1) Family read alouds

2) Crafts

3) Play hide and seek

4) Tea party

5) 50s night

6) Camping inside or backyard

7) Scavenger hunt

8) Charades

9) Spelling Bee

10) Movie night

11) Opposite Day

12) Make bean bags and learn how to juggle

13) Bible Theater

14) Hiking

15) Do good deeds for each other

16) Sprinkler obstacle course

17) Breakfast picnic

18) No electricity day

19) Hawaiian day

20) Baking contest

21) Go get ice cream in pajamas

22) Take a walk.  At each corner, flip a coin.  If it’s tails, turn left.  If heads, turn right.  See where you end up.

23) Play freeze tag

24) Chinese day

25) Blow bubbles

26) Make friendship bracelets together

27) Build a fort with blankets and furniture

28) Nature walk—take pictures or sketch items for a nature notebook

29) Draw pictures of each other

30) Bible number game—Someone says a number and everyone has to guess the Bible story they are thinking of with that number

31) Fly a kite

32) Mexican night

33) Play dress up

34) Remove all the breakables from your living area.  Put the couch in the center of the room and play volleyball over it.

35) Do a puzzle together

36) Have races

37) Make up a skit and perform

38) Go to the beach and build a sand castle

39) Board games

40) Make a cake and decorate

41) Build a house of cards

42) 70s/Disco night

43) Have a holiday party

44) Have a water fight

45) Brain teasers

46) Listen to an audio book together

47) Play with building toys (Legos, K-nex, wooden blocks)

48) Make a scrapbook page together

49) Card games

50) Make an old family recipe together

51) Decorate cookies

52) Play Twister

53) Tell progressive story-each person gets a turn taking over where the last person left off

54) Go to the park and play football, volleyball, or tennis.

55) Set up a seasonal or holiday table

56) Play Pictionary

57) Karoake

58) Tell jokes

59) Visit Dejongs dairy in Wildomar

60) Have a picnic and walk around San Diego’s Balboa Park

61) or visit one of their more than 70 museums (check out their website for free Tuesdays)

62) Bible trivia

63) Make cards and send to someone who needs encouragement

64) Play the alphabet game—think of a category (foods, animals, books) and take turns naming an item in that category for each letter of the alphabet

65) Get some friends together and do a field trip of a restaurant

66) Play bingo

67) Readers Theater

68) Make ice cream sundaes

69) Ride bikes or roller blade through the neighborhood or at the park

70) Play video games together

71) Paint ceramics—at home or at a ceramics shop like Color Me Mine or Painted Earth

72) Make cards and deliver to a nursing home or children’s hospital

73) Walk through the mall

74) Go see local historical sites and landmarks

75) Have a lemonade stand

76) Write letters to missionaries or family members

77) Have a puppet show.  You can make puppets out of mismatched socks or paper bags.

78) Go through old photo albums together

79) Make up carnival type games to do at home

80) Do manicures and pedicures

81) Work on a family blog

82) Go to the Temecula duck pond

83) Paint

84) Make smores in your fireplace or over the stove burners

85) Learn some magic tricks and have a show

86) Go to the library

87) Have a garage sale and let them keep the profits from their items (or donate them to a missionary family)

88) Have a “science fair”.  Everyone does a project or experiment and shares

89) Play basketball in your driveway.  If you don’t have a hoop, just mark a circle with chalk on the ledge above the garage and use it as a target

90) Work on a big project such as a go-cart or treehouse

91) Make and play with play-doh

92) Have a talent show

93) Play 20 questions

94) Wash the car in bathing suits

95) Lake Elsinore outlets kids activities on Fridays

96) Get a how-to book or rent a how-to video for something and learn together

97) Have a sleepover

98) Invite missionaries or foreigners over to talk about the culture of their home country

99) Play musical chairs

100) Go for a ride down the coast

101) Talk about favorite family memories

 

Tonight we had a "campout" in the backyard.  We have had a canopy set up back there the last couple months so that Paul can barbeque no matter what the weather.  My MIL wanted to come over and hang out in there with the fire pit going, make some smores, and enjoy an evening together.  So, she brought over a bunch of food and we went for it.  It was a little rainy, so we were all huddled under the canopy together.  It was great--good food, good company, good way to relax at the end of a long week.  Here are some pictures:

Taylor and Anthony stuffing their faces (of course!)

My sweetie cooking the best burgers ever!


Taylor hiding her beautiful face, as always


Christian taking apart a toy-just so he could put it back together


It started to get a little smoky...

