CHRISTEPHI

Little Guy practicing his letters in a pan of salt. This week we learned more about the early American settlements, how they built their homes and what sorts of foods they ate.  We investigated yeast and made butter! My kids are not unfamiliar with yeast since I bake bread every week, but I don't think I had ever let them really examine it or explained what exactly it does.  This week in science, we did an experiment to show that gas (carbon dioxide) is produced by growing yeast. The kids worked together to mix yeast and sugar in warm water.  Then I carefully poured it into a glass pop bottle and stretched a balloon over the neck. We set it aside in a warm place while we worked on some of our other lessons.  We checked in on it just in time to see the balloon "sproing!" straight up! Both kids were so excited and really enjoyed the whole experiment.  Miss M recorded our procedure and observations on a lab sheet and added it to her Adve...

I've run into We Choose Virtues a time or two on my journeys through the blogosphere, but each time it goes something like this: Oh wow, that looks great! We could really use something like that.   --click on website--   Whoa, the Homeschool Kit is a hundred bucks! And the Family Kit is seventy.  Whew, it looks great, but...  Well, I'd really love to, but...  That's too bad, I would have really liked to use something like this.   --close website-- So you can imagine my delight when I found out I was going to get to review some products from We Choose Virtues for free!  That delight has only grown...and grown...and grown!  Just when I think I've gotten a complete grasp of the Virtues program, I discover another delightful tidbit.  For example, did you know that each Virtue Kid has a name that corresponds with the beginning sound of that Virtue?   H at Matt for H elpful, O boe Joe for O bedient.  This makes it easy ...

We started our week with a bit of disciplinary action.  Do your kids do incomprehensible things such as wiping boogers on the wall?  I think having had to scrub them off, Little Guy has learned his lesson and won't be doing it again.  I hope! We continued with Level E in Spelling Power.  Miss M seems to grasp spelling concepts very quickly and constantly surprises me with the words she can spell. In history we learned about the Pilgrims and how Squanto taught them to plant corn and fish without hooks.  We read about how the Pilgrims built their homes and covered their windows with oiled parchment in the absence of glass. We made some oiled paper by rubbing olive oil into regular printer paper with a paper towel.  Little Guy enjoyed joining in on this activity.  We held up oiled paper and regular paper to the window to see which lets through more light. Oiled paper on the left, Regular paper on the right. We also tested the oil...

Precocious little Miss M has been growing like a weed!  Several pairs of pants she could wear at the beginning of fall are now quite short on her.  You know what that means, right?  Time to sew! I already had the Superstretch jeggings (Ottobre 4/2011 #3) in size 116 traced and some denim knit material on hand, so I whipped up a pair (over the course of two days) of new jeggings for her.  She's not quite ready for a size 116, but since she just keeps on growing, I'm not concerned. I also made her a pair of legwarmers from some fun sport weight yarn my mom gave me.  I used an easy pattern from Tangled Happy .  Since the pattern was written to fit size 7/8, I sized down a little by making my initial chain 37 and continuing for a total of 35 rounds.  I also swapped out the pink satin ribbons shown here for some yellow grosgrain ribbon because it stays tied better. Miss M loves them!  And they make a wonderful addition to her w...

As much as we love our parents, neither Hubby nor I grew up with particularly stellar financial management examples set before us.  Now o ur kids are still very young, but we have decided we want to teach them the proper way to view and manage money.  It's really important once we have identified a weak area in our own upbringing to seek out tools that will allow us to do better. This is why programs like the  Money Management Certification Program by FamilyMint were created. The Lowdown on FamilyMint FamilyMint was developed by two Michigan dads who saw the need for money management training in their own families, among their own children.  They worked together to create a program that would help instill financial habits in children that would last a lifetime.  They knew the program had to be something that would work long-term, because it takes time to develop information into behavior and behavior into habit.  They wanted something...