Valentine's Cards in Homeschool?

We have never celebrated Valelntine's Day in our homeschool. I'm not against doing that, but it never really seemed like something that we needed to do. And none of the children ever requested that we did.

But I have been contemplating whether or not to exchange Valentine's cards this year. I think it would be fun to have the children each make a card and then they could exchange them. The only thing is that I am pretty sure that with 3 boys I will get a couple of "that's for girls" statements. But I'm sure GG would really enjoy making anything that is pink or purple with hearts on it. LOL.

I still have until February 14th to figure it out. I think I'll see how the tone of school is going that day and then I'll decide if that's something that we might pursue. I think that the main thing is that I encourage the children daily to demonstrate the love of Christ. That is love 365 days a year. As long as we keep Him as our focus then I don't think it really matters one way or other if we celebrate a day of love once a year.


If you are planning on celebrating Valentine's Day in your homeschool then you may find this list of printable Valentine cards for kids helpful.

Martin Luther King Jr. Book Online

Yesterday I told the children that we would be off from school today because of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. And my 6 year old turned to me and said, who's Dr. Martin Luther King? I told him we would talk about it the next day and this morning I woke up early and scrambled to find a Martin Luther King Jr. book online.

I remembered finding one from scholastic a few years back when my oldest first learned about the great civil rights leader. I searched unsuccessfully to find that one. But, I am happy to report that Scholastic has another Martin Luther King Jr Book Online that is free.

The book is for grades K-4. It's a little over 20 pages but it is has just enough information to introduce little ones to Dr. King. It looks like you have to be a subscriber to print the book out the way it was intended to look. But you can view a full screen version for free and read the book directly from your screen. That is what I did with the children. They found the book very interesting and asked me a lot of questions afterward.

Eventually, I did find the book that I was looking for. It's called Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Dream. However, it appears that it is no longer free. You now have to have a subscription to Scholastic's mini-books in order to print most of them out. But I did come across one more Martin Luther King Jr. Book online - Our Friend Martin. This is probably best suited towards preschoolers.

An In-depth Study of Agriculture

At the beginning of this year I decided to utilize as many of the free coloring and activity books as possible. So, I started with the first activity book on the list which is The ABCs of Oklahoma Agriculture. As I started to look through the book I got so happy. The book is a great guide to put together an extensive study on agriculture using various coloring and activity books that I've collected links to over the past few years. I even threw in some recipes that the children and I can make together, to keep school interesting.

Now I can finally put my handy dandy heavy duty stapler to use. Yippee! So below, I have linked to the mini unit study, book(s) , or recipe that I plan to use for each subject.

Agriculture - I used this page as an intro to our studies.
Beef
Cotton
Dogs
Eggs
Feed - I focused on farm instead, since farm animals eat feed. Maryland Agriculture: Farm Fun, Farm Service Agency for Kids,  Southern Maryland Farms
Greenhouse

Horses - Go Harness Racing, Life on a Horse Farm (from NetLibrary)
Insects - Coloring Fun with Insects: I'm going to read the online book to the children. Then I'll let each of them pick out a few insects that they want to color.
Jelly - homemade jelly recipe: We're going to reduce the recipe down to 16 servings, or just one pint.
Kabob
Legume - peanuts (yes, they're legumes)
Milk - Guida's Milk and Supercow, How We Get Our Milk, Milk Matters with Buddy Brush, Fuel Up with Milk
Nuts - Pecan breakfast loaf recipe
Oklahoma - OK coloring book
Pork - Kids Pork Cookbook
Queen Bee - Adventures of Beatrice the Bee
Rain - My Water Activity Book
Sheep - I am the Good Shepherd
Tractor - tractor activity found towards the bottom of the page
University
Veterinarian - Veterinarians
Wheat - whole wheat honey bread recipe
Xylotomy - Trees: A Colorful Look at Our Forests
Yam - yam smoothie recipe
Zucchini - zucchini bread recipe

Eggs Mini Unit Study

I think the Iowa Egg Council website has enough information about eggs on it for me. There are a few egg coloring and activity pages and some fun "eggsperiments" for older students there.

