Hobbit Homeschool

We've just begun The Hobbit, and I'm trying to employ some of the kinds of living book activities that we've enjoyed in the past: recipes, crafts, research, and field trips, etc. We started creating our own Hobbit books to fill in as we read; and we enjoyed a Hobbit-style afternoon tea.

Hobbit Tea:  Our little tea party was full of seed cakes, pork pies, and ale - served on bright colored dishes and a green tablecloth. We found hobbit-inspired recipes that we followed loosely:

• this recipe for our pork pies, but really we just stuffed them with some leftover pork roast. 
• this seed cake, baked in small bowls to make multiple little cakes, although we actually left out the seeds.
• Henry Weinhard Root beer made a nice ale for some of us (and the rest had cocoa)
• And we enjoyed decorating our pies with some of the tips we found in this cool video.

An unexpected tea

Seed cakes, pork pies, and blackberry tarts

Root beer for our ale

Hobbit Book: We like the Waldorf practice of making books to illustrate what you have learned, and kept using the idea even after we moved away from Waldorf curricula. For our Hobbit books, we stapled together 12 pages of construction paper, leaving us 1-2 pages per chapter (and we decided we can unstaple and add more if needed).

Each child spent plenty of time making their books cozy-looking and just the way they wanted. They decided not to glue their Bilbo's behind the door, as we originally planned, but keep him loose so that he can walk throughout the book. We'll try to illustrate characters, copy quotes, and answer discussion questions in the book as we go. For this first chapter, we focused on the characters.

We found this cool interactive map of Bilbo's journey, printed it and glued it on the back cover for reference.

the beginnings of a Hobbit book: Bilbo and his Hobbit house

Gandalf and the bearded dwarves

Gandalf and the bearded dwarves

Who knows if I'll get around to sharing the rest of our Hobbit adventures, but I'm keeping my Ideas for Living Book Activities in mind: we'll try some dragon crafts, and I'm eye-ing Hobbit legos for Christmas. We have a hike planned later this month, and I think that will be a nice venue for field-trip reading. I'm also reading the Cliff's notes, so we don't miss out on important themes, and we'll watch the movies when we're all done. Anyway, we're off to a promising start!


affiliate links!

Schooling

It has been a while since I have posted anything. It seems now that we're deep into homeschooling, I have less time for blogging (or craft tutorials). Here's a quick peek at our school year so far!

First day of school, jumping right in!

Learning about mosaics via bean art.

Field trips to see local art shows at the Ned. 

And bigger field trips to see the Matisse retrospective at OKMOA!

Enjoying Dale Chihuly at OKMOA, too. :)

Blessing of the students for the new year at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church.

Winning at the State Fair for bean art!

And blue ribbons for blue haired mermaids! Nothing like external validation!

Diagramming sentences with the Sentence Family.
(Seriously, the girls beg to do this grammar program.)

Finishing our read aloud, The Cricket in Time Square, with cricket crafts.
We made paper cricket cages and pipe cleaner crickets. We didn't have a pattern for either, so they're a little messy.  

More trips to the Ned!

Minecraft Legos bought with State Fair winnings!

  

Simple cubby dividers to cut out distractions during quiet work time. I can't find the link where I originally found this idea, but its pretty simple. I bought one display board, and cut it in half horizontally to make two cubbies. We're seeing what works for now, and adding as we go. Right now, each girl has a handwriting chart, and a math chart (relevant to her grade). They also have little flags attached with brads which they raise to quietly ask for help or let me know they're finished. Maybe eventually we'll paint?

We love the dividers, although distractions continue.

That's all for now. How's your school year going?

Time Scavenger Hunt Printable

We studied time last year, and this lead to a little printable activity I wanted to share with you. We started with our little clock and our math workbook, but I wanted to do something a little more fun. I made up a quick Time Scavenger Hunt by drawing some pictures of a few things I knew would happen today. When they happened Lou had to write down the time and add hands to the clock. Easy peasy, but lots of fun! Since I made it last year, we've used it again now and then when we needed a refresher.

She wanted to do more so I made up some printable pages. I drew in the drawings, and will let Lou write "when the clock coo coos," "the baby cries," and "lunchtime." You could easily mix it up by writing in the event and letting them draw the picture, or writing in a time, and let them watch the clock to see what's happening when the time rolls around.

I use a .05 copic pen to draw with a nice black line. I made a few variations of the pages, and one includes some reminders for how to read the clock.

Grab the printables below!

Some days...

Some days you're looking into your public school options... and then some days, homeschooling really does look like this. 

Advent Countdown Printable

40 Days to Christmas - printable

Last year I made a quick nativity printable to count the 40 days leading to the birth of Christ.  This year, I wanted to make it a bit prettier. My oldest daughter sat down with me and helped me decide just how to make it, and I think we're both pretty happy with it. You'll notice there are 2 versions - one has stars for 40 days, and the other has the usual 25 days. (Orthodox Christians start counting 40 days before Christmas, which is coming up on November 15!) As usual, I can't just do one thing - I also made a black and white version if you want to let the kids color their own.

This works great as a last minute advent calendar if you don't already have one, or to accompany your Jesse Tree readings so you can quickly see your progress. We will put ours on our fridge and probably X, count, or otherwise draw the days as we go. We also used a magnet last year, but it was often knocked out of place, so writing seems to work best. :)

Just grab the png and print. Enjoy!

