Tips for Attending a Homeschool Curriculum Fair

I went to a a large curriculum fair today, for the second time in my life. Here are a few tips I have learned, some from others, some the hard way.

If possible, preview the vendors and a map online before the event. Have at least a general idea of items your family will need in the upcoming months and years. Spend some time reviewing the vendor list and familiarizing yourself with their products. Spend a little time looking online at prices so you can recognize a good bargain when you see one.

Bring a friend (or two). It's nice to have someone to chat with on the drive. It's nice to have a sounding board for ideas, or a second opinion. It's nice to have a second pair of eyes looking for that one item you cannot miss. I like to leave the kids at home.

Bring pre-printed mailing labels with your name and address on them. It's nice to have these to stick on forms for mailing lists, instead of writing out all your information over and over.

Know your budget. Bring some cash. If you use a debit card, and you are traveling to the fair, give your bank a call so they don't freeze your card for suspicious activity. Bring a backup credit card or checkbook.

Bring a tote bag or backpack, or rolling crate. You will need something in which to carry all your purchases. If possible, carry some outside to the car sporadically.

Always peruse the used book stalls and ask vendors about scratch and dent books. Ask about bundling. Haggle. Those folks want to carry home as little as possible.

If you can't get what you want at the fair, ask about any deals for ordering at the fair. You may get a hefty discount, or free shipping.

Take your time and have fun!

Planner Porn

I'm sharing my innermost homeschool planning secrets today. Here's what is working for me right now.

My everyday planner. This handles the general overview of my life, including anything not school related.

It's a super simple At A Glance Collegiate Planner. I like that I can see the entire week at a time, it's small enough to fit in my handbag, and it's cheap.

This is my main homeschool planner, in a binder. I made a list of contents to remind myself what's inside.

My color coded daily schedule. It's different for each child. Managers of their Homes helped me learn how to schedule my school day effectively. I copied this schedule and posted it on our wall for easy reference. The kids like to look at it, too, and often keep me on schedule.

Each school month has a tab. Behind each tab is a two-page monthly calendar spread. 

Under each monthly tab, there are weekly planning sheets for my older son. Facing each weekly sheet is a family planning sheet.

I don't remember where on the intertubes I found this sheet, but it has been immensely helpful.

This is my weekly planning sheet. Across the top are days of the week, down the left side are school subjects. I pencil them in and check them off as we complete them.

I also keep a list here of things I need to remember. It's the first page so it's the first thing I see when I open my planner binder.

The next binder is for my kindergartner. The first page is a checklist I made to make sure I have work in his portfolio for each week of the school year.

This is a list of all his unit study topics by week.

Each unit study topic has a tabbed cover sheet. This is where I list my goals for the study, and what supplies we will use, what field trips we will go on, what books we will read, what art projects we will do, etc. If  I have printouts (workbook sheets, art project ideas) for the unit study, they go behind each tabbed cover sheet.

My next binder is where I keep all my ideas, resources, and worksheets for my third grader. It has a tab for each subject and things are filed behind each tab.

In social studies, I have a cover sheet for each geography lesson, where I list topics, supplies needed, and ideas.

Each child has a daily folder where I put worksheets they are to finish. This is also handy for taking with us. The vinyl zipper pocket holds pencils, rulers, scissors, glue stick and anything else they might need while we are schooling away from home (or if I just send the third grader to the desk upstairs to work independently).
When they finish their sheets, they place them back in the folder, and I check them when I have time. They go from here to porfolio binders.

Each child has a (color coded) portfolio binder. I put these together before the school year starts, so that as work is completed, I can fill it up and it will be ready to go to our portfolio review. First page is attendance.

This is where I keep logs for each child. I have a log for everything. Reading, field trips, movies and educational tv, scouts, physical education, music, carschooling. I find keeping up with this stuff is hard, so the only way I can do it is if I take a minute at the end of each day to write down what we did. My evening routine is to check worksheets from the daily folders, fill in our logs, journal a bit if necessary, check off attendance and portfolio checklists, then prep for the next day. I do a lot of weekly prep on Sunday evenings if I can do it in advance.

And lastly, I keep a binder of blank forms. Any kind of form that I think I might use on a regular basis I keep here. I keep originals of all my planning sheets in here.

