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Happy Mother’s Day!

May 12, 2013 at 5:07 am , by

This Mother’s Day we celebrate…

The Moment We Became Moms:

The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new. – Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh

A new baby is like the beginning of all things-wonder, hope, a dream of possibilities. — Eda J. Le Shan

When I stopped seeing my mother with the eyes of a child, I saw the woman who helped me give birth to myself. – Nancy Friday

The Love of Moms

A mother’s heart is always with her children. – Proverb

Some mothers are kissing mothers and some are scolding mothers, but it is love just the same, and most mothers kiss and scold together. – Pearl S. Buck

The Power and Influence of Moms

The hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world — W.R. Wallace

All that I am or ever hope to be, I owe to my angel Mother. — Abraham Lincoln

My mother was the most beautiful woman I ever saw. All I am I owe to my mother. I attribute all my success in life to the moral, intellectual and physical education I received from her. — George Washington

What the child says, he has heard at home. — African Proverb

The Belief Moms Have about our Future:

Mother love is the fuel that enables a normal human being to do the impossible. — Marion C. Garretty

Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall; A mother’s secret hope outlives them all. – Oliver Wendell Holmes

The Forgiveness of Moms

The heart of a mother is a deep abyss at the bottom of which you will always find forgiveness.  – Honoré de Balzac

The Strength and Energy of Moms

A man’s work is from sun to sun, but a mother’s work is never done. — Author Unknown

God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers. – Jewish Proverb

The Giving Nature of Moms

A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie. – Tenneva Jordan

A mother’s arms are more comforting than anyone else’s. – Diana, Princess of Wales

Mother’s Intuition

A mother understands what a child does not say. — Saying

The Tired Mom

 There was never a child so lovely but his mother was glad to get him to sleep – Ralph Waldo Emerson

People who say they sleep like a baby usually don’t have one. — Leo J. Burke

A Mother is Always a Mother

Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that suppose to mean? In my heart it don’t mean a thing. — Toni Morrison, Beloved

No matter how old a mother is, she watches her middle-aged children for signs of improvement. – Florida Scott-Maxwell

To all the Mothers out there… I hope you have a lovely day!! ~Liesl

Resources Used:

Random House Webster’s Quotationary by Leonard Roy Frank

All Great Quotes: Mother Quotes

Psychology Today: 50 Quotes on Mothers

 

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Baby Birdies Have Hatched!

May 11, 2013 at 10:09 am , by

Yesterday, I shared the robin lapbook the girls made. It was absolutely fabulous timing because they learned about the robin’s life cycle (eggs, chicks, juvenile, adults…) and a few days later we discovered a bird’s nest under our deck. We’ve been able to watch this beautiful story unfold…

The Nest:

The Mama Bird:

4 eggs (we have a step ladder about 3 feet away… I used a zoom on my good camera). I have no idea why the eggs look so different.

A few days after (after several days of rain) the chicks had hatched:

When I let ED come for a glimpse, the little chicks must have thought we were Mama Bird coming with food:

Mama Bird came pretty close and chirps at us to get out from under the deck!  We scurried away to leave her in peace.  The kids have strict instructions not to go near the nest unless I give them permission. We don’t want to disturb nature too much, though I’m happy the kids have gotten to see this amazing process! We watch all day as Mama bird flies back and forth with food for the baby birdies!

One other photo of Mama Bird. I think she is an Eastern Phoebe, though I’m no bird expert!  Her tail often bobs up and down:

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Lapbooks for Preschool on Up – A Project Kids Can Be Proud Of!

May 10, 2013 at 12:59 pm , by

It has been a while since we’ve done any lapbooks.  I saw this free robin lapbook over at Dynamic 2 Moms and asked the girls if they would be interested in doing one on robins. ED and DD both said, “Yes!”  So, I printed everything out and the girls set to work.

If you’ve never heard of a lapbook, it is a cute way to display small folded mini-books, flaps, pop-up books, and/or folded display material. The lapbook can include photos, drawings, or anything else that helps them learn about the topic at hand.  Kids can add their own information, include questions to quiz themselves on or other interactive activities. They glue their finished pieces into a file folder (see the second photo below).

What I love about lapbooks is that the kids are drawn back to them again-and-again, showing them off to family and friends… even pulling them out to admire their work and repeat the activities.

Here’s a picture of ED as she was putting in the finishing touches… she glued in some extra photos of robins.

Here is a picture of the front so you’ll see how the file folder was folded (the front and back of the folder were folded to meet in the middle). I have to say that ED was horrified when I started to cut her drawing in half, but quickly saw why I was doing that! Whew… catastrophe averted!

By the way, ED signs everything “McKenna…” Her obsession with her American Girl Doll continues as strong as ever!! :)

In this particular lapbook, the girls learned what robins eat, what predators eat robins, where robins live in different seasons, the parts of the bird and the life cycle of the robin. If you look closely you can see how some of the parts unfold… that’s what makes the lapbooks so appealing and interactive!

