Slices of Life

I find that anytime I can plan fun school activities around snacks and foods my boys are eager to participate.  Today we had spelling, math, art/science all using candy and food! To have some fun with spelling today we pulled out a box of Scrabble Junior Cheez- It's and I found two different sheets for the kids to use.    Snacking on words was for Evan-- he had to make three letter words using the crackers and we read them together.  Since he hardly knows any words at this point I let him make up nonsense words as well as real words and I didn't make him record them-- yet.  We talked about changing just one letter to make new words and I was so happy when he read BAT! For Ian and Alec I found a sheet that looked a bit like a Boggle board that the crackers fit on perfectly.   I followed the entire activity that I found on the Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational  site.  I too allowed the boys to manipulate the crackers ...

We were preparing to head to our local library tonight for the summer reading kick- off program.  We had a bag full of books, movies and books on Cd to return and many more to pick up. We were the first ones at the library for the kick- off event tonight.  The boys were very excited.  Our library arranged for a program called Creature Teachers to come with a bunch of their animals to talk about them, their natural habitats and diet.  My kids love animals so this was right up their alley.  Alec was convinced he wouldn't be stumped-- but he was!  I was too!  There were many new animals that we had never seen in real life before.  We had front row seats and it was a good thing too!  I think they had over 80 people show up.  While that may not seem like a huge number that's a really big turnout for our library.  Ian and Evan pet Levi We saw a cockatiel, an alligator, a skunk, a kookaburra, a Coati, a cane toad (wow! they're huge!), a t...

We had a pretty lousy start to our day and after lots of frustration and tears we were looking for something fun to do.  I told the boys we could explore and play with fizzing goop. My boys love goop; it's a simple mixture of cornstarch and water and it lends itself quite nicely to exploration.  Those non- Newtonian liquids are always so neat! I brought out some cornstarch and pop rocks and we set about making fizzing, fire cracking goop!   I divided one entire box of cornstarch into two bowls and added one packet of pop rocks to each bowl. Even before we added the water we could hear some crackling sounds. Once Ian poured the water in though it was really cool.  We heard popping, fizzing, and crackling sounds.  The boys said they could even feel the pop rocks fizzing as they stuck their hands in the goop to play with it. My oldest even swears that the goop smelled differently.  Since so much water was added to the goop, it wasn't all that goopy and th...

My boys started the day by watching the movies they got from the library yesterday.  They watched The Sandlot: Heading Home and How to Train Your Dragon.  I was a bit annoyed with all the movie watching, but I just kept reminding myself that it's summer.  A time to be a bit more lazy and relaxed, a time to enjoy life and have fun. We were planning to make balloon and cd hover crafts today so we started by super gluing our pop top bottle caps onto the CD and then we set them aside to dry. While waiting for the CD/ glue to dry we started on our art projects.  We used clear glue and dripped fun designs onto watercolor paper.  While the glue was still wet we covered it with salt.  Just using ordinary table salt-- we then set that aside to dry.  I have to say, even with just the salt on the glue my boys already liked this project.  The salt made the glue look all shiny and like giant crystals.  We couldn't wait for it ...

We had a very busy morning around here and tried to focus on fun.  I always try to make our learning as fun as possible and today we had so much fun! Alec had a book he got from the library called Alex the Parrot that everyone wanted to listen to so I agreed to read that as well as Yes Day! and How Do Hot Air Balloons Work ? We read all three books and since Alex the Parrot was a true story we looked for videos about him on-line.  We watched a few YouTube videos about him.  It was really quite amazing! You can follow the link to see our favorite.         Once we were done reading I told the boys I had a quick writing activity planned.  They were to write one sentence but it had to start with a subordinate conjunction (After, Although, Unless, Since, Because, etc.). I found this idea on Incite to Write's page on Facebook.  Subordinate conjunctions help kids make a more complex sentence and I figured they would never arg...