The Crafty Work At Home Momma

A while back, I posted about the pretend passports I made, but also featured a deal from Mamapedia. I came across a fun Geography kit that also uses pretend passports. The website is Little Passports and I thought many of you with kids who are between the ages of 5-10 might be interested in this product as well. The deal I purchased was 50% off a 3-Month Little Passports Subscription ($47 value for $23) Now if you order by December 18th, they'll guarantee Christmas Delivery! Each month, your child will receive a package from fictional characters Sofia and Sam as they “travel” to a new country. As he reads the adventure letter and discovers exciting souvenirs and activities, he’ll learn about what it’s like to live in Japan, Brazil, and other locales. As each country is visited, your child will receive a personalized package via postal mail that includes an adventure letter, fun souvenirs, activities and access to Little Passport’s online Boarding Zone full of games and activ...

It's December 1, 2011! The countdown begins! What better way to get your kids excited and involved with Christmas, with a Personalized Christmas Letter from Santa! This deal is good for their Elf Package only, which includes: Letter Personalized with your child’s name and wish list items Includes North Pole envelope and “nice list” certificate If you redeem by December 9th, 2011, The Original Santa Letter company guarantees delivery by Christmas! Through this link receive your letter 50% off the price ($10 instead of $20). Hurry up! Deal ends in 5 days!

This week we rowed through the book  "Lentil" by Robert McCloskey . We had a lot of fun with this book. Besides following the pages in the FIAR guide for Lentil, there's so many great additional activities you can follow. I guess that applies to all the stories in the Five in a Row  Curriculum! I had so much fun recreating the cover of Lentil. McCloskey is the writer and illustrator of "Lentil". In this story his illustrations are made with charcoal. I introduced charcoal to the kids with a drawing I made of the harmonica featured in the story. My Daughter's Pictures: First one is like my harmonica but white charcoal pencil against black paper. The second is black, brown, blue and green charcoal against white paper My Son's Picture We also discussed taste since there's a part in the book where everyone puckers their lips at the sight of someone eating a lemon. We looked at a diagram of the tongues taste buds and taste tested lemo...

Who Owns The Sun? is such a great book and I just found out the author of the book wrote it when she was 14 years old! I can only hope my children find a love for writing and are able to come up with their very own stories. The subject of slavery is the main topic of the story and I was unsure how my kids would react. Surprisingly they did well learning about slavery. I gave them a general idea on how they were captured, how they were sold and treated by their owners. We also read two other books on the topic of slavery: Here's my book cover for our mini book scrapbook: Benjamin chose to draw the starry night scene in the book and they learned what a simile is: Here's my daughters drawing and we pasted a plastic sleeve for their copywork: We also learned about simple machines such as levers, wheel and axel, pulley, wedge, screw and inclined plane. I set up a few simple machine examples to demonstrate how they work. We made a vocabulary pocket to...

Three weeks ago, we rowed "The Giraffe That Walked To Paris". I'm scrambling to post what we did for the past few weeks! This book gave us the opportunity to learn so many new vocabulary words including "Pasha" (Egypt's high military official. This is also based on true events, which made things even more interesting for the kids. I printed out a few templates from Homeschool Share and we constructed the mini book together. In addition to reading the book, they completed these small assignments throughout the week. Here's what we came up with: The kids wrote some vocabulary words from the book and wrote the definitions. They also practiced their writing and did some copywork from a sentence in the book: I drew the cover The kids wanted to draw their own giraffes and my daughter wanted to write a story under hers. My son also wrote a small sentence to practice his penmanship. Our geography lesson was on Egypt, Mediterranean Se...

I finally have had the chance to catch up with my posts on my FIAR adventures with my kids. After our first week of FIAR, we continued on a wonderful journey around the world with one of my favorite books How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World by Marjorie Priceman The kids had a great time learning about evaporation (we conducted an experiment on salt evaporating), tasted some cinnamon from a cinnamon stick, colored flags from the countries the main character in the book visited for a geography lesson and learned about the seasons and the apple tree. (Not pictured: minibook page with cinnamon stick attached) Best of all, we finished the week with a small math lesson on measurement and made a delicious apple pie! I've made it several times since then. My kids are allergic to dairy, so I had to modify the recipe in the back of the book and use vegan butter. I've recently discovered Xylitol as a natural sweetener (good for the teeth too!), so instead of the...

I had to post this. My good friend Lisa from Snoopygirlmusings posted this on her blog. Eclectic Musings: Some homeschool Laughs! :   Whoever said there isn't pressure to make a good impression even within the Homeschool community? LOL!

Last week was our first week back with our FIAR (Five In A Row) studies. So far it was our best week with FIAR ( Five in a Row Curriculum). The kids were very much involved and have learned so much about Geography and Mallard Ducks. We decided to start our FIAR studies with the book Make Way for Ducklings . The great things about FIAR is that I'm learning a lot of things I don't remember learning in school! Male mallard ducks are "Drakes" while females are "Hens". Although it's probably one of the most common ducks, I don't ever remember learning about them when I was in school. Male mallards, or drakes, are more distinctively colored than females. The female mallard, or hen, has mottled brown feathers and not as striking as the drake. We wanted to showcase what we leaned from the FIAR lessons. We created a lapbook based on "The Clown of God", however I had no folders to make a lapbook for "Make Way For Ducklings...