Ten ways to simplify homeschooling

Colette Longo

1. Keep everything as simple as you can. Jesus wrote with a stick in the dirt, and He was the greatest teacher that ever lived. He used no curriculum or flannel graphs or lesson plans. Homeschooling can be made far more complicated than it should be. A simpler approach is much more effective.
2. Stick to the 3 R's. They form the foundation of life-long learning in every field because they are the tools of study. There will be no need to formalize any other subject if the children are doing their best in these 3, because people who are well grounded in reading, writing and math will approach other subjects boldly, independently and confidently.
3. Let the children teach themselves as much as they are able to. This teaches them responsibility, intellectual independence, and builds confidence. It's also better for the parent/child relationship because you can focus on parenting instead of playing schoolteacher.
4. Use the most direct method available. For reading, read. For writing, write, for math, do it, and for Bible, read it. Don't fall for catchy curriculums or methods that are really just something else for you and your child to learn.
5. Don't worry about your child's age or grade. Just let him do the best he can each day. Children grow intellectually like they do physically: in spurts. Although we may have an audience of skeptical relatives, homeschooling is not a circus, and we refuse to train our children to do tricks for people.
6. Minimize distractions in the home. Watch for excessiveness in entertainments, snacking, outings, phone conversations and the like. These sorts of things can easily get out of hand and compete with the effectiveness of a homeschool and sap the family of time and energy.
7. Seek quality over quantity. A few tapes of great music, a small case of carefully chosen books, a few special play mates, and an occasional outing is better than a large, but poor quality collection.
8. If you must document your school activities, do it after the fact. This way you will not make promises you cannot keep. If you are required to make lesson plans, be as vague as permissible. Don't let transcripts, diplomas, records and tests determine your academic plans. Focus on learning and the rest will follow.
9. Put the needs of your youngest, most vulnerable children first. If an older child gets a little behind in school, I'm sure you can forgive yourself. But if something happened to the toddler while you were busy homeschooling, I don't think you would be able to say the same.
10. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind and soul and don't neglect to seek him early...giving him the first fruits of your day and teach your children to do the same. I know that you are tired and that there aren't enough hours in your day, but we serve a God who can make the sun stand still.

I just finished reading the book Teach them Diligently by Lou Priolo. 

I have had this book for years and have many people told me how good it is, but just never got around to reading it.  Well, the Lord always has perfect timing and this was just the right window for me to read this book.  I have to admit, I found it a little dry and methodological.  But the message was important and something I really needed to hear.

I have been having a lot of disciplinary struggles with my 7yo--the extremely active one.  There are many areas in which he does need to grow and change, but how unfair it has been of me to expect a certain level of behavior from him without first equiping him and training him in righteousness.  I was very convicted to be constantly using the Scriptures to teach and train my children.  In doing this, I can be more proactive than reactive.  Also, when the time does come to correct, I can use the previous training in what the Scriptures say regarding the area of offense. 

I am somewhat overwhelmed at the long road ahead, but also encouraged that if I am faithful to teach the Scriptures diligently to my children, the Lord will produce a harvest of righteousness in them. 

^"And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.  You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."  Deut 6:6-7

This month one of my goals is to pray for my family everyday. This morning on my walk, the Lord prompted me to stop the audio message I was listening to and pray for my husband right then. I did, and that prayer turned into Him instructing me and confirming that He wants me to spend at least 30 minutes praying for my husband every day. I am going use The Power of a Praying Wife as a guide, praying for a different area of my husband's life and walk with the Lord each day.

If anyone would like to join me and commit to praying for your husband for a half hour everyday this month, you can either...

email me at dawn@spicefamily.net to sign up:
Just put 30 Day Prayer Challenge in the subject line and "Sign me up!" in the message. By signing up here, you will get your challenges in your email box every day. This will also put you on my mailing list for future events.

join the facebook group to be notified:
Signing up here will enable you to access each day's challenge on the facebook site. This will also allow you to interact with others who are doing the challenge too.

(You can, of course, sign up both ways)

I look forward to seeing how the Lord will use this to work and move in the lives of us and our husbands.

~Dawn

Today I could no longer stand to walk by the hall bookshelf and tolerate the mess.  It is amazing to me how quickly something can become a complete disaster area.  Here is the before picture (note that it was so messy, I had resorted to putting things on top):



Thankfully, some messes are cleaned up just as quickly as they were created.  So, after fifteen minutes it is not perfect, but liveable:

We are wrapping up our unit on Russia and getting ready to start France next week.  I love unit studies.  They are so fun and easy to plan.  I often get asked where I get resources for our unit studies, so I thought I would share my favorite sites.  I know it took me a long time to find a good list of sites, so I hope someone finds this info useful.

abc teach

activity village

crayola

dltk-kids

edhelper

enchantedlearning

familyfun

homeschoolshare

kraftfoods

perpetualpreschool

preschooleducation

preschoolexpress

rainbowkids

thebestkidsbooksite

 

If anyone has any good sites to add to this list, I would love to see them!

