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Break for Nature Luv

May 29, 2013 | Leave a Comment
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There really was another reason I couldn’t finish my spring cleaning. We got to the back porch and discovered a nest down between the cushions of the chair.

I know I have seen nests in some crazy places. Makes you wonder what a bird finds appealing about a certain place. In between the back and seat cushion of our chair is not a safe place in my opinion, but it sure made for a grand view for me and the kids over the last few weeks.

It wasn’t long before we had babies. I thought it would be easier to take pictures but the mom and dad were quick in bringing back food. So we had to shoot pictures quickly. They had their mouths opened quickly.

By the next week, they grew quick too but we were able to get as close as we wanted to. We noticed this week that they probably knew we weren’t mom and dad now.

It was just a few more days before we saw them ready to leave the nest.

We knew it because of the great amount of chirping coming from mom. This baby managed to leave the porch right to the grass and had to take a break. I don’t know who enjoyed this more, me or the boys. He is so cute and we loved being so close to him without handling him.

Then it got up on the wall and found the corner. It took momma to come find him so he could leave the corner. He couldn’t figure how to get to the trees but finally figured it out. Amazing how they can cling to almost nothing, but the tiny ledge of a brick. I finally got to clean my back porch but waiting those few weeks for our bird watching was more fun.

It didn’t take long before the kids and I decided it was too hot to be doing cleaning now.

So we invited over my niece and spent a good amount of time in the pool. So this is how we will be starting our school days during the summer. I highly recommend starting your day off like this.

Hugs and love ya,

Home Management Binder + Printable Bank Accounts Information Page

May 28, 2013 | 1 Comment
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Before I had all the mayhem from the end of the school year for most folks, I was still working on my Home Management Binder. I probably should say I am updating it little by little this year instead of making it just a spring project. One reason is that I have more forms that I want to go in it. So instead of overwhelming you me, I had decided this year I would add the forms slowly. Too, I have the new cover and have slowly been updating the forms to match it.

One form I figured out I needed right away was a bank accounts information form. This new form has space enough for 4 accounts. I will need to print off two myself because we have more than 4 accounts, but I don’t like to crowd my forms. Four accounts is all that would fit comfortably, look balanced and still gives you enough room to fill in.

Home Management Binder Editable

By the way it is editable. But I am especially proud of myself this time around because I was able to take time and fiddle with my new program that allows me to make editable pdfs for you and learn a few things. One feature I wanted as well was the ability to not have to retype information after I saved it. Guess what? I think I figured it out. I always depend on you though for feedback as you use them too. However, the way this feature works is that after you make a change you have to re-save it using another file name. For example, when you download it, it is saved with one name. Then when you fill it out, I believe you have to save it with another file name. Then still with another name if you add more changes.

If you get a chance to play with it, let me know because I have the full adobe program which allows me to do these forms so I need to be sure it’s not playing differently with me because of that. I know I say figuring techy things out is not my first love but I have to admit I do love them occasionally when I find them useful.

I hope all that made sense and you let me know how it works on your end because I will take time to go back and do all the forms with that update added to them. It sure would save us time as we filled them all out.

Download this newest form with the ability to save your typed in information here.

It’s kind of nice to have the new bee workshops behind me for a break and the co-op done so I can focus on getting some of my projects done. Also you know how much I like to take off the whole month of December so I school right through the summer. I do school somewhat lighter normally, but not this year, I am sticking with a full schedule. There are some changes coming ahead on some other things, but I will save that and tell you about next them month.

Hugs and love ya,

5 Days of A Homeschooling Co-op Convert – Day 4: Co-op Core Leaders Matter

May 27, 2013 | Leave a Comment
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Co-op core leaders was an area of concern that held me back from becoming a co-op convert. You don’t have to homeschool for any length of time to figure out that a clash of personalities among leaders can break the spirit of a co-op.

Having a co–op that I cherish, I want to share some pointers and tips on what to look for in individuals who want to help lead a co-op.

