Fun Math Site
Author: Kendra
•7:30 PM

I'm always on the look out for sites that will provide me with things that I can use in our math classes. We have a variety of resources around the house, but I was delighted to discover this awesome website called Teach This. Not only is it loaded with a variety of school printable games, but it's got a treasure trove of fun math resources. The site is not free, but well worth the $39.95 fee. (Keep in mind that the price is in Australian Dollar, to convert to your currency click here.) What I love about it is that it is an Australian site. Money games and resources are hard to acquire with our currency on them. My kids are being taught to recognize both American and Australian dollars. We also have pounds and euros around here too, but that's another story entirely!

Our printed worked overtime, as did the laminator, to get a few new math games up and running a couple of weeks ago. The boys thought it enjoyed playing all of them too. All though we've not tried out the snail game (up front) yet.

This was the money game we played. It comes with a dice (you must cut and glue yourself) and then you collect the coins you need in order to buy your "new toy". Using the coin dice was great review for Morgan and good starters for Jayden who hasn't had much practice with money yet. All though he's pretty keen on American money at the moment because he's very into presidents right now. Toy Store can be found here.

I was excited about this game because both of the boys are going to be learning place value. Oddly enough it's not something that was taught in Morgan's math books in great amounts yet. He did learn to count by 10's and sort 10's and 1's, etc. Anyway, this game is only basic and works with 10's and 1's, and we had a might bit of difficulty figuring out the set-up and even had to call the "principle" in for a bit of help. Once we figured it out though we had a lot of fun with it. The paper peeking out behind it also goes with the game.. Delivery Dan can be found here.

Then I found Clock Bingo and I was so excited by this find! The boys loving playing a few varieties of phonics Bingo and it had truly never occured to me to make any math bingo games. So silly of me, cause even Bingo in itself (sorry Nana) would be a good math lesson for the boys to recognize reading a graph and finding various numbers. However, this game was lots of fun, and a tad challenging for them because the hands were the same color and slightly similar in length. I suspect this one will gets lots of use this week. You can find it here.

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Fun Filled Weekly Workboxes
Author: Kendra
•8:50 PM


We're still working away on a Space School here, but we've also added a Nim's Island study to our plate. So this week the boys will find more then just space goodies awaiting them. They are pretty big fans of Nim so I'm pretty sure they'll be delighted to find that we'll be doing fun things based out of "her" book too. All though, I am eagerly awaiting a package from the mainland, so we may spend lots of time sitting by the mailbox waiting on our Postie who doesn't often come until quite late in the afternoon! Hopefully this week they'll find:

  • Magic School Bus Space Video (it finally came from the library!)
  • Supplies for making their own rain gauges, weather veins, and barometers
  • A few moon science experiments
  • Grocery Store Math supplies (felt food and fake coins, I've got some big plans for this)
  • The Cabin Faced West (as we continue learning about George Washington)
  • Space Sticker book & more of Lunar Jim as we didn't finish these up yet
  • Planet Craft (we're all excited to finally have our supplies for this one!)
  • Moon Sand, we made play-do instead last week
  • Celebrating Rembrant's Birthday (15th) with an art project
  • Making a salt-dough map of Nim's Island based on a paper map we have
I may also slip in passes for an afternoon at the movies. There's one out that the boys are itching to see and it's much more fun to go during normal school hours. We're also pretty psyched to make the planet craft now that we FINALLY made it out to the craft store for our supplies.
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What about you, what have you got planned for your Fun Filled Weekly Workboxes this week? Blog about it, and then come back and link up here! If you don't have a blog and want to join the fun just leave a comment and tell us about your workboxes.