 

 

Would you like a way for your children to learn and to donate to a good cause at the same time?  Free Rice does just that.  You can go to the Free Rice website and answer questions from various subjects, including art, english, math and others.  For each correct answer, 10 grains of rice will be donated to hungry people all over the world through the UN World Food Program.  Just playing on here for 15 minutes could add up to a lot of rice!  This is awesome for the kids, but I had a lot of fun playing on there myself! 

We are doing a unit on Russia, and part of that unit is to learn about bears.  So, today we made bear caves out of shoe boxes.  Then I hid a bunch of colorful bear counters around the house and the boys had a bear hunt.  They had fun.  Here are their bear caves:


Anthony (11)

Christian (7)

Ian (5)

My 7 yo is active.  Very active.  This child just can not sit still for 2 minutes.  He has been a challenge to teach since day one.  Sometimes it is all I can do to keep from pulling my hair out.  It became such a fight with him to get him to sit down to do his math I finally made a deal with him.  He would be able to alternate days-one day he works out of his math workbook and the other day he gets to do math on the computer or do some other sort of "fun" math thing (using manipulatives, games, etc).  Today he was using play money and had to make certain monetary amounts.  Even this was a fight because of course he had to sit still to do it.  UGH!  I don't know what else to do.  Does anyone else have a child like this?  He is a very smart boy and seems to learn things by osmosis or something, but getting him to do any sit down, structured type lesson is like torture for both of us.  Sometimes I think that he should be completely unschooled, but then that wouldn't be fair to the other kids.  And he doesn't really like to read, because it is not active enough.  I am not quite sure what to do to reach him...

Throwing my hands up in the air,
Dawn

I have been tired lately.  I mean super tired.  I have been having trouble getting up in the morning and feel tired all day no matter how much sleep I get.  I go through these phases every once in a while and I'm sure I'll be back to my full energized self in no time.  But in the meantime, getting everything done is proving difficult.  During these times, I have to remind myself that if we get nothing else done, we all need to be spending time in the Word.

 We have come up with an easy system that allows the kids to dig into the Word on their own during their morning routine.  I am going through the One Year Bible.  I give the kids the option of reading the same passage as me or something of their own.  I also gave them a chart with all of the chapters of the Bible so they can mark them off as they read them.  They each have a devotional journal which they decorated.  (Pictures below)  In their devotional journal they write what passage of the Bible they read and write at least one sentence about their reading.  They ask themselves--what does God want me to know, do , or be? and write the answer.  Then they pick one verse from the reading, any verse they want and write it down in their journal as well.  To finish, they pray and ask God to help them apply what they learned and to meditate on their verse all day.  That is it.  I know, it is simple.  But it seems to me that people try to make it so hard that sometimes that keeps them from implementing anything.  If you can't find just the "right" way to do it, you end up not doing it all.  Well, I finally came to realize that there is no right way.  It is just about sitting at the feet of God and seeing what He wants to show us through His Word.  We do spend additional time digging into the Bible during school time and really studying it, but this simple devotion time just gets us all starting out our day on the right track, by putting our relationship with God first.   

I am sure we will get caught up on school work next week, but for now I am thankful that we are doing this everyday, if nothing else.  And the cool thing, they are also getting reading, reading comprehension, and writing just from this one thing.  That's a cool bonus.

Here are our devotional journals, which we each decorated:

Ian (5)

Christian (7)

Anthony (11)

Taylor (13)

Dawn (32) LOL

I made a new New Years goal today!!

I told the kids that from now until the end of the year we are going to visit every park in our city and our sister city.  We have some great parks in our area, but we tend to always visit the same ones.  (And, being on a tight budget we go to the park a lot!)  A couple weeks ago when we went to a park that we have never been to before the kids were so excited and they didn't want to leave!  So, I thought it would be exciting to visit all of the parks we have never been to before.

But, of course, as a homeschool mom I can't just leave it at that.  Oh no, we have to make it educational, right?!  So, I decided that I am going to have the kids take turns picking the park we visit.  They will look on the city's website and pick which park we will go to.  Then, they will get directions to get there, plan what to take with us based on what they have there (for example if they have a basketball hoop bring a ball).  They will also help pack the picnic to take with us.  We will take pictures and make a scrapbbook with all the pics and any other papers from our trip. 

I think it is going to be cool.  I will post pics when we take them.

~Dawn

We do spelling on Tuesdays.  We have never used a "spelling book".  This is what we do:
Each child has a spiral notebook for spelling.  Whenever they are reading or writing and they come across a word that they do not know how to spell they write it down.  Then on spelling day they take some time to practice the words.  They spend 15 minutes spelling the words in different methods--chalkboard, stamps, dry erase, cursive, stencils, letter tiles, magnets, and in their best printing.  Once they have mastered the spelling of a word they cross it off the list.  This has worked so well for us.  It makes their spelling lesson fun, and best of all they are not spending time working on words that they already know.  Their time is being used most productively since they are spending it practicing words that they personally need to know.  I would love to hear what others do for spelling.