So it seems overwhelming, but it's six binders (two medium, four large) and two folders. It fits easily on my school supply shelf with our text books and it's working for me right now!

Gymnastics Class

I was too excited to recently find a gymnastics class for homeschoolers offered by my county. Classes for both age groups meet at the same time and place!

The things have really taken to it. The teachers are strict but encouraging (perfect, in my book).

The younger age group mostly does obstacle courses involving somersaults, handstands against a wall, jumping and balancing.

The older class is working on series of movements, like running, jumping from a springboard onto a tall block, landing in a squat, and doing a forward roll down an incline.

Thing Two is excited to learn how to do a handstand (with help), and has been inspired to try to learn to do cartwheels at home.

I get to chat with and network with homeschool moms while they are in class (or read or sew), and I even did a cartwheel one day to help him. Gym class is good for all of us!

A Pet Problem

Not a usual school problem...the cat keeps sitting on the workbook! We had a good laugh over this one.

First Day of School

Wow! Where did the summer go? Trip to Louisiana to see friends and family, and attend my husband's 20th high school reunion. Two weeks of ice skating camp. Lots of long drowsy days reading and playing outside.

I've been working for weeks preparing curriculum for this upcoming school year. I decided on an overarching theme of "America", and we'll be doing units chronologically until January, when we'll start more "fun" units like baseball and apple pie.

New for this year: No TV until 3pm each day. Mom's been getting up at 6am to try and exercise and have a bit of quiet time to prep each day. Thing Two has his own set of four workboxes (he''ll be four in November). We'll be having "Triangle Time" each day (there are three of us so it makes more sense than "cirlce time") which will include some basic calisthenics. I have the day basically scheduled with school in the mornings and free afternoons. There's no more napping in our house, so afternoons are better now for errands, playdates, read aloud time, etc.

I don't know how moms of large families do it. I feel exhausted from prep work, and it's our first day! The kids aren't even awake yet!

End of Year Review

The purpose of this form is to help you create a record of the year’s learning experiences for each child in preparation for completing the Comar 05 laws. This form will also become part of your child’s confidential MPNL Record. Reviewing the year is a valuable activity that contributes to a family’s sense of pride in their accomplishments.

Child’s Name: Thing One Date: 4/30/10 Grade K

Use the spaces below and highlighting the educational resources, material, and curriculum your child has used throughout out the school year. Include valuable information such as filed trips, lesson plans, unit studies, travels and other experiences. Check your calendar; many dates and experiences it will be marked on you calendar and jog your memory. Feel free to attach your own pages and add to this review form.

'Demonstrated Skills' is just a list with headings on it for each subject they've covered, and as the children do something that comes under one of these heading, you write it down. You can write down knowledge they show about a topic of conversation, math skills they use while buying toys and shopping, 'PE' stuff they do while playing, etc.

'Resources Used' list has the same subject headings as the Demonstrated Skills list. Write down the educational resources used; reading/library books, books on tape, movies, radio programs, field trips, people they have discussions with, web sites, subscriptions, newspaper and computer, and whatever else you come across in life that gives them exposure to learning. You can even make note of the grade level of subject especially different then actual grade.

English: Demonstrated Skills: reads aloud and silently (both well above grade level), copies words, alphabetizes by first letter of a word; very good verbal descriptive skills and very good vocabulary; tells stories; word search puzzles
Resources Used: Moving Beyond the Page curriculum; reading websites, poems, library books, audio books, personal library
audio books

Mathematics: Demonstrated Skills: counting to 1000, adds and subtracts small numbers, skip counts by fives and tens, reads simple charts and graphs, recognizes shapes, draws shapes, finds the odd one out, matches, decodes simple codes from a key, recognizes hours and half hours on a clock, recognizes coins
Resources Used: Moving Beyond the Page, Calvert Math K and 1st, counting rods, Anno’s Math Games, jigsaw puzzles, mazes, Sudoku puzzles, code puzzles, geoboards, parquetry blocks, tangrams