ED has brought out the lapbook a number of times (to show Daddy and to look over her work). I love that!  Here she is reading the words (egg, juvenile, adult) and matching them to the pictures:

In the picture below, ED is telling me what the colors mean in the map. Lapbooks are a great way to reinforce material and make it exciting!

Here’s another lapbook on bears I did with DD when she was 3 or 4:

As you can see, it was pretty interactive. Below she is feeding the bear (the mouth is open so she could slip the berries, fish or whatever into its mouth)

In this lapbook, I taped in another page in the middle so I could add a few more activities like the color matching activity below (she obviously colored the bears in!):

One last example is this bat lapbook that LD made when he was in preschool:

He was so intrigued by bats! I can’t remember exactly where I got the parts for this lapbook. It might have been from Hands of a Child. I used them quite a bit for a couple of years. They have a free lapbook you can download on Metals.

Here’s a glimpse at the inside of a butterfly lapbooks DD did. You can see more of our lapbook projects here:

Where to Find Free Lapbooks:

I absolutely adore all the free lapbooks shared by Dynamic 2 Moms (Thank you so much Kelley and Tina!). That’s one of the first places I head if we are itching to do a lapbook. I especially love all their free history lapbooks.

Another incredible resource for free lapbooks is Homeschool Share. I bet there’s two or three hundred different lapbooks to choose from there!

You’ll find some free science lapbooks based on the Magic School Bus series over at Yee Shall Know.

Just ask your child what he or she is interested in learning about and give it a try!

One more thing before I go, these days we still use a lot of these flaps, foldables and little envelope sleeves, but we often include them in our science or history notebooks, but the lapbooks themselves seem to have a satisfaction-factor that just can’t be beat. It’s a finished product that the kids can show off and review over and over.  That’s why we did so many when the kids were 3-7 or so.

Digestive System Free Worksheets

May 8, 2013 at 5:00 am , by

The past couple of days I shared all of our hands on activities in our study of the esophagus, stomach, small and large intestines… everything from recreating the muscle movement along the esophagus to making fake vomit and measuring out the length of our digestive tract.  Here are the worksheets I made for my kids to go along with all of those activities.

I actually did a lot of those hands-on activities before we worked on these sheets… I just slipped information in as we did activities so that when we went over the sheets, most of the information was already familiar to them.

A good overall review sheet for the kids was the first page.  They checked off the digestive system part (such as the esophagus) and colored that same part in on their page.

The next day, we measured out the digestive tract. As they cut a piece of yarn, they colored that portion the same color on their sheet.

The next couple of days, we went over more detailed information about the digestive system. We’ll obviously have to come back to this in a few years when we rotate back to this material again. As you can see, there wasn’t a whole lot of writing so my daughter (7) was just fine with them.

The last thing they did was this matching page which gave a brief description of each part of the digestive system and the organs associated with it (it’s on page 3 of the packet):

Here’s a glimpse of the digestive system packet pages if you are interested in downloading them. This packet is actually 9 pages long, but the answer sheets are not shown below:

Digestive System Packet — Stomach, Intestines, Digestive Organs

We didn’t get to this activity yet (we were going to do it yesterday, but got carried away with our activities in our Africa Unit), but since this is my last post about the digestive system I thought I’d mention these cute human body stickers I bought at Oriental Trading. It was $8.00 for a pack of 12. The body is on an 11×17 piece of paper and the stickers are quite big.  I thought the set was pretty cute, though a little on the pricey side. Still, we did a set last year and will do another this year… so over the course of 4 years I guess it’s not so bad:

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Other posts in our study of the Digestive System:  This was the last post of our unit. We’ve now officially finished our human body unit for this year! Here were some of the activities and worksheets we worked on as we studied the digestive system the past month or so:

  • Digestive System: It All Starts in the Mouth: We spent time looking at the important role the mouth has in digestion. We did some fun, hands-on activities related to teeth and chewing.  We also filled out a few pages for our science notebooks.  You can click on the link above for the first free download about the digestive system –the mouth/teeth — and you’ll see some of our hands-on activities.
  • Choking, An Important Lesson for the Kids - This was a lesson about swallowing, the epiglottis and performing abdominal thrusts. We made our own (movable) epiglottis with the printout to show how food is prevented from entering the windpipe:
I hope someone finds this useful! ~Liesl

Hands On Activity: How Long is the Digestive Tract?

May 7, 2013 at 12:08 pm , by

Digestive Tract:

So just how long is our digestive tract? We set out to find out with this activity. We measured out different colors of yarns for each part of the digestive system.

The page you see (above right) was in the Digestive System Pack I made for the kids. I’ll share that with you tomorrow.

After we had all the bits measured and tied together, we went out to the driveway to see just how long it really is!

The kids then spent time, trying to lay all that out on their own body.

I made outlines of the kids bodies on butcher paper (we did this the day before).

Then they carefully laid out the yarn in the appropriate areas:

LD decided he wanted to draw the parts of the digestive tract on his body, though he did it in pencil so it’s a bit difficult to see:

We went over quite a bit of information as we did all these activities. You can see a couple of those pages in the photos above. We read books from the library and then at the end of the unit, went over the information for their notebook pages.  I’ll share that pack with you tomorrow.

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