Our family loves jigsaw puzzles AND our family loves geography/maps – put the two together and you have a fun-filled afternoon!  Our GeoPuzzles arrived yesterday and we were eager to get started!  Parker’s love of geography was enhanced at his old Montessori school.  They had this neat activity where the child would use a large push pin and ‘punch’ out a country that was traced on construction paper.  Once all the countries of a continent were punched out then the child would glue the countries in place on a piece of poster board.  Here are Parker’s maps that he completed.

He’s very proud of his maps and rightly so!

Today we put together all the GeoPuzzles – my main quibble with them is that they do not divide the puzzles by continent.  Instead of North and South America they have US/Canada and Latin America and they include the Middle East in with Africa; but overall I like the puzzles.  They are MUCH cheaper than real Montessori puzzles which run a minimum of $21 per puzzle and have an outrageous shipping cost.  Here is the result of our work

Tags: geography, maps, Montessori, puzzles

We are finally starting to get into the groove of things … well, kinda.  Sophie was very focused today.  She completed a number line from 1-20.  She colored the numbers, which were in mixed order, cut them out and then pasted them in order.  She seemed disappointed when she realized I didn’t have more numbers for her to do!

Parker, on the other hand, seemed bored today and didn’t want to stick with any one thing for  very long.  He did play with the balance that came with our Right Start math curriculum.  It’s a very cool tool – it teaches addition and multiplication in a visual, hands-on way.

We also read a cute little African folktale today about a greedy spider named Anansi.

Tags: Anansi, math, Right Start

I was inspired by a contest at Parent Bloggers Network to write about kids and money.  Sarah is too young for money, Sophie is a little interested in money and Parker, who will be 6 soon, is very interested in money.  I was never taught how to handle money when I was younger and I don’t want to repeat that with my children but where to start?  Do we give an allowance or not, do we tie the allowance to chores or not?  There are many views out there.  I’ve read a lot of opinions about it on one of my yahoo groups.  A big portion of the moms on that group said that they give their children an allowance that is not tied to chores because they feel that chores are a must and if you are part of the family then you must do your chores.

We’ve already seen the downside of tying an allowance with chores.  We implemented a very simple list of things Parker could do to earn money and while he was eager to earn money most of the time there were times where he wouldn’t do his chores and he would say he wasn’t interested in the money.  But the chore still has to be done.  I’m inclined to pay him in other ways for chores, such as if he does x, y, or z he get to play on the computer for so many minutes.  THAT will really motivate him.  But I foresee that setup not working for Sophie, she’s only motivated when she wants to be!

I’ve seen all kinds of cool products out there for kids and chores and kids and money.  One of our favorites is Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace Jr.  Dan and I are currently taking Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University course and it is great – I highly recommend it.

Capital One has this new Moneywi$e eLearning tool, but it looks like it is geared toward teenagers.  It is good that they are doing this but in my opinion money education needs to start much earlier.

Tags: blog blast, chores, Dave Ramsey, money

Today was the first day of our SEE co-op.  Parker and Sophie are each taking 4 classes through the co-op on Fridays.  I teach two classes myself.  One of the classes I teach is Making Make Believe.  Today we read Where The Wild Things Are.  After that we made Wild Things masks and then wore them while we danced to wild music.  Sophie is in this class with me and the kids all seemed to enjoy it – they were certainly wild!

Tags: co-op, Wild Things

How can you get $300 worth of Books for $75???  By having an Usborne Book Show!  I recently had a show and got double free books (ask me how you can too)!

Most will be used for our studies and they look pretty cool.

Some of the books are Internet-linked and they include some cool links to go learn more.  Pretty neat.

Now I just gotta go find a place to put all these books…

And the kids really enjoy the books.  Here’s a cute picture of Parker reading See Inside Your Body to Sophie.

And to keep from leaving Sarah out, here’s a picture of her posing for me when she saw the camera.

Tags: books, usborne

We had our first chess lesson today.  It went pretty well.  We learned about the board, how many dark square there are, how many light ones, how the rows are called ranks and files and how they are numbered and lettered.  We went to our friends‘ house for the lesson where she had drawn a life sized chess board on her driveway; it was a big hit.

After we finished the lesson Parker decided to draw his own chess board.

Tags: chess

Since the kiddos are into dinosaurs I thought we would make fossil sandwiches.

First we prepared the supplies: plenty of white bread and little objects with which to make the fossils.

Then, we layered bread and objects.

Then we mashed it all together and admired our handiwork!

And if you look closely you can even see the imprint of a leaf!

Tags: fossils

We are slowly getting into a grove.  Parker asks tons of questions and Sarah trashes everything in her path – they should name a hurricane after her!  Last week Parker was eager to do more, more, more!  But this morning he wanted to know WHY he had to do lessons.  But once we got started everything was ok.  Today Parker wrote a letter to short Granny (my grandmother) and Sophie drew a picture and signed her name for her.  We also learned what makes weather and about how the earth tilts from the book Can It Rain Cats and Dogs?

I am definitely going to have to find some activity that will keep Sarah occupied for more than 5 minutes – I keep having to interrupt Parker and Sophie to chase after her whirlwind.

Tags: handwriting, weather

Parker and Sophie decided to build a beaver lodge with the branches that Dan pruned today.  They were very excited about their results.  Parker executed a superhero spin and turned into a ‘builder’ before commencing the building of the beaver lodge.  Unfortunately I did not get a picture of that move!

Tags: beavers, building

Now that we are homeschooling we have lots of time for extracurricular activities.  One that we will be trying this coming week is Championship Chess.  It seems like a good program, very kid friendly – even comes with a coloring book! I’ll be learning along with the kids so I need all the help I can get   We are teaming up with a couple other families and learning it together.  One mom has offered the use of her driveway so we can draw a life sized chessboard in chalk on her driveway; should be fun!

Tags: chess