Science: Demonstrated Skills: simple experiments, gardening, pronounces and memorizes complicated names (dinosaurs, etc), observation, compare and contrast, classification
Resources used: Moving Beyond the Page, nature study, videos, magnifying glass, rock collection, library books for unit studies: sharks and rays, early life, dinosaurs, panda bears, scorpions, ocean life, Chesapeake Bay, rocks, plants, airplanes, ships, Earth day, human body, fish, simple machines, spring, fungi, science songs music cd

Social Studies/History/Culture: Demonstrated skills: identifies some continents on map, identifies some states on US map, identifies hometown, identifies our street, simple map skills, identifies community helpers
Resources used: playdates, field trips, Moving Beyond the Page, Story of the World, Vols. 1-2 including activity books, Maps, globe, atlases, landmark flashcards, library books for Unit studies: Egypt, Knights, Samurai, China and Japan, Nomads, Early Humans, Africa, holidays

Art/Music: Demonstrated skills: drawing, painting, cutting, gluing, drawing from observation, sewing straight line on striped fabric with sewing machine with supervision
Resources used: lapbook templates, crayons, markers, chalks, paint, clay, play-doh, sewing machine, craft supplies

Music: Demonstrated skills: keeping rhythm, identifying songs or musicians or composers by listening, singing, memorizing song lyrics, play Mary Had a Little Lamb on the piano, find middle C on the piano
Resources used: piano, guitar, keyboard, Usborne First Book of Piano, music CDs as part of unit studies, Classical Kids story/music CDs, Wii Guitar Hero

Physical Education/Health: Demonstrated skills: running, standing on one foot, skipping, jumping, climbing, riding a scooter, riding a bicycle, roller skating, hyper-dash game, dancing, swimming, nature hikes, Wii sports, Wii Fit, yoga

Foreign Language: Demonstrated Skills: counts to ten in Spanish, recognizes a few colors in Spanish, recites a few Spanish vocabulary words
Resources Used: Dora and Diego books and videos, Spanish matching card game, Spanish Bingo, websites

Field trips educational outings: College Park Aviation Museum, Patuxent National Wildlife Refuge Visitor’s Center, National Gallery of Art, Belair Mansion Museum, Belair Stable Museum, Patuxent River Naval Air Museum, Goddard Space Flight Center, Smithsonian Natural History Museum, Smithsonian American History Museum, The Nutcracker ballet, Marching Through Time Living History, Baltimore Aquarium, circus, Chesapeake Childrens’ Museum, Watkins Park nature center, Clearwater Nature Center Anne Arundel County Fair, Prince George’s County Fair, Sheep and Wool Festival

Please use any of the next spaces for subject headings not listed or a separate sheet of paper if you feel the need to add additional related information about your homeschooling. (Special Needs, Technology Classes, Community Colleges, apprenticeship classes, awards, honors, merits, certificates, trophies, community service etc.)

2 First place ribbons at Prince George’s County Fair for a papier mache sculpture and a painting.

Pre-History Week

We had another really laid back week this week. I feel extremely guilty because I didn't prepare workboxes, but we still did a lot of learnin' 'round here. I'm trying to get past that guilty feeling. It helps to blog because then I remember all the fun educational things we did all week!

We discussed more from Story of the World about nomads. We pretended to be nomads this week, and went around the neighborhood pretending to hunt for food. We also talked about how nomads would gather food. We gathered some figs off a neighbor's tree.

We made cave paintings.

This idea is from the Story of the World Activity Book. You crumple up a brown paper bag, then draw your painting in charcoal, then paint the image if desired with brown, beige and black paint.

Then we gathered some long sticks, and some "animal hide" (fabric out of mom's stash). We built a hut in the back yard.

We made clay pinch pots. We studied prehistoric mammals, like mastodons, mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. And a lot of other ones with names like platybeladon. Thing One reads this stuff for fun. That's my boy!

The boys "camped out" in the back yard. This was a private party, no parents allowed. Even daddy's storytime was rejected. Thing One took care of it and read to Thing Two instead.

You can imagine how long they actually lasted. There was no actual sleeping accomplished.

