Slices of Life

 I've  been working on these Breakfast with Lilo and Stitch Disney pages for three days.  I'm not sure why it's taking me so long but I finally finished a few of them!   I think this one is my favorite!  Alec only wanted to meet Lilo and Stitch  so I didn't have a ton of photos with him in it.  I was  able to assemble a single page for his book.  I had this brown sandal/ flower paper and I loved  the colors in it.  I mounted each of the photos onto blue and then orange.   I added a blue title cut from my Life's A Beach cartridge.  I cut two more titles in orange and gold to get  the layers for the flower on the title.  I then cut three flip flop boarders out of blue, orange and gold also to get my flip flop embellishments.  I also cut two Plumeria flowers; one orange and one blue and then used the layers feature to cut out the gold and orange and blue enhancements.  Once I had assembled all th...

I'm always looking for new and fun way to reach my boys.  Games and hands on activities are vital to our homeschooling days.  Today I decided to implement a few new games and thought I'd share them with you. Catch a sight word--- I wrote a bunch of sight words on a small beach ball and Evan and I played pass.  Wherever our hands landed we had to read the words under our hands.  Not surprisingly his brothers wanted to join in too! Our ball Evan playing the game and reading his words Clothespin drop game -- remember playing fun party games when you were a kid and you had to try and drop a clothespin into a bottle?  I took this fun kids games and turned it into a subtraction game.  I gave Evan 10 clothespins to start with; I had him count how many he had and then I had him try and drop them in a bottle.  He had to subtract the ones that fell on the floor and tell me a number sentence to go with what happened  (such as: 10- 6= 4 in...

We get together with our homeschool group a few times a year for a crafting day.  Each family is asked to bring a crafting project that we can share with everyone.   It's not always easy coming up with crafts that are simple enough to do with large groups of children who span a large range of ages.  We're also asked to pick activities that don't require much in the way of drying time-- so no glue or paint!   We had so much fun for the next few hours crafting and visiting with our friends.   We made bird feeders-- 2 different kinds For bird feeder no. 1:  we spread honey all over a toilet paper roll and then rolled it in bird seed.  We strung some shoelaces through the toilet paper roll so they could hang it from their trees when they got home.  For bird feeder no. 2: we strung cheerios onto some pipe cleaners.  It was fun to be able to shape the pipe cleaners into different shapes for the birds.  I think a ...

This weekend I worked on our Disney album.  I worked on our Dumbo pages.   My two younger children agreed to ride Dumbo with me and we snapped some great pictures that day.  I made up three pages; one for our family album and one for each of the boy's albums.   I had one sleeve of Dumbo themed stickers that I had bought a few years ago and I combined them with some printed papers.   My favorite is the top layout.   I love the contrast between the white and the dark royal blue paper and I think all the tiny boxes along the bottom are just darling.     I also pulled together one really quick teacup page.   For this layout I mounted all the photos onto white paper and then backed them with a dark royal blue color.  I had enough left over to make the title strip and used my Stampin Up! phrase starters stamps and my Almost Amethyst pad to print the title.  I tied a bow aroun...

I love best when we can tackle a lot of learning concepts and ideas through games and playing.  When we can keep learning light, fun and engaging, the boys are willing to work longer and harder. I decided to start teaching the boys basic division.  And even though the boys already have a basic understanding of division I did start with a very simple activity. I gave each of the boys a muffin pan and a pile of beads.  I gave them each thirty beads and asked them to divide them into one group, two groups, three groups, etc.  Until we had divided them into 12 groups and we ran out of muffin tin spots. We talked about remainders, equal groups, and relating our findings to multiplication problems that they already knew (like 30 divided by 5 equals 6 since 5x6 equals 30).  They pointed out that the more groups we broke the items into the fewer pieces each group had.  It was a great lesson with just enough challenge that the boys h...