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Space Puppies, er Buddies
Author: Kendra
•9:00 AM

Last night the boys got to watch Space Buddies as part of our Space studies. I wasn't particularly excited about the movie, because to be honest I expected it to be quite cheesy. I'll be equally honest and say that it was completely and totally cheesy. The boys, however, were on the edge of their seats the entire time. They were enthralled with it. They loved every minute of the silly movie. What I found neat about it, was that at the end of the movie it not only told you how they were able to make certain scenes possible. They also spoke with some real cosmonauts, and you were able to watch real training sessions that these people go through before being able to go to space. They showed clips from the first moon landing and even a few fun tidbits about how much the space shuttles have changed. While the kids didn't stick around for too much of the real information and tidbits (they were too busy digging out there own toy rockets before bedtime!) I'm pretty sure we'll plug it back in again later this week to read again. Especially after we read the current book we've checked out about Neil Armstrong. Oh yeah, and despite the fact that I always call this Space Puppies, I was firmly corrected by a six year old who told me they were really BUDDIES. I stand corrected.
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Fun Toys
Author: Kendra
•10:00 AM



A while back we purchased the Uncle Milton's Moon In My Room. The idea had been, at the time, to put it up for Lawrence's birthday. He was on the mainland at the time and it was a perfect opportunity to pick it up. The kids ended up giving it to him the day he got home, unaware that it was suppose to wait for his birthday. This little light is very fun to play with. It comes with a remote control where you can adjust the moon through all it's phases waxing, waning, and full. It's also really quite realistic when it's lit up and it's fun to crowd around an empty room and turn the silly thing on. It will be especially fun this week to play with it as the boys are learning about the moon through Space School with Prof. H.


Interestingly enough we decided to pick up the Uncle Milton Star Theater 2 for the Southern Hemisphere this evening. (Our local K-mart carries both of these Uncle Milton toys..) We brought it home and set it up to try out. The boys covered some basic star information last week, including meteors. This handy little gadget comes with an extra "tool" that allows you to make meteors shoot across the ceiling. The boys had fun using it and of course had gobs more questions about meteors because of it. We all had fun laying on the living room floor this evening and staring at the ceiling pointing at various stars. One of our intentions this winter had been to learn some of the constellations in the sky. I'm absolutely no good at this when it comes to the Australian sky because I look up there and don't see a single star I know.

We're in a totally different hemisphere which means even the north star and the big dipper are vacant from my view. However, Lawrence has taught us all how to spot the Southern Cross or Crux, as it's dutifully called on our Star Theater. It will be fun to learn to recognize the stars and then be able to go outside and find them. This will be extra fun in October when we all head out to family camp, all though we may find a few possums attempting to join us..

The really neat thing about the Uncle Milton toys though is that they come with cds. I know, big deal so many things come with cds these days.. Ahh, but these are actually INFORMATIVE cds, which makes them completely worthwhile. You can get a tour of the night sky and the moon. You can plug them in and listen to someone tell you all about the objects your looking at. It makes using your toy a whole lot more interesting when you know what you're doing with it!

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Liberty Bell Day
Author: Kendra
•8:11 PM

Today we had a bit of fun learning about the Liberty Bell. July 8, 1776 is the first day it was rung. The bell was rung to summon the people to come and hear the first reading of the Declaration Of Independence. There's a lot of history about this amazing American Icon, and we were highly amazed to see how long it took them (a year) to finally hang the bell up. We also learned the bell spent a good part of it's life locked up under the floorboards of a church to keep it safe from the British during the war. The boys found that fact very amazing, they've had some unusual war-like questions ever since we used the book Grandfather's Journey for a school unit lesson. They also wanted to know what I thought the British would have done had they been able to capture the bell. That was a pretty fair question, and my guess was that it might possibly have been melted down for bullets, or worse used to summon people into town. Chances are it would have also taken away a lot of hope the townspeople had, but of course this is all pure speculation. The boys were pretty impressed I had an opinion and ideas. I'm pretty certain they'll bring metal to me in the near future and ask if I can melt it for them...


The boys knew about George Washington, as we've started discussing him for our president study, so they were delighted to hear the bell was also rung for Washington's Birthday. I'm not sure if their excitement lasted once they realized the bell cracked again and was left that way after it was rung for him. I was impressed to see that on every 4th of July children who are descendants of Declaration signers get to tap the bell 13 times (13 represents the original colonies!) If my Great-Grandmother was correct, that means my children are eligible to tap the bell.. Kinda makes you want to pull out the old family tree, doesn't it?