We read:

A Wooly Mammoth Journey by Miller

Choose Your Own Adventure: Indian Trail by Montgomery

Will's Mammoth by Putnam

Outside and Inside: Wooly Mammoths by Markle

The Mammoth Academy by Layton

The Legend of the Cranberry: A Paleo-Indian Tale by Greene

Wiley and Grampa #10: Jurassic Grampa by Scroggs

We watched:

Ice Age

We listened to:

Sunset of the Sabertooth by Mary Pope Osborne audiobook

Then, we did our usual, after-hours aimless learnin'. Thing One found a new pet, a tomato hornworm. He has cared for it very gently, feeding it fresh leaves at least twice per day.

Thing One loves to draw. Today, he tried to draw the United States from memory.

See you next week for Plants and Seeds!

Back to School

Today would have been Thing One's first day of kindergarten, if he would have gone to public school. I've had a strange, bittersweet feeling all day. But I know in my heart we made the right decision for our family.

So, instead, we started back to homeschooling after a two week break. He's so happy to be back. I can tell, even if he hadn't told his daddy this morning that he is excited.

We put together our new wall calendar. Thing Two wanted to "play", too. Then we read the introduction in Story of the World Vol. 1, and talked about Thing One's "personal history." We looked at his baby book, his baby pictures, watched videos of him as a baby, and made a timeline of his life.

We put a big piece of brown paper on our classroom door and made a family tree. Things One and Two decorated it with flowers and butterflies.

We're sending out some questionnaires to family members about their lives.

Then we headed to the library. I love that it is a two minute walk from our house. We loaded up on books about sharks and manta rays, and family. I got some reference books about homeschooling to look over as well. We found a cicada to play with on the walk home.

Now we're eating dinosaur-shaped turkey sandwiches while we watch the Magic School Bus video we checked out. Thing Two's headed for nap time next, while Thing One tries out afternoon center time. It has been a great "first day of school."

Airplane Week

We had kind of a lazy airplane week. I feel bad because I just didn't put the effort into filling workboxes that I usually do. I did a good job on Monday but was lazy the rest of the week. I'm starting to think that a good homeschool schedule for us might be three weeks on, one week off, year round.

Thing One has been saying for a year that he wants to be a pilot when he grows up. Specifically, a fighter pilot. Monday, I researched what it takes to become a pilot, and what a pilot does in his job, and I made workboxes about each of those steps.

Overview of a pilot's training and job duties, why it's a stressful job

School-I asked a few questions of each boy like what's 2+2, sing the ABC song, etc. You could present them with a diploma and a graduation hat, if desired.

Pilot Training School-They sat in their chairs and pretended to fly a plane as I narrated what to do.

Health Check-up- I was the doctor and used the play doctor kit to certify them able to fly.
Pilot License-I printed out a photo of each child, their name, address, etc on the back, and put them together back to back and put contact paper over each one. You could also use an old badge holder. I also gave them "pilot's hats" which were just two hats out of our dress up bin.

Checking the Weather and Aircraft-We pointed to today's weather on a chart, and then pretended to check the outside of the aircraft (our chair) and fuel it up.

Planning Routes-I made a Departure/Arrival Chart on a piece of posterboard. Thing One looked at our US map and decided what city he wanted to leave from, and where he wanted to land. We wrote these on our chart, plotted the cities on a dry-erase US map and he drew lines between them. We compared which routes which were longer, shorter, etc. We also wrote times on our chart, and discussed AM and PM, noon and midnight.Seating Chart-I made a very simple plane diagram with four rows (A, B, C, D) and four columns (1, 2, 3, 4). I made up silly passenger names like Angry Alice, Bald Bart, Perky Pam, etc and wrote them on index cards cut to fit inside the boxes on the chart. On the back of each card, I wrote a letter and number (4D) and Thing One had to put these on the right place on the chart. He also had fun reading the names. I also made pilot, copilot, and flight attendant cards to put in the Cockpit and Flight Attendant sections of the chart. I think this would be fun to do with stuffed animals, too, on a large sheet of paper or a sheet or just mark the floor. Just tape the chart coordinates on the bottom of each animal. Payday-I put some play money in the workbox for their salaries

We also made some simple styrofoam prints of some of Thing One's airplane drawings. I cut cardstock to postcard size so we could mail these for our postcrossing project. These turned out really cute. The only step added to my basic directions are that I taped Thing One's drawing onto the styrofoam, and he traced over it with a dull pencil, pushing hard into the styrofoam.