Though a willing spirit is certainly a positive, it is not the only thing to look for if you want to successfully lead a co-op. There is no other way to say it except that I look for individuals that are there to “serve” instead of being looked to as “Leader” or looking at the co-op as a way to benefit their family only. The dogged determination to plan even when a leader is feeling a bit ill, her kids have been sick or other pressures of life have caught her feeling swamped is a beautiful quality. It is inherent or part of her make-up. In this world where folks only look after themselves, I place a high priority on persons who give of themselves willingly year after year.

I have known more leaders who at the first sign of stress, throw in the planning towel without a consideration to the rest of the leaders.

One of the leaders I ask to join was actually hesitant, which is a good quality. This means she is thinking seriously about this role and how to preserve the co-op. Instead of jumping willy nilly into it, it shows maturity on her part.

It is natural to want to look competent always in front of other homeschoolers, but a leader can set herself up for a big disappointment. Any successful co-op is always the work of a group.

Do not look for the laughing- we can do this–probably has no clue mom who shows up at all the events having suggestions. You don’t need flighty leaders. It is easy to suggest change, but quite a different thing to roll your sleeves up and do something about it yourself. Look at individuals with a realistic sense of what can be accomplished instead of idealistic.

Look for individuals who are not like you because they can bring another whole set of strengths to the group. You need to ask yourself: What qualities do I bring to the co-op? Answer truthfully and not something that you think other people want to hear.

For me, though I like crafts sometimes, I know I will never be Artsy Craftsy Tina. I do love to create things hands-on for my kids, but if you have a true friend like I do that is naturally crafty, you see her value. The creative ideas she has that brings an element of fun to your co-op are true treasures. I value her. In the same vein, she can appreciate my ability to organize an agenda and mind the details that are needed for a co-op. It is a much needed partnership based on mutual respect and cooperating with each other.

The third co-op leader in our group, Kelley, loves the technical aspect of things and knows how to draft a “mean what I say email” when one is needed as a group reminder. She works well with details that are laid out and goes over any spots other leaders may have missed. She too appreciates the value of a person that has been gifted with sharing arts and crafts with the group. When she handles money or even the technical details of any function, you can bet your co-op will run smoothly because she has a natural bent for checking things like that over.

The key to a unified board is that all of the persons respect each other and their strengths. It goes further too. They need to see that though they may have a different opinion about a matter that falls squarely into somebody else’s expertise, they have to yield to the person who has a natural bent that way.

That is not easy to do in a world that touts how important you are. However, none of the leaders can forget the reason for joining our hands and voices together. We do this for the children. It goes without saying that co-op leaders though not free of hurt feelings can not wear them on their sleeves. A group cannot survive if the co-op leaders quarrel too because it is sure to happen among the members.

It is not just the moms who say they want to help, but it is the moms who say they want to work, serve and help preserve peace.

The last important thing is to present a united front. No leader wants to be disliked in a group. So when you have rules, it is important to present a united front on the rules and not make only one person do this. That means to take the not so fun part of a co-op, rule enforcing, along with the fun interactive part of a co-op.

Look at a list of these things below that helps us in our co-op to present a united front.

Share one common email so that all leaders get the same message.
Discuss the issues presented at any co-op or field trips privately.
When releasing rules to the group, do that with the group email so the group sees it is a united front.
Agree on a few rules. You won’t be able to cover everything, but if a family sees a few rules like 10 or so and not pages and pages, they are more likely to feel warm and welcomed. As issues come up that have not been listed, you can discuss privately and let that individual know.
As the leader, be sure your family sticks to the rules too. Become a co-op model member too.

It helps to have a balance of personalities though they may clash with you at times because a co-op is much more healthier and energized. It will grow if you have done your jobs well. We grew from 6 families to well over 100, then had to cut it in half because it was too many families for us to manage without adding more core leaders.

Look at this list below of what each type of leader would do in a co-op.

Crafty person

Always has the best ideas for decorating the co-op.

She is very good at gathering games that are appropriate for each level and leading the games. She is very fun and warm and the children like her.

She is the decorator for the co–op and normally has ideas for making it easier to decorate.