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. day so we had the day off from school.  The kids went crazy playing with the neighbors, especially when I made them homemade bubbles.  Seems to me kids never grow out of blowing bubbles.  Below is my homemade bubble solution recipe, but the coolest part was how creative the kids got in making some blowers.  We have a collection of some small blowers but was that good enough for them?  Oh, now.  So, first they used a piece of this twisty noise making thing, then they used a piece of a broken light saber (why do we have all these broken pieces?).  But then they came and asked me if I could cut the bottom off of a 2 liter bottle and a milk jug.  First the overprotective mom side of me came out and I was worried about them cutting themselves on them, but then the 'let them have fun and stop worrying' side of me took over and I decided to go for it.  It was really cool and they had a blast.  Who would've thought that fun could be so cheap!

Homemade bubble solution:
1/2 c. dish soap
4 1/2 c. water
2 tbsp glycerin (can be found in the baking section of a craft store like Micheals)

Paul took the kids to the park today.  (What a blessing that was!)  For art we had discussed landscapes, so while they were there they each did a landscape drawing with oil pastels.  They were really good!  When they got home I had to figure out which park they went to based on their drawings and I did!  Paul even got into the fun and made one himself.  Here are their drawings:

Ian (5)

Christian (7)

Anthony (11)

Paul (37) LOL

Have you ever had one of those days that make you want to run down to the nearest school and immediately enroll?  No, you all are probably perfect and never have such thoughts!  Well, I do, and today was definitely one of those days.  OY!  I will never understand why a child would chose to sit for hours and not do something that would only take 5 minutes!  It's safe to say I blew my goal of not yelling at the kids a few times today.  But, I did repent and ask their forgiveness and they are always so quick to forgive and forget.  So, tomorrow is another day, which I am sure will be much better (it couldn't possibly be worse!). 

Oh, I did have one revelation today.  I decided to play Apples to Apples for our vocabulary time.  If you don't have it, it is a great fun game, and educational too! 

Wednesday is Paul's day off, so we have made it a habit to go to the library every Wednesday.  Our new library is so big and beautiful, we absolutely love it.  There is a park right outside, so we pack a picnic and make a whole day of it.  The kids like to play on the computers so I let them do that and also pick out some books and movies.  While they are occupied I get to pick out some books for me or for our school unit.  I also really enjoy reading the magazines.  I canceled all of my magazine subscriptions, but now I can read them all there and jot down any cool recipes or ideas I find, and I don't have any cost or clutter!  We each have our own cards and we can check out 30 items each.  Sadly, we usually are all close to maxed out.  Every time we go someone makes a comment like, "whoa that's a lot of books" or "wow, you guys really like the library".  We do love it!  

One of my goals for this year is to keep my brain active and try to learn something every day.  This month I am trying to form a habit of sitting down with the kids while they are doing school work and learning with them.  I decided to build my own "world" notebook just like they have.  Today I made my first page.  We are studying Russia and part of our unit is to learn about bears.  So, I made a "fast facts" page about bears.  I think it turned out pretty cute.  It made me excited to do more and build my notebook.  I also think this will help the kids to enjoy it as well, as they see how easy and fun it can be. 

Today was the first day back to school since we started our holiday break, almost  a month ago!  It went very well.  We pretty much had an easy and fun day-I like to ease them in!  We did independent work (math, copywork, journal, and grammar/phonics) and then just spent some time decorating our notebooks.  We had a huge stack of papers that we had done for advent and our Christmas around the world unit, so we got them all put into notebooks and then decorated the covers.  We also took some time to decorate journals for our morning devotions.  I did mine too.  They really enjoyed this and I think it will also help them to use the journal more often to write down what they are learning in their morning time with the Lord. 

I will be posting pics soon-- the camera battery was dead when I went to use it.  I hate when that happens.  Pics to come, I promise!

Well, ready or not we start back up with school in 9 hours.  I still have two baskets of clean clothes to put away, a corner of the kitchen to clean and the dining room table is covered with Christmas decorations that still need to be put away.  Oh well, if need be, we'll just do school at the coffee table tomorrow.  LOL.  I am totally ready to get back to our normal routine!  Tomorrow evening is also the meeting for the moms group for which I am the administrator, so it will be a very busy day. 

Tonight the kids and I went out and did a little stargazing.  The moon right now is the biggest it will be for all of 2009.  When it first got dark, they went outside to check it out and there was no moon.  A couple hours later it appeared so we went out with the binoculars and telescope.  I don't how to work the telescope so we didn't get to see much.  I am hoping Paul will take them out again tomorrow night and give them a real show.  He really likes doing that.  It was really neat to see them getting so excited.  The neighbor kids were at our house too, and we got to share it with them.  I love to see them fired up about God's creation.  It really was amazingly beautiful!