25 days to Christmas - printable

25 days to Christmas - coloring page

40 days to Christmas - coloring page

cross-posted from many mercies 

See Winter

We love A Dolphin's Tale and SeeWinter.com. We're watching Winter a little bit right now right here, but Winter seems to be a little sleepy tonight so we made our own Winter movie. Watch L's lego Winter swim!

Reading Day

Ah, Mondays. Sometimes our weekends are so full, we need a rest from the weekends! But Monday comes, and we can't afford to get behind in school. So I did a little shuffling with our weekly schedule to make last Monday a little different to get us excited about starting a new week. We had just been to the library and it was time to start some new books, so reading day seemed like a fun idea.

So what do you need for a great Reading Day?

1. Books. We started with 6 books, and replaced our usual subjects with extra readings. We started two new chapter books (Royal Monastic and Island of the Blue Dolphins) from which we read several chapters in a sitting. The rest were easy reader books that we read all in one sitting (including Poppleton books, Arnold Lobel's Grasshopper on the Road, and Henry and Mudge books), and we ended up adding in a few extras of these.

2. Schedule. I organized our schedule the same way I usually do - with a checklist in a spiral book for each child, but today's usual subjects were all replaced with reading. So today's check list looked something like this:

• Read during breakfast. 
• Read.
• Morning walk, and read outside.
• Quiet reading time on your own.
• Read again.
• Snack and Read.
• Read.

3. Post-its. Before we started on our schedule, we decided to read each book in a different place. I put a post-it on each book, and let the girls choose where we'd read each one. We wrote the location on the post-it. We chose Grasshopper on the Road for our outside reading, L thought it would be fun to read Poppleton in the Pop-asan (papasan chair), and then the girls each picked their bed for their favorite book.

4. Cozy socks. A last minute idea, to help make today feel extra special, everyone put on warm socks so we could be cozy while reading.

After we got organized, we read through our schedule. I tried to put the next book in its place while the girls checked off their list. I was just trying to stay organized, but the girls thought it was like a treasure hunt. So when we took our quick morning walk, we picked some flowers and then we arrived on the porch; and there they found a vase ready for our flowers, and our next book waiting. Later their books were waiting in their beds with snacks. A successful treasure hunt indeed! We went through most of our stack of library readers, and got started on new novel and biography with lots of snuggles, so I'd say a pretty successful day. 

Back to (Home)School with Animal Bookmark Printable

dolphin bookmark

We're back to school again, and pretty happy about it. Many families have first day of school traditions to help get everyone excited about the new year. I was only sort of prepared, and so ours stretched into first week of school celebrations, which is just fine with me. 

On our first day, we painted self-portraits, and started reading some new books.

Everyone claimed their quiet reading spot. 

I meant to have donuts for breakfast, but didn't get out to the store. So I made toast with butter hearts. I thought they turned out pretty well... but I sort of forgot to mention it to the kids, and I think they ate them without noticing. But hey, the love is there, right?

making toast with love

Later in the week, we got around to grabbing a few new school supplies, and starting the 1st grader on her very own field journal. I'm feeling really good about using spiral notebooks to simply our homeschooling schedule. We'll see if it works for the whole year - but this week, we're all loving it. It helps the kids see how much they have left to do, encourages my new reader to read, and it has a fun schedule built in (when they finish the first two subjects, then they get to have a snack and read on their own).

We have a (mostly) Charlotte Mason style homeschool this year, so there are lots of books. I thought some new bookmarks were in order to get us excited about reading. First we made a few of these easy origami bookmarks. (There are quite a few other origami corner bookmarks with interesting designs. I've pinned several here.)

And then I surprised the kids with some animal bookmarks, featuring their favorite animals: Sea Animals (a dolphin, of course, seahorse, and octopus) and Horses (in well named colors). 

octopus bookmark

golden horse bookmark

lavender seahorse bookmark

I couldn't find all the books in all the places to take pictures, but this shows quite a few. Grab the printable bookmarks below. Print on cardstock, and cut along the gray line. Use an x-acto knife for best results on the interior cut outs. Enjoy!

Happy New School Year! 

Printable Thank You Cards

We've been talking about gratitude at our house this year, as you may remember from this recent printable gratitude unit. A big part of that is remembering to write thank you notes for kindness and things we receive from others. After I used up my stash of thank you notes, I made this little bundle of printable notes, so that I would always have some handy. I am finding it very helpful for me, maybe more so than the children, to take a few quiet minutes and reflect on the kindness of dear friends in our life and to make that gratitude tangible.

This bundle has 4 simple designs of hand drawn illustrations of some beautiful things in our home: origami butterflies, our new little budgie, an antique globe, and a pinwheel. I made the cards print black and whit, two to a page, to conserve ink. You can print them blank inside, or with fill in the blanks for children who may appreciate writing prompts (as mine do).

I printed them on 60lb paper. This has a really nice feel, but goes through my printer more easily than heavy cardstock. Since they are black and white, I used colored paper, and added a few touches with colored pencils and metallic pens to make them a wee bit fancier.

The kids balked at writing thank you notes for all of their gifts at first, but they have grown to enjoy it - especially with the fill in the blanks and coloring cards. These make them a little fun without being as much work as making a whole card from nothing. 

The printable bundle is available in my shop.