Homeschooling X3

Fun Mommy: The Cool Stuff Table

Odd title, right? The "fun mommy" is a regular series I want to do. I am homeschooling a 16yo, a 12yo, and I have a 6yo. My young one's schooling doesn't take long and since he is home with me all the time, I need fun things for him to do with his days. So that's what the series is for - fun things to do with your young ones.

As for the "cool stuff table", we have a little kids table in our den. It is home to, well, cool stuff that we have going on at the moment. I will share these as we update as well. Right now the cool stuff table is home to:

 

Plants that Little Bill has started. Bill accompanied me to a shopping trip to Home Depot. He found these Veggie Tales seeds kits and was thrilled, so I bought a few of them for him. It comes with seeds, a little cup, dirt, and a plastic top to make a greenhouse for the seed to grow. It was $1 for each type of plant. So we have pumpkin seeds, sunflower seeds, and watermelon seeds growing in little greenhouses on our cool stuff table.

Grow-a-Crab - Bill bought a little squishy crab thingy (very technical here) from the quarter machine at our grocery store. You put it in water and it expands to 600 times its size. So also on our cool stuff table is a small cup of water with our now-large squishy crab in it. If you take it out of water it shrinks back to tiny again, so ours lives in the water for now.

 

We found a crystal-growing kit for $2 at our local dollar store, so we set that to growing and put it on our cool stuff table.

 

My brother got these for his daughter and passed a ziplock baggie full along to us since he had so many. These Orbeez are truly mesmerizing. At first they are tiny -smaller than peppercorns, and hard like plastic. But when you put them in water, they grow like crazy and become small marble-sized gooey balls. They come in lots of colors. When you let them dry, they go back to their original state again. You may know these as a dirtless planting medium, but now they put them in fun packages and sell them to kids for fun. We have a container of these on our cool stuff table, and sometimes they are dried up and sometimes they are in water and gooey.

These are a mix of educational and frivolous, and they don't require a lot of time once they are started, but they are fun and Little Bill enjoys them all. 

Teaching Reading: Letter Sounds

When it comes to early learning, I believe very much in lots of fun exposure but definitely not in pressure. I am in the "kids will learn when they are developmentally ready" camp. I read to my boys like crazy, sung ABC songs with them, had lots of ABC books and a poster on the wall, and played reading games. Both learned to read very early in life. All kids are different, but I thought I would share with you some of the things we did to teach letter sounds in a fun, informal way.

 

ABC books - We had a whole collection of ABC books. At night I always read three books to my little one, and I always included an ABC book as one of them. During the day I would leave ABC books lying around the house for my young one to look at. When we would look at one of the books together, sometimes we would sing the A Beka alphabet song: "A says a like apple, a says a a a. B says b like ball, b says b b b. C says c like cat, c says c c c. D says d like dog, d says d d d. . ." but of course I used whatever picture they had in the book for each letter.

 

ABC poster - I also had an ABC poster hanging on the wall and we would sit in front and I would point to a letter and the child would tell me what sound the letter makes. I didn't force this if the child just didn't feel like it though.

Keyring of ABC cards - We had this plastic keyring with a picture card for each letter of the alphabet. I found it at a garage sale, but you can find one by Munchkin here. I would put this in my purse and bring it with me when we went on errands. Then I would choose an item and pull out the cards and ask my child to find which card went with the item. For example, at the grocery I would pick up a banana, hand my son the keyring of ABC cards, and ask him to show me which letter banana starts with.

 

A B Seas game - I bought this alphabet fishing game from Discovery Toys. You put the magnetic ABC fish into the "ocean", then use the magnetic fishing poles to fish and catch an alphabet fish. You also have cards, like Bingo, where you have to put a fish on each letter of your card to win. This game is fun to play and the child can identify the letter and its sound when (s)he catches a fish!

What do you do to practice alphabet letters & sounds with your child?

This post has been submitted to Helpful Homeschool Hints.

 

Visual Math Trick for Addition

Here is a trick I learned many, many years ago for teaching the commutative property of addition (which says that the order of the addends doesn't matter because the sum will remain the same, i.e. 2+3 = 3+2):

You need a hanger and some clothespins. Draw a plus sign on one clothespin and clip it to the center of the hanger. Then put a few clothespins on one side of the plus sign and a few on the other. State your addition problem (such as 2+3). Ask the child the answer. Then turn the hanger around and show that the problem is now rearranged (3+2). Ask the child the answer. Use this concrete visual to explain the commutative property of addition!

 

Geography: A Fun Way to Learn the Continents and Oceans

Memorization is so dry and boring. Sometimes it is simply necessary, but if I can make it hands-on in some way, then it goes a long way toward making it more interesting and, in fact, more memorable! 

When Little Bill was working on the continents for geography, I started out simply pointing to continents on a poster and having him name them for our sessions. Then it hit me - if I cut up the poster into continents, Bill could hold them in his hands, move them around into place, and just have more hands-on experience with them which makes learning more fun and makes it "take"!

I just cut out the continents from the world poster and stuck magnet tape (cut into pieces) onto the backs. The continents (and ocean names) are now hanging on our fridge. After using them for a while I did the same with a non-labelled poster, since at first he could simply read the continent names. When I did the un-labelled poster I laminated the continents before sticking the magnets on to make them more durable.

I also keep a small laminated world map in the cabinet right next to the fridge, so that if Bill is playing with the continents alone he can check what he's done against the map. 

How to Make a Chalkboard

As you saw in the post about our homeschool spaces, during the warm months we do our homeschooling out in the garage with the big door open. I have a very large "table" out there that I made from an old table frame and an unneeded door, and I painted the above chalkboard.

I have three ways of making a chalkboard that I would like to share with you. The first one, which is what I did, is to go to Lowe's or Home Depot and buy some chalkboard paint. It comes in a whole array of colors, including this spunky purple. I simply measured the space I wanted and penciled it on the wall, rectangled off the area with painters' tape, and painted two coats of the stuff. Then I bought some simple framing and nailed it around the chalkboard with itty bitty nails. The framing comes in 8-10 foot pieces, but if you bring your measurements with you Home Depot (and probably Lowe's) has a table saw with yardstick on the aisle so you can cut the lengths you need right then and there. 

Another way to make a chalkboard is to make your own chalkboard paint. It is easy peasy! Just mix 2 tablespoons of unsanded tile grout for every 1 cup of paint. That's it - you now have your own chalkboard paint! The advantage of this, of course, is that you can use any color. So if you want your chalkboard to just blend into a room in your house, or you even want to make a whole wall into a chalkboard but don't want it to be noticeable, you can use the color of your wall.

The third way, which I have just come across and haven't tried, is to buy a piece of sheet metal the size you want and paint it with chalkboard paint - either store-bought or homemade. You can hang it on the wall and either frame it or not, and the great thing is that it doesn't have to be permanent. You can just take it down when you want to. My chalkboard works fine but I am thinking that on sheet metal, the chalk would write super smoothly and be clearer to read. The idea came from Jeanne Winters.

Whichever method you use, paint two coats and allow to dry thoroughly. You'll need to color the entire chalkboard (with the side of a piece of chalk) and then erase it before the first use. 

I had lots of chalkboard paint left over, so I painted this smaller chalkboard low to the ground so my young one could play. Turns out not only he, but my daughter, and lots of neighborhood friends love sitting at this board and drawing all over it. It has gotten so much use!

Good luck!

{P.S. This is a post I am bringing over from the Blogger site.}