That's pretty much it for now.

Dogs Mini Unit Study

I'm sure that there are numerous resources on the net pertaining to dogs. So, I may revisit this dog mini unit study in the future and add some additional free resources.

Dog Coloring and Activity Books
Be Bite Free
Bow Wow Ow
The Lucky Puppy
Safety Around Dogs

Homeschool Bible Lessons

I have tried several different approaches to teaching the Bible to my children. My oldest began reading pretty early so from about ages 5 - 7 or 8 he really enjoyed the free bible lessons from Calvary Chapel. But once he outgrew those I really struggled with finding a good free Bible curriculum. But my husband started having D write Bible verses as copywork to help improve his handwriting. And it is still amazing to me how much scripture has gotten inside of him from such a simple task.

Since I have 3 little ones so close in age I have tried teaching a Bible lesson a little at a time over the course of a week. But now I am thinking of taking a "Sunday school class" approach with the children. I will teach the lesson in one day. I will try to keep it short (to keep everyone's attention), but memorable.

Here is the new method that I'm going to try on Wednesday.

• listen to the passages on our dramatized Bible CD
• have children read, discuss, and color a Bible mini book
• do a craft
• have the children recap the lesson out loud

Why I'm Switching to this Approach
I recently started helping out in the children's church and I was amazed at how much my children retain from a single class. So, I realized that it really doesn't take a week long of "studying" scripture when they're so small. What a relief. It was challenging to try to stretch a Bible lesson for 5 straight days. But I'm finally learning that quality really does matter more than quantity.

Bible Mini Books
I am so glad that I cam across Bible mini books during my search for free Bible curriculum. These things are pure genius. And I am so grateful to those who have made these little treasures and offered them for free online. Here are the resources that I use for free Bible Mini books.

• Dltk-Bible
• Christian Preschool Printables
• Preschool Sunday School Central

By utilizing all three sources, you can cover quite a bit of the Bible. We're covering the stories in the order they occur in the Word . And my 12 year old is studying the same lesson using the free Padfield Bible curriculum. He did a few lessons from it last year and really enjoyed it.

Update 03/30/11 Smiley (age 6) is starting to say that the DLTK work is "babyish". And he is not really into coloring. So I am keeping the Bible study the same for everyone else. But I am starting to print out lessons from Calvery Chapel for him. Everyone is still studying the same lesson, but with (hopefully) age appropriate material.

Cotton Unit Study

Cotton, "the fabric of our lives®." Sorry, I couldn't resist. Anyway, there are probably several different directions that you could go in with a unit study on cotton (i.e. the cotton gin, clothing, cotton during slavery). I guess I'll just let the free materials dictate which direction we take. We usually wind up learning a lot when I do it that way.

 

 Cotton Coloring Book
The Wonderful World of Cotton is a coloring book that looks like it will hold the childrens' interest. The words in the book are fairly simple. So, I plan on having the children and myself take turns reading.

Cotton Lesson Plan
This cotton lesson plan is for upper grades.It's a very short lesson but it contains a lot of information. This might be one of those cases where less is more. I'm going to print this out for my 9th grader. Even though he has his own curriculum, he still likes to study the same topic that his siblings are learning.

Cotton Website

I don't think I'm even going to look for another website besides cottoncampus.org. This site has cotton related educational materials for lower and upper grades. There is also a games section. You could probably spend a few days to a week going through all of the material that is on the site. I'm definitely going to use the "World of Cotton" slide show.

A Short Study
This looks like it will be a short study. I don't want to go into slavery and cotton picking with a 3, 4, and 5 year old. So, I'll save the Eli Whitney study for a later date. My plan is to read the coloring book, watch the slide show, and then let the children color the pages in the book. That's probably about 1 day's worth of school, two at the most.