Passover Seder in December!!


Today we had our last Ancient Egypt Co-op and we decided to celebrate a Passover Seder. It was a great day. Each of the moms brought some aspect of the Seder and I used this Christian Passover Haggadah to guide us. The only thing that I changed was the reference to all being baptized and I chose to have a drummette chicken leg for the shank bone. 
It went so well and tied into the afternoon activity of the Exodus play that the children put on. 
This is what we did:
First, I went to our local thrift shop and rummaged through the plates until I found enough for the 15 children that attended. I had the children draw on their plates with Sharpie pens. I showed them examples of Seder plates and things that they could put on them. I had some passages of Hebrew writing if that was what they would like to add. 



Before they plated their Seder we covered the plates in Saran Wrap as I didn’t feel that Sharpie ink was very food safe!


Then I had the moms add an egg, a dollop of horseradish, a piece of lettuce, a drummette, charoset and matzah crackers.  On the tables were bowls of salt water and sugar water. We used grape juice for our wine.
This Seder was participatory on the part of the children so several of them read passages of scripture and participated in some way.


The children had fun with the toasts and with all the aspects of the Seder. Most of the children hadn’t been part of a Seder before.


After the Seder, and we had a potluck lunch the children put on their play. It was a play that had several parts added into it by one of our very talented mothers so that every child had their own character. The children practiced and then put on the play for all of us. 
What a great day we had!
Blessings!

Our Trusty Laminator and Things We Have Used it for Over the Years


Years ago, possibly even 10 years ago, I purchased a laminator. I chose the low tech version and I have never been disappointed. It seemed like a large purchase at the time but I have used it so much over the years and lent it out to many others in need of a laminator. We have made many, many books and projects over the years and enjoyed keeping these laminated and comb-bound. 

Here are some of the other things that we have done with it:
I have made a variety of flash cards over the years from sites like Sparklebox and small Art cards using these (and ones like them) from Dover.

I have made a variety of games over the years like the ones from Adrian Bruce.

I have made a variety of Montessori nomenclature cards. From sites like here and here.

I have subscribed to Evan Moor Teacher Filebox and made a variety of materials.

I have made a mini-office for our daughter.

I have made displays like this one.

Our trusty laminator has never missed a beat. Hundreds of projects and feet of lamination later it is still working like we just purchased it. 
Blessings!




Building Skills in Art - Painting and Drawing

From my last post, you can see that Fimo is the medium that our daughter spends most of her time in. However, she really enjoys drawing and painting. 


Gustav Klimt Class

For the past three years she has done two sessions each year at 4Cats Art Studio. At 4Cats she has learned about artists and techniques that have stretched her out of her comfort zone. She has learned techniques she never knew she was learning. Perspective, balance, knowing when a painting is finished, depth, negative space and the list goes on and on.
Drawing for fun!


She has always taken an interest in art and I remember her drawing years ago from the Draw, Write Now books and the How to Draw Animals books from Dover. It started out as tracing and then went to drawing. 
For awhile we used the art videos by Mark Kistler. We also had some of his books around. These were great for learning shading and creating depth. 
We enjoyed several computer programs over the years including Creativity Express. We have watched the Devine Entertainment Artists series for inspiration. I have hung up art in our home for a low key “picture study”. 


Leonardo Da Vinci Group Portrait Class

Finally, we have provided paint, canvas and a place for creating. We found a used artist’s easel and our daughter now prepares her own canvas so that it can be any size that she wants. 
I hope that this post has given you some ideas for art!
Blessings!

Encouraging Entrepreneurship in Children


Last night our 12 year old daughter sold $7.00 of her crafts and got orders for $28.00 more. She was so excited! She has been working with fimo clay making miniature food for about 2 years now. She has researched and learned many, many new techniques. She has watched you-tubes, and read books. She has replicated other’s work and then transferred those skills to make her own unique products. 
As her parents we have invested in her supplying her with what she has needed (mainly with Michaels 50% off coupons) to create. We have also turned our back on the mess, allowed her space in the house and given her time to create (this above all I think has been the most valuable).


“Little One” has created her own catalogue, given herself a company name and decided on prices based on what she can replicate well and what is much harder to create. She has given many gifts out in the past while she was learning. This, I think helped her to understand the items that she was truly proud of and what she would like to replicate. 



All of the skills she has learned are more than I could ever count. Now she is learning about the world of business. Her next step is to create her own blog and give instructional videos on how to make fimo food. She is saving for a proper video camera to make the videos.
What a great opportunity she has provided for herself. She has given herself more than just a hobby, she is an entrepreneur! 
Blessings!!

