Want a craft project that reminds you of cooler days?  We are pretty warm right now in Texas, and I was thrilled to discover a fun “wintery” science experiment.  Pam of Troop Petrie created some fun and whimsical snowflakes with her kids using borax (which is a staple in homemade cleaners) and pipe cleaners.  As borax is a chemical and not edible this would definitely need to be a “well-supervised” experiment.  Here are Pam’s snowflakes and directions.  Thanks Pam for submitting a guest post today!
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We made borax snowflakes, it was …

Our kids are just beginning to grasp the concept of different states.  A few months ago we ran a post card swap here at Quirky Momma, inspired by Liz over at A Belle, a Bean, and a Chicago Dog.  There were nearly 30 kids who sent post cards to each other.  I also begged and pleaded for some cards from family and friends and we amassed 22 cards from 14 different states and 4 different countries.   If you would like some cards from Texas, we’d love to swap with you …

My kids love going to the grocery store, me not so much.  I can totally see this idea, from JDaniel’s Mom, entertaining my kids as we shop!  Thanks for another great guest post – I think this would be great for my youngest who is still learning her colors.  It would be a great way to teach her about the shades of something!  JDaniel’s Mom went on a hunt for shades of the color green, but I can see us adapting this and say giving each of my kids their …

Today’s Fantastic Friday we are going to feature a few of the great posts I have found over the past few weeks.  All of these posts are printables that you can create to help your kiddos learn.   I found a tutorial for custom alphabet cards, some printable word family books
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I love this tutorial!  It is so simple.   Jess over at Mad in Crafts is working on learning the letters of the alphabet with her little tyke.  To help him, she created custom alphabet cards using the free program Picnik.  I …

I got the idea to create cereal box puzzles from a lady at my church.  She was discussing how her kids learned early reading skills through interacting with and recognizing brands, that this “recognition” was the first step for them in sight reading.  One of her children has special needs and helping that child learn to recognize brands has helped make her more independent as she can now go get “her” cereal, etc.  We’ll feature more of Mary’s ideas later, but for now, here is an activity that my preschoolers …

Here is another great learn-to-read, DIY resource: Sliding word cards.  We aren’t quite at the reading stage where they are useful, my daughter is still on three letter words but we are trying to transition into blending consonants.  I know she loves manipulatives like our learn-to-read cootie catcher and I am hoping that these new sliding words might help engage her mind as her hands are occupied making new words.  They were super easy to make.  These sliding word cards were inspired by the blogs, Preschool Playbook and The Snail’s …

We are using our word cards to practice writing this week.  I wrote earlier about how I love the collection of sight words from Erudition (we’re giving a game of theirs away this week).  The words have been incredibly helpful!  You can easily make your own cards, but I love that they did the work for me.  Now I can set my daughter up on the floor with our tracing tray and she can practice writing with relatively little assistance.
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To make your tracing tray:
We used a cookie sheet and I …

I think that Sight reading is a great way to help our kids learn to read.  We probably mix sight words with phonics, mixed with several longs days of play outside where we never touch our “school stuff” – I love Spring.  But if you live in one of those parts of the country where the weather is constantly changing, you’ll still have several inside days before spring is here in full force!  It is pretty cold out this morning, time to get those word cards out.  Thanks Erudition for …

For today’s Fantastic Friday Shout-outs we’d like to recognize a math game, a DIY math puzzle and several sites that have been referred to us as resources for our kids to learn early math skills online.
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We discovered a terrific math game from Shirley, a homeschooling mom over at Preschool Activities.  It is great for teaching both addition as well as subtraction.  I bet you could even adapt the “Number Spider” for upper level math as well!  Basically, you write the answer in the middle and all the “legs” are the …

Do you remember Cootie Catchers from when you were a kid?  I loved them!  Here is a cootie catcher perfect for the learning to read kiddo in your life!  For our paper we used one of the sheets of Shaving Cream Painted works from yesterday.  I was inspired by Jimmie and her daughter Sprite (love their blog).  They created cootie catchers for learning history and math facts at Heart of the Matter Homeschoolers.   If they can make one for the Civil War, I bet I can make one about “Short …