Kickin' It Home-School!: Fun with Pinterest

First and foremost, let me just say I am glad I printed off some compound word and punctuation worksheets from http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/index.html , because literally within hours of printing them the other day they went from being a free site, to a pay for print site. :( It's only 19.95 for the year, so that is not that bad, but do I really need it? I don't know! I do know a lot of my printable worksheets came from them, but was that because they were free and I knew where to find it, or is it because they best fit my need? Hmmm. I will have to think about that. Maybe I am being ridiculous, considering it is only $20 bucks out of an entire year that I have spent on dumber less useful stuff than that.

Anywho, that brings me to today, just in case you were wondering I also LOVE to use Pinterest for ideas and links to printable worksheets. If you haven't been, GO NOW! Do not even waste your time reading this, it is quite possibly the BEST waste of time ever! Or if you are me, you waste a lot of time, and somehow work in things that will be useful for prep ideas on lessons, so you can look somewhat productive. More on this later....

We do Saxon Math everyday, and I usually don't post much about it, because it isn't much fun looking at facts over and over, but today she did some measuring using blocks, and I can't help but remember a little Curious George blurb about measurement. If I can find it that is! pbskids.org has a tendency to keep only a handful of items on hand, and while they have games pertaining to measurement, they are not as useful as you might think, not allowing the child to actually measure before making their guess. The point of the lesson isn't about estimates, it is about using different items as a system of measurement. Here's what I did find though: http://pbskids.org/curiousgeorge/games/how_tall/how_tall.html Who knows, maybe I will use that later. I guess it depends on how my prepping goes tonight.

Measuring pencils drawn on paper using blocks for practice.

Measuring real world items (ruler, crayon, marker, pencil) and recording the findings.

Taking the record and organizing it in a way in which we can easily discern which item was the longest, by using a bar graph, how else? ;)

Finished product.

She also loves loves loves the Mystery Bag and guessing games. She wants me to do a whole hour on that alone, but I don't. I think I may however start this idea:

from Pinterest and phase out some of my other dailies, or maybe just work it into Fridays since my load is usually lighter with no Science or History. I don't know......

Speaking of Pinterest, if you are interested here is my home-school board: http://pinterest.com/jacqui_cupples/home-school/

On to fun ways to do compound words in our Language Arts lesson.

This was also an idea from Pinterest (http://pinterest.com/pin/160370436700592324/)

I tweaked it a bit, and we made a vase so that she can put the compound word flowers in and out, that way we can make more, or pull them out for future use.

The finished product now adorns the wall of our classroom. :)

Here she is reading from her Sing Spell Read and Write companion book. We do comprehension exercises while reading and after she's done. To be quite frank, she doesn't love this.

Our animate history lesson. It is kind of explanatory, since there are speech bubbles, but I would LOVE to see someone do a comic book version of Early Egypt and Mesopotamia history for young kids. Wouldn't that be amazing?! This is my haphazard version, it changes and is added to as the lesson goes on.

Just in case, the gist of it is...... After the White Crowned King defeated the Red Crown King and placed the crown upon his head creating the double crown you see on the left, he controlled all of Egypt. He began to gain so much power that people begun to think he was a God. I put the speech bubble in the Red Crown King's mouth, to simply illustrate to Kelsey that it was misguided of the people to believe that, and reminded her that just as it had always been before it still was. (Meaning that we explored yesterday that the Nile would flood yearly when the rain came from the mountains and the farmers used this to their advantage to build canals and dam up the source to keep water for their crops during dry months, but now people were attributing this "phenomenon" to the Pharaoh's power as a God. This was simply not the case, it was just as it always had been, but people misguidedly believed the Pharaoh had power over this.)

The next part of our lesson was about the other Egyptian Gods, Ra, Osiris, and Isis, and how people used the Gods to explain away things that they did not understand, such as the Nile flooding. What you see there is the story of Osiris' brother Set tricking Osiris into a coffin to drown him, and Isis finding him and wrapping him as the first known mummy in Egypt, which prompted him back to life. This made the whole world cry tears of happiness that the Nile overflowed with their tears, and thus the reason for the annual flooding. See is this not the kind of stuff that needs to be in a comic book?! Complete with zombies!!! That's why I do my stick-man theater. I may just decide to do a comic book, I should check up more on history during prep, and make one for her, except when will I find the time? Oh, well....

She made the double crown, yes they can both be used separately or together.

Another angle. It somewhat reminds me of the silly bishop hats, but I guess nothing tops the flying nun hats, so this is probably less dramatic among them.

Now our science lesson. A quick white board review on forces.

Before the bottom portion about balanced and unbalanced forces, we did a little push against eachother activity, as well as a arm wrestling match to illustrate balanced and unbalanced forces, then we put it on the board to further drive the point home. And just so you know, in my mind strong-man there is saying I work out in RedFoo's voice, and if you don't know what I am talking about, you are about to discover that this is not your traditional blog about home-school. This is a blog of awesomeness, and definitely NOT your mother's blog! Here's what I am talking about:

It's a blog about kids, not one for them. And please for the love of God, stop giving Wilmer Valderrama work. It is disturbing to know him as Handy Manny and see him otherwise. Now back to more normal topics....