We always start with Ambleside Online


For years now, we have loved the literature/non-fiction that Ambleside has chosen for their mainly free curriculum. We start planning our year by going to the website and taking a look at the books that the advisory team has chosen. 
Ambleside is an amazing story of seven home educators (including Canadian Anne White) joining together to create something for the benefit of all. What these women have achieved is remarkable. They have created a community that is successful in so many ways. They have worked hard to apply their founding principals into the books and the curriculum that they have chosen. 
It is well laid out, solid, incremental, and has a beauty about it. We have been introduced to so many wonderful authors through Ambleside. Elizabeth Enright, Edith Nesbit, Thornton Burgess, Andrew Lang, H.E. Marshall, Charlotte Yonge, and M.B. Synge just to name a very few.  We have been challenged to include picture study, poetry, fairy tales and Shakespeare in our curriculum. We have been challenged not to shy away from more “advanced concepts” in literature when our daughter has been young. 
Ambleside has given us over the years a framework to plan our own program. We have been inspired by many of the home educators who use Ambleside!
We have reaped the blessings for many years of the wonderful women who decided in 1999 it would be admirable to create this beautiful curriculum. Thank you, thank you, thank you!!
Blessings!

Peter Menzel Books - Material World and What the World Eats



Tonight our daughter pulled out these books by Peter Menzel - Material World and What the World Eats and started taking another look at them. 



I had purchased them last year for our study on Human Rights. They were on the coffee table for months as we scoured over the pictures, stories, facts and statistics in each chapter. 
We would go through them when friends came to visit and have rich discussions on poverty, human rights, distribution of wealth and interesting things that we had learned about other countries. 
They were an education in themselves! Both of them!! I encourage you to find these books and use them for learning about how others live. I believe that Peter Menzel has more books to explore. 
Blessings!

Paper Fashions


Our daughter loves a variety of art! Art is her passion and the place that she can get lost in for many hours without ever looking at the clock. There have been many art projects she has created over the years so I am going to share in several different posts. 
She has had such a great time for the past year or two with Paper Fashions. She has made a variety of “fashions” and keeps them all in a binder with photo album pages. 


She has enjoyed several different sets including this set:
and this set:
She has enjoyed exploring many different textures and patterns. I think that this has prepared her for sewing and making other craft items. She loves to go into the fabric store and look at the variety of fabric. She loves to imagine what a pattern would look like in a certain fabric. 

Her esthetic nature fuels this love of fabrics, colours, patterns. Paper fashions is a way to fuel that love of the esthetic without buying out the fabric store. She can experiment with a variety of “fabrics” and styles. 


These are one of those art projects that is inspirational for awhile, then gets put away, then one day gets opened up again and more styles are made, then it is put away again! Each time it comes out a new skill seems to emerge. The styles get more elaborate and more intricate. 


Blessings!

Copywork



We have used copywork throughout our homeschool years as a way to not only have handwriting practice but also to expose our daughter to poetry, quotes from famous people, rights of a child and many other projects.
I have found that copywork has many benefits. It is independent work from the time a child is young, it is work that along with illustrations can be very satisfying and it gives a me an opportunity to reinforce parts of a book or subject we are studying.
I have made up our own copywork over the years using sites like this one. Sometimes I would skim the chapter we were reading in the morning the night before and find what I thought to be a key sentence/paragraph and use it. Many times I have used poetry or quotes. Sometimes I have used letters to Aunts and Uncles as a great way to encourage copywork.
There are many prepared copywork books and over the years we have used a few of them. 
Queen Homeschool Supplies is one supplier of a variety of copywork books.
Simply Charlotte Mason has some free manuscript copywork materials.
If you would like some quotes for copywork take a look at WikiQuote. For poetry you can take a look at this page at Old-Fashioned Education. I especially like the book on this page Poetry Every Child Should Know.
Blessings!!

Ecosystems



We have just finished up our unit on Ecosystems. We began by doing the Adaptive Curriculum Unit on Ecosystems. You can look at my post here


Our daughter completed the Ecosystems Lapbook from Hands of a Child. This was really valuable for the vocabulary and for the systems of an ecosystem. It included lots of information on the environment of an ecosystem and the balance of it. 
Our daughter has completed several lapbooks from Hands of a Child and I have always been pleased with them. 





One thing I had our “little one” do is watch a Jeff Corwin video on an ecosystem of her choice. You can find a list of Jeff Corwin videos on Discovery Education here. She chose Australia and the Grand Island Ecosystem. I then had her make note of where she saw any of the systems within an ecosystem portrayed on the video. This was a great activity to solidify terms that she was learning in her lapbook and from Adaptive Curriculum. 



We have wrapped things up now on this unit and starting next week we are on to Chemistry!! Blessings!
Ecosystems Lapbook

We Love Whodunits


We have loved reading so many mysteries over the years. Right from those beginning Boxcar Children books to The Shakespeare Stealer. 
Right now we are reading Spiderwebs for Two which is a series of mysteries that two children have to figure out and solve with a stanza of poetry as a clue. These are quite sophisticated little mysteries. 

We have enjoyed Hy Conrad’s books:
Kids’ Whodunits
They are about a young boy who's mother is a police officer. She goes to crime scenes or tells her son about crimes and he follows the clues to solve the crime. These take critical thinking skills to separate the red herrings from the actual clues. There are several books in this series.



We watched these old Hardy Boys Mysteries (the old black and whites) as a way of learning to discern the clues and the foreshadowing in mysteries. We got these from our local library.
This was fun! I think we can all still sing the theme song!!
Blessings!!