Homeschool Fun

We have been having such a great time with the schooling since the conference a couple of weekends ago - I must have really needed that shot in the arm!

All of these fun activities are ideas from the Five in a Row lesson plans.


In the book A Pair of Red Clogs, Mako and her friends play a weather-telling game with their clogs. This was an opportune time to get the weather ball Jed received for Christmas up and running. It acts as a barometer, with the water level in the spout reflecting changes in air pressure and predicting impending weather. Jed started a weather journal, and so far it's been pretty accurate.







Mako and her mother go shopping for new clogs, so for our math lesson Jed opened up his own small retail business. His toys were going for bargain-basement prices! :) The challenge was making change for all the customers he had that day.



The Rag Coat features a girl named Minna who can't go to school because she doesn't have a coat. Her mother's quilting friends decide to make a coat for her, using fabric scraps and rags from their own stashes. There are stories behind each piece of fabric in her coat, and she knows them all, which makes for a delightful tale. To reinforce the geometric shapes used in quilt-making, we got out the tangrams.










Minna's dad is a coal miner, so we learned a bit about coal and mining it, and then we did a little mining of our own. Mining for chocolate chips is a great way to capture the interest of a 7 year old boy! But the reclamation part was not so easy....how do you put a chocolate chip cookie back together, minus the chips, so that it is a sustainable cookie once again? The world may never know. :)