Morgan also enjoyed doing a quick craft. We covered a foam cup in foil, attached a toilet paper tube with a pipe cleaner, and he drew the crack on his bell. It has grey string on it because he wants to hang it up, he was wearing it around his neck for a while. It's suppose to have a little jingle bell inside of it, but I'm afraid I was fresh out. When I broke the news to Morgan he wasn't at all upset, "I really didn't expect it to be noisy Mom, it's just a cup you know."

You can read more about the Liberty Bell here, and see a timeline here. You can see more specific details of our craft here. If you're interested in a coloring sheet there's one here, and a much more realistic one here. As for a good book, you might have to recommend one to me, cause our library has zilch on this topic! This was a very fun way to briefly discuss a piece of American History. I suspect I'll be searching for a good read aloud so we can learn a bit more about the Liberty Bell. Oh, and if you're really game, National Treasure Two has a lot of tidbits and fun information about the Liberty Bells in them. Both of those videos are big favorites in this family.
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Patriotic CupCakes
Author: Kendra
•9:33 AM

For the 4th I wanted to make a red, white, & blue desert. I was going to make some jell-o, or rather fruit juice gelatin with bits of real fruit in it, but we had a birthday party gathering to attend, and I opted for cupcakes instead. I was debating on how to top the cupcakes when I stumbled across Patriotic Cupcakes from Kraft. I took the idea, but totally changed the recipe.
Our cupcakes were completely sugar free, and we didn't use cool-whip either. Instead we used our typical chocolate cake recipe. It's very moist and yummy, but I've heard that it doesn't always cook up properly for people. I think the key is that you may be expecting a totally clean knife when you test your cake. Your knife will not have gooey thin batter on it, but it may have slightly wetter bits of cake on it. I find that cupcakes cook in our electric oven at 180 (350) for 20-25 minutes. Usually the later.
Overcooking them leaves them dry and icky. This is truly a moist cake, so you'll get bits of cake on the knife, but it won't be globs of dough. I suppose it would have been pertinent to take a picture of what I'm attempting to describe, but this might mean making more cupcakes. Somehow, I don't think the guys in this house would be one little bit disappointed! We topped these cupcakes with our cream cheese frosting (recipe to come) and then the fresh fruit, all though the blueberries were frozen. They are way out of season at this time of year, and that will probably be the end of the strawberries until December.. I always hate to see the strawberries go at the end of the growing season..

These little things disappear quite quickly! I'm half suspecting that the guys in this house ate them paper and all considering how quickly that plate of cakes vanished!

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New Clock Game
Author: Kendra
•8:00 AM

With our math lessons we've focused in a lot on clocks, using our big make-shift clock on the rug for a while. The boys have progressed beyond that and we've been doing simple review and lots of "what time is it" to keep up with the skills they've learned. Morgan has been doing excellent with telling time on the analog clocks around the house on whole hours, half hours, and any 5 minute increment. Jayden does well with the whole and half hours. I decided it was time to make a fun new math game to help them learn how to write the time, and to encourage the analog and digital abilities. Quite some time ago I stumbled across an idea to make Clock Rummy. The idea was well thought out by the original inventor, and even tested in a classroom setting. Since the idea was perfect for us, I decided to make my own version of it and then glue it on to a normal deck of cards (for whole and half hours it took more then one deck of cards!)

The idea is to get the cards all matched up, but it's acceptable to only get two of the cards matched up. We had our first run with it today, and Jayden was easily bored with it because the game took a bit of "sit down and think", but Morgan did really well with it. He fully enjoyed the challenge that it took to check his cards against the discard pile and to compare it with what he picked up.

We weren't too nitty gritty with the rules. We made sure we each had five cards in our hands when we ended our turn, and we kept our matches, but next time I think we may put them out on the table (think RummiKub) and let each other build off of them.

I think as we progress with it we'll also add in more times, as this will help him become quicker at telling time on the "5's" as we call it. For now though we'll stick with the whole and half hours. My one major fault with the game is that I made the cards all going in the "wrong" direction for easy viewing in your hands. This wasn't a huge deal for Jayden because we had him spread his out on the table so we could assist him. I'll also say that it didn't hold Morgan back any at all either. He was just as happy with it as they were. You can download your own set of clock faces and words if you want. Because of the size of the file we've split it in two, and you'll need to click here for faces, and here for words. I simply used a glue stick to adhere them to regular play cards.
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