Our airplane reading list this week was:

Miss Mouse Takes Off by Ormerod

Cam Jansen #12 The Mystery of Flight 54 by Adler

Airport by Barton

Eyewitness Books Flying Machine by Nahum

Strange and Wonderful Aircraft by Weiss

Feathers, Flaps and Flops by Zaunders

Moon Plane by McCarty

DK Experience Flight by Platt

Goosebumps How I Learned to Fly by Stine

We listened to:

Most Amazing Truck, Train and Plane Songs (Music for Little People)

My Green Kite CD by Peter Himmelman

We watched:

Bill Nye the Science Guy's video about Flight

Reading Rainbow Bored with Nothing to Do

We made several paper airplanes. I have to admit that none of them flew worth a darn, but Thing One had fun with them. We had fun experimenting with how to improve their flight. Paw Paw sent Thing One a neat book of paper airplanes recently called Pocket Flyers by Ken Blackburn & Jeff Lammers. They are pre-printed sheets that you fold into tiny paper planes. I love that there are multiple sheets of each plane.

We wrote a few interview questions for Paw Paw because he used to be an air traffic controller, drew him a nice picture of airplanes, and stuck it in the mail.

We learned about an early aviator from Brazil called Alberto Santos-Dumont. You can learn more about him here. There are some nice links and activities on this site. This was a nice opportunity to learn about Brazil and do a bit of geography with our globe and map.

Friday we went to the College Park Aviation Museum. We had been there several times before. I made a scavenger hunt for Thing One to do while we were there, based on things I knew were there (map, model plane, goggles, etc).
Daddy let Thing One play "Flight Control" on his ipod. This is his new obsession!

The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

That's all til next week, when we learn more about volcanoes!

Parrot Week

What the heck do you plan for a whole week of parrot themed activities? Well, I'll tell you what we did.

I asked Thing One what it is about parrots that interest him and that helped me figure out where to go with our studies. He wanted to know more about talking birds.

Our book list:

Princess Penelope's Parrot by Lester

Beastly Feast by Goldstone

Talking Birds by Flanagan

Parrots by Altman

We listened to Nonsense Poems and Stories on CD by Edward Lear

We had a pirate day. We read pirate books and dressed up like a pirate.

Our pirate book list:

Pirates Eat Porridge by Morgan

Tough Boris by Fox
Pirates by Lamm

For crafts, we stuck feathers in a styrofoam ball and glued googly eyes on it for a parrot head. We printed out some parrot bookmarks, colored them, and laminated them.

We looked at and felt real feathers, looked at a picture of different sizes and shapes of feathers, and learned the parts of a feather. We talked about the different ways that feathers help birds, and the different ways that people use feathers. We talked about types of beaks and why different birds have different kinds of beaks.

We watched silly videos of birds talking and playing and bathing in the sink on youtube.com. We watched volume one of David Attenborough's Life of Birds but Thing One declared it "boring." I think he doesn't have quite the attention span for it yet. I thought it was fascinating.

We played a parrot game, where one person was the bird owner and one person was the parrot and repeated everything the owner said.

And I saved the best for last. We got to visit a friend who owns a 12 year old African Meyer parrot named Oscar. The boys got to pet and hold him. He knows how to shake hands which they thought was soooo cooool. They fed him tortilla chips.

We tried a new kind of puzzle for our treasure hunt this week. I put a clue into code that had five letters in it "Mom's room" (five counting the apostrophe). Each day after finishing his first workbox puzzle, he got the key to one letter in the week-long puzzle (?=M for example). By the end of the week he had the puzzle solved and found the treasure chest. I gave him a "Canadian Oreo", a maple cream cookie that daddy brought back from Canada this week.

We also found a venus fly trap at the local garden center and Thing One is so excited about his new "pet." He is thinking up a name for it, and chasing house flies to feed it.

I Love Mondays!

I understand why most folks in the workaday world hate Mondays. I used to have the boring 9 to 5 job that I dreaded returning to on Mondays.

