A year or two ago, I created a couple of Valentine’s Day printables for you to enjoy with your children. I thought I’d remind you about them since V-Day is just around the corner. Simply click on the graphics to download.
The Measure of a Heart uses candy hearts to practice measuring perimeter and area. After finishing the worksheet, use your candy hearts to measure the perimeter and area of other things around the house.
(In case you need to know…Perimeter is the measurement around an object and area is the measurement of an object’s surface. To measure the perimeter of the hearts on the worksheet, place candy hearts around the edges of the hearts – the dark lines – and count how many it takes to go all the way around. To measure the area, see how many candy hearts will fit inside the hearts on the worksheet.)
The Candy Pattern worksheet (which didn’t transfer to a jpg well and is MUCH nicer in the PDF download) allows your child to make various patterns using candy hearts.
(In case you need to know…each of the letters on the worksheet (A, B, C) represent a different colored candy heart. So, for instance, an ABA pattern, where A represents pink and B represents green would look like: pink, green, pink, pink, green, pink, pink, green, pink. Your child gets to decide which colors represent each letter of the pattern.)
You can find several other fun math related V-Day ideas at Googol Learning.
{Although a silly story (needing some tweaking), the science mystery experiment pictured above is both fun and worthwhile as you step away from the textbooks this Christmas season. Enjoy the Christmas Cookie Mystery with Teacher Directions.}
Below is an article I wrote for CHEK’s December Newsletter. I thought I’d post it here just in case some of you are overwhelmed this Christmas season.
Are you tired yet? By the time December rolls around each year, I’m ready for a break – only to find all the busy moments surrounding the Christmas season staring me in the face! Instead of throwing in the towel on homeschooling in order to manage all the other to-do’s of December, we have “Christmas school”. That’s a fancy term meaning we relax the regular schedule and make the to-do’s part of our school routine.
During these two or three weeks just before Christmas, the textbooks are often replaced with practical things such as menu planning, couponing, baking, party planning and decorating, shopping for presents on a budget, crafting homemade gifts, addressing Christmas cards, practicing for plays and musicals at church, and more. We’ll spend extra time fitting in service opportunities, too.
We also replace our daily Bible routine with one that prepares our hearts to celebrate the birth of Christ. There are so many different Bible schedules and Christmas devotions readily available, even some with learning activities! I’ll mention just a few to get you started. We love completing a Jesse Tree and have done this several different years. We have completed several themed studies relating to Advent, the Symbols of Christmas, and the Names of Jesus. We’re also suckers for good literature. Our very favorite Christmas series is written by Arnold Ytreeide and includes three books (read one book per year) with readings every day of December leading up to Christmas day. If you are new to this series, I would read them in the following order: Jotham’s Journey, Bartholomew’s Passage and Tabitha’s Travels.
Don’t let the craziness of December leave you feeling overwhelmed and spent. Enjoy your family. Enjoy your homeschool. Enjoy the to-do’s. Enjoy the extra-gushy time with our Lord and Savior.
Got candy? We do, and we’re having so much fun using it during living math lessons! This year we added a little science classification to the mix, too. Fun! Fun! Fun!
Math
My preschooler made a concrete graph with his candy.
He had to sort the candy into groups before we could graph them and he created the group names all by himself – gum, chocolate, suckers, crunchy, chewy and hard.
After completing all sorts of averages based on different groupings of the candy, Caleb (6th grade) created this graph using Excel. (This is another great computer integration activity for those of you who’ve asked me to share more about how we use the computer in our homeschool!)
Science
Not a great picture, but I wanted you to see the entire concrete classification system my 6th grader made with his candy. {A classification system is otherwise known as a taxonomy, which we compared to the classification system for plants and animals.}
Beginning with the main group of ‘candy’, Caleb decided how to break the large group into two smaller groups. He came up with ‘chocolate’ and ‘non-chocolate’ as his descriptions.
For each new category, he continued breaking the groups down into two new categories until he ended up with each specific type of candy in it’s own pile.
Finally, we walked through each candy’s “classification”. An example from our taxonomy chart -Candy; chocolate; bright wrappers; made with peanuts; made with peanut butter, crunchy, Butterfinger. Besides being a science activity, this also fits into the category of logic!
Check out some other candy math lessons we’ve posted in the past, too!
There are so many great Christmas books to read with your children! I’ve posted about some of my top favorites from years past. But, since I write nature studies, I thought I’d highlight some of my favorite Christmas picture books that relate well with nature study. Really good ones are few and far between, with so much twaddle to weed through! I’ll admit that a few of these are a stretch when you consider tying them into nature study, but think creatively! For instance, the following two don’t have explicit nature themes, but An Orange for Frankie is appropriate when you consider the topic of Fruits and Nuts; while Silver Packages fits best with Snow and Ice.
If you’ve come across other great Christmas & nature-related books that I haven’t mentioned, please leave a comment!
By far, the Nature Study Through the Holidays study has been our biggest seller. For that, we thank YOU! The short and simple activities tied into the Advent theme are just enough during this busy season in our house.
Last week, my three children and I headed to a local cemetery for a red and green scavenger hunt, as suggested in Nature Study Through the Holidays. Luckily for us, it was a mild day, so we took advantage of the fresh air opportunity as we scoped out small glimpses of red and unique greens in nature.
Here are some photos from our walk. We found more reds that we had predicted!
Berries
A stately conifer tree
Buds
Lichen
More buds
A thriving vine
A ladybug
Some research is leading me to think this is a prickly sow thistle, but I'm not quite convinced yet. Any ideas?
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