She can come up with plays if you incorporate that into your co-op.

Technical Person

Good at coming up with how the duties need to be balanced among the leaders when it comes to the “behind the scenes” duties.

Excellent at keeping up with the group’s money.

Excellent at answering email to the group.

Could help in any technical matter related to putting on the co-op.

She works well with the crafty and organizer person both to help and give a hand if needed for finishing any tasks.

Organizer

Good at setting the co-op, time and dates and reminds the group.

Good emcee who keeps the co-op running smoothly along and keeps it moving along so that the co-op starts and ends on time. There is nothing more frustrating than leaders who do not start/stop on time.

A great resource for finding things in the community like speakers to line up for the group.

Can obtain a location and coordinate with persons or business that they rent a location from.

What do you think? Do you know a person or two like this that could form part of your co-op core board?

Hugs and love ya,

If you missed the other days, grab them here.

5 Days of A Homeschooling Co-op Convert – Day 1:Who needs one anyway?

5 Days of A Homeschooling Co-op Convert – Day 2:What are the basics?

5 Days of A Homeschooling Co-op Convert – Day 3: Coordinating the Co-op

Review of Great Empires Activity Study by Home School in the Woods + Year End Co-op + Free Printable

May 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Warning: Picture overload!

We just had our year end co-op. How do you choose a few pictures from all of the hard work of each child? As each family shared what delighted them, I have tried to scatter as many pictures as I could throughout this review.

Over the years I have shared my passion for history that is both hands-on and interactive because it breathes life into lifeless events of the past. So when planning our year end history co-op, I decided to use the Great Empires Activity Study, which is an activity study by Home School in the Woods. I have to say a fair amount of swooning was involved because of the scope of empires that the Great Empires Activity Study covers.

Great Empires Activity Study by Home School in the Woods covers fourteen empires: Ancient China, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Arab-Muslims, English Empire, French Empire, German Empire, Japanese Empire, Mongols, Russian Empire, Spanish Empire, United States and Viking. Not wanting to make a choice using the eeeny, meeny, miny and moe method between any of these swoon worthy civilizations for our history loving co-op, I decided to cover a little about each of these empires through hands-on projects.

Organizing and assigning hands-on projects for our Great Empires co-op was easy and enjoyable because of how the information is laid out. After reviewing the download of the material I received, I noticed the files are organized by master, texts and projects. The projects page for each empire, I found extremely useful in wading through all of the excellent material. The project page is like your weekly lesson plan at a glance page and the master is your lesson plan for the day. The master pages include a helpful teacher’s key reference, which is a map marked with key areas, boundaries and other helpful features for each region covered by that empire. Glancing at the project page, we could select all the hands-on activities that we wanted to do and find them among the 107 master pages.

Too, background information on each empire is vital in covering the topics like we did because we wanted to savor a morsel of each empire. The text pages for each empire are 2-3 pages. However, one gem about the text pages is that they cover the empire at its height. Non-history loving folks don’t like history because they can get caught up in a quagmire of details that can drain the life out of a history lesson. Unsure of which invention, event or key point to highlight, a budding history buff may come away more confused. However, the text pages by Home School in the Woods shaves off non-essential details for the elementary age child but builds appreciation by covering key events that are significant for each civilization. If you are a give-me-the-facts-only type of person, you will enjoy reading about each empire in the condensed text because you won’t come away feeling overwhelmed. Beyond covering key events for each empire or covering significant inventions, the text unifies the past to the present. Your child comes away with a better understanding of the impact previous civilizations made in today’s world. Keeping it simple without being boring makes the text a nifty feature.

However, if you already have a basic framework of history knowledge and want to explore beyond that foundation, you will enjoy the additional reading suggestions in each projects page and the extensive links found in the text which directs you to a website page at Home School in the Woods. Easily, you could spend a week on each empire.

Because the Great Empires Activity Study is about exploring, discovering and hands-on learning, you will find plenty of activities for each empire from making scones when learning about the English empire to making an Egyptian cartouche. Activities vary with each empire from learning about history through cooking, painting pottery like the Greeks and printing minibooks about famous people to Japanese kiragami.