Nowadays, I love Mondays! Our weekends are always full and fun, and usually exhausting. Monday is our slow down day in a way. It's our get-back-into-the-routine day. It's usually my catch-up-on-chores day. I always have a lot of energy on Monday mornings. I always seem to get a ton of stuff done. And I love that feeling of accomplishment when I get a lot of stuff done.


Last night I prepared a few activities for Thing Two (who happens to be two years old). He has seemed content enough to be included in a few of our school activities (if we do a crafty simple workbox I prepare enough supplies for two, and I've been planning at least cooperative play activity per day that all three of us can do together). He likes to play by himself downstairs most of the time. But I felt a bit neglectful and I want to offer him more structured activities. He may refuse them but I feel like I at least need to have some prepared in case he wants to do something. So I made him a mailbox out of empty oatmeal canisters and a shoebox, and a packet of empty junk mail envelopes, play "stamps" (stickers), old postcards, and a small shoebox that he can make into a "package" to send or receive. This turned into our daily cooperative game before 7:30am! Both boys loved it. I remember Thing One loving it at this age.






I also prepared some cut up straw segments and a couple of pipe cleaners to thread them on. He mostly filled up his dumptruck with them and said they were pipes. I bought a bag of multicolored popsicle sticks and he liked building roads for his trains and cars with those. We also laid them out in shapes for a few minutes. I made some animal matching cards, and a new shape puzzle. He wasn't too interested in those today.












Thing One's first workbox is the weekly treasure hunt box. We've been doing a treasure hunt each week. Upon completion of a "puzzle" (usually a worksheet or physical puzzle), he gets one word in a five-word sentence clue. For example, last week's clues were "The opposite of wetter is" and he had to figure out "dryer." His wooden treasure chest was hidden in the clothes dryer with a whole dollar bill inside!


Today he had to complete a new puzzle of a world map. He's been bugging me for one for months and I found one in the Target dollar bin.






Our theme for the week is Penguins. He chooses each week's theme. We did a couple of small lapbook activities from http://www.homeschoolshare.com/. I've printed out a couple of games from http://www.filefolderfun.com/ for later in the week. We usually do one or two lapbook activities Monday thru Thursday, then put it all together on Friday.

We also did a file folder game of the sign language alphabet. Thing One has become very interested in learning sign language. I think because some of our friends at church know it and use it as a family. He also likes to make up his own secret signs, and often chooses to communicate with me in strange gestures that he assumes I can understand. He likes making up all sorts of things like this. Stories, yoga poses. He's always inventing.








We played a rousing game of Scrabble Junior, on the difficult side of the board today. Thing One was learning how to play his new words onto the existing words.










Then we played the generic version of Jenga (Jumbling Blocks $4.99 at Target). I picked this up because Thing One has been playing a Wii game called Boomblox, and it has a Jenga-inspired section. He didn't really understand the mechanics and physics of it. So I thought playing the real game would be fun and would help him understand. It certainly did, and he loved building towers and playing the game. Thing Two loved lining up and stacking up the blocks as well.





At lunch break while the boys played, I finished up the laundry for the day, and then started baking. I set out two loaves of bread to rise. DH is playing around with a recipe from mother earth news that says you can have freshly baked bread in five minutes per day. You mix up a big batch on the weekend and leave the dough to sit in the fridge for up to two weeks. You take a chunk, let it come to room temp then bake it. It turned out pretty well. I forgot to slash the top so it busted open and isn't pretty to look at but it tastes yummy. It develops a sourdough flavor the longer it's been in the fridge. This one is about 8 days old.


While two the loaf pans were rising I made blueberry cornmeal muffins from a recipe I got from Family Fun magazine. My kids love blueberries, and love corn muffins so I thought I'd give this a try. I've been looking for good easy breakfasts. We each had one at lunch. I love them. Thing One picked out the blueberries. He says he doesn't like them cooked. Thing Two didn't really eat any of his. On to the next muffin recipe, I guess!





While Thing Two napped, we watched March of the Penguins, read Tacky the Penguin, Gor Vol. 2, and played a simple animal classification file folder game. I made it from a worksheet I got from http://www.montessoriforeveryone.com/.








Then we played outside, blew bubbles, dug in the dirt, ate dinner, took daddy to class, had a bath and story time, and I put the boys to bed. Whew! It's been a great Monday.