You will not find cheesy analogies of history clip art in this product. All of the clipart, projects and pictures have amazing detail. If you are a non-artsy person you will enjoy assembling the easy to do projects because a lot of them are printable. You decide if you want to color or not.

Here is what I find most appealing about this product:

The scope of empires covered. If you have been lagging behind in covering history topics or are trying to follow the 4 year cycle used by a lot of homeschoolers and it is going slower than you would like to, using Great Empires Activity Study would be a useful tool if you want a bird’s-eye view.

It can be used as a stand-alone history curriculum because you have the option with additional reading material listed in the projects pages and links provided by Home School in the Woods to extend each empire. With the abundance of reading recommendations and because we love history, I personally would take two weeks to cover each empire if I were using this as a stand-alone curriculum. Doing one hands-on activity per week would not be overly time consuming and you could easily end up with a year’s worth of history. What a bargain for the price and you are using it for all of your children.

If you are using a history text and would like the flexibility of adding in an activity to enrich your reading, then Great Empires Activity Study would be a nice fit.

Great Empires Activity Study allowed a lot of room for flexibility in our co-op setting because it allowed each family to focus on the topic that interested them.

History clip art matters to me because pictures are important in history. The fine detail and high quality pictures can be used for a timeline, history notebook or to add to a lapbook.

Many of the creative activities can be printed and do not involve a lot of teacher supervision or tons of crafty artsy items on hand to do them.

The constant in all the empires is the beautiful teacher’s key map. Providing a key map for each empire is like having a mini geography curriculum as a bonus.

I feel that persons can vary tremendously on what each one thinks is a disadvantage in a product. I prefer using the word considerations because it gives you pause for thought to see if your circumstances fit that product.

Considerations for this product would be:

There is not a lesson planning guide or checklist for each day’s activities. For some homeschoolers that may feel like freedom to explore and breathe but for others having a to-do checklist each day may feel a bit more secure.

Some of these activities are ones that history lovers may have already done if they have been homeschooling for a while or find them easy but again the product is aimed at the elementary aged child.

Download Free Notebook Cover here.

You know I have to organize most products I get and this one was no different. I have created a printable for you to use as cover page for your binder when covering these empires.

{Tiny had a wonderful time at the co-op. I’ll share with you soon how we made his easy, easy Roman costume,helmet and shield.}

{A huge dose of thanks and love to Cynthia and Kelley. Cynthia did the beautiful Egyptian pillars. Would you like to know how she made them? I’ll share that in an upcoming post too. Thank you to Kelley for the beautiful Great Empires Co-op banner with those smokin’ hot wooden letters.}

Home School in the Woods is an excellent example of showing how history does not have to involve a textbook or always acquiring random uninteresting facts. With background information on each past civilization and several creative activities to choose from on each empire, you will not be disappointed with Great Empires Activity Study. Whether you are studying about the legends of Crete or are exploring the adventures of Captain John Smith, adding in hands-on history along with a huge dose of field trips and a history co-op or two is a sure way to making learning about the past meaningful.

Thank You Amy Pak and crew for keeping history fun through the Great Empires Activity Study. My kids loved it!

Product Name: Great Empires Activity Study

Website: Home School in the Woods

List Price: Download Version $18.95; CD Version $19.95

Grades/Ages to use it for: Elementary grades. I see though that with the links and additional reading, that you could use this with multiple ages.

Type of Product: CD or Download.

Customer Service: My download was emailed to me in a timely manner as promised.

{There are so many games to go along with these empires. A variety of games from each empire would be: Knucklebones, Roman Ball, Disc, Rota, Ephedrismo, Abarisa, Balonmano, Cinco Marias, Blind Man, Catch the Dragon and Chinese Ball to name a few.

Above: The kids are playing Catch the Dragon.You have to love homeschooling when even the older kids don’t mind teaching the younger ones how to play the game.}

{Mummy Wrap game. Okay, not so ancient, but fun!}

Hugs and love ya,

All product information is correct and accurate as of the date of this review.

Pantry Updo

May 25, 2013 | Leave a Comment
This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see my full disclosure policy.

Do you know how much time I spend thinking about changing my blog description? My ideal description, I think anyway, would be happy homeschool girl who hearts homeschooling and everything about it, but also hankers to organize any time of the year and dabble in a little decorating too.

How do you say “I am a girl who loves lapbooking, notebooking, history, doing anything hands-on when it comes to learning, organizing all I can anytime whether it’s school, my home, or one drawer, creating my own printables, leading workshops and talking about every possible and conceivable subject that has to do with homeschooling and let’s not forget while I am at that I have a soft place in my heart for new homeschoolers and in between that I conjure up new color schemes and projects for decorating that one day I may be able to use in my home“?

It is has never been easy for me to reduce all the ideas and projects that are reeling around in my head to a few eloquent sounding sentences. Instead of worrying about all that, I would rather tell you about what else I have been doing. I get on maniac missions and it’s hard for me to unhinge myself from them until I complete them.

Right now, I am in a re-organizing part decorating state of mind. Maybe you have seen my pantry in some of my pictures but I am a girl in love, love, love with it.

This pantry is new and it is actually my “second pantry”. I will have to show you my first pantry too but that is another project. I fell in love with this pretty thing because I heart turquoise but also love the look of wrought iron. It is kind of old world charm mixed with traditional things. The wrought iron look is the same design I have on my breakfast table and I have loved that look for years.

So for my spring decorating project, I have been trying to decide on what containers or bins to use in my pantry because as you can see it is open to the rest of my house, so that detail matters to me.

I have been taking my time on organizing. These turquoise containers I already had, so I put them in the pantry to see if I liked them. Well I love the bins but I think I really need a pop of some other color. Also, I need to declutter the utensil containers here that are my extras. So I have more work to do to it. I think a keeper though are the clear containers.

Don’t get in a rush about labeling your baskets and containers until you decide if they will work for you. I have to use the pantry for a while before I decide what I want to keep and get rid of. After deciding that I would keep only the clear containers, I have been on a hunt for different baskets ever since.

I have been looking for days and had to show you some of my favorite places to get baskets and if you visit the places regularly enough and watch the prices, you may hit a sale like I did today.

These bins or baskets come from Target and it is a good stand by, but Target is not always my first stop because sometimes a basket I like will have a tag indicating that it is an “in store” only purchase. I prefer to have exactly the number I need so I may look longer to buy online so I don’t have to hunt and peck at the store.

Another favorite place of mine to shop for baskets is World Market. I can’t stay out of that place and they vary what they have throughout each season.

Land of Nod has to be right up there for one of my top two places that I love to buy baskets at too. I guess people think they are just for kids room but baskets are baskets and can be used anywhere.

I just go crazy over their color selection because I can match any color scheme usually.

So if Land of Nod is one of my top runners, then Hobby Lobby has to be my other choice for a great place to look for bins and baskets. I just can’t stay away from that place either and I finally found the bins I had to have.I just fell in love with these and the polka dots and will be changing out my pantry soon. I really couldn’t contain myself either when the baskets were marked 30% off too. I just knew I had to have them.

They have so many styles and colors too. I have ones similar to these in my bathroom.

1/2/3/4/5/6/7 /8/9/10/11/12

The long hunt is over and I can’t wait for them to get here. Next, I will start working on labels. You know I will make my own labels too. But now that I picked out the baskets, I have some time to create labels. When it’s complete, I’ll share those pictures with you too and of course the labels.

Just remember, if you buy organizational bins to measure first or use baskets you already have for a while until you decide exactly what you want. Do you have a project that needs some updated and fresh storage bins?

Hugs and love ya,

Welcome

Break for Nature Luv

Home Management Binder + Printable Bank Accounts Information Page

Home Management Binder Editable

5 Days of A Homeschooling Co-op Convert – Day 4: Co-op Core Leaders Matter

Review of Great Empires Activity Study by Home School in the Woods + Year End Co-op + Free Printable

Pantry Updo

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