Homesteading, Homeschooling & Homemaking
It’s always fun to do hands on crafts to celebrate holidays. It’s even more fun if those crafts are ones you can eat while you make them. I’m pretty sure that’s why Fruit Loops Rainbows are always a big hit with my kids.
I give the kids a couple of handfuls of Fruit Loops (I actually use the generic cereal), and they get to sort and build their rainbows however they’d like. [Read more…]
5 of Our Favorite Read Alouds for 5-9 Year Olds
Now that you’ve learned why read alouds are so important, I want to share with you some of my family’s favorite read alouds. Links to these books are Amazon affiliate links. Thanks for supporting this blog by using these links!
My oldest loved this series so much that we read through it twice. She wanted to read it a third time, but I told her it was time to read something else!
The Little House series gives us such a different perspective on life. I was especially affected by The Long Winter. The story really encouraged me in knowing that our homesteading dreams were wise, since it’s so important for us to be able to sustain our family.
This series elicited great laughter from my children. It also gave us the chance to talk about tall tales and exaggeration.
Just an overall fun read for the family!
When we started The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I didn’t think it would hold my kids’ interest. The sentence structure is so different from how we speak now, and there is a lot of vocabulary that is different.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Although we normally do our read alouds in the evening, this series had my kids asking throughout the day if we could read more. It also had them asking for “one more chapter” time and again.
This is a book full of emotion and big issues (death of a child, losing everything to a fire, slavery), but it allowed these issues to be seen from the perspective of a child going through them. This was an extremely enjoyable read for all of us, and I would put it towards the top of my favorite books I’ve read to my kids so far.
Surprisingly, my son was the biggest fan of this book. When we recently decided what to read, he asked if we could read the next Caddie Woodlawn book. The story is about a family that pioneers Wisconsin (which at the time was mostly populated by native Americans). It is a story of bravery and true friendships.
We are currently halfway through the second book, Caddie Woodlawn’s Family, and we’re loving it!
We would love suggestions for more fun read alouds for our family to enjoy, so please comment with your favorites!
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Make your own DIY Recycled Shrinky Dinks from garbage!
There’s a reason this post is one of our top posts of all time! Making your own DIY Recycled Shrinky Dinks is so much fun, and it costs almost nothing!
I’m going to show my age with this post. I remember when I was in middle school and Shrinky Dinks were cool. We made them in an art class, and I have a very vivid memory of what I made. In fact, my mom may still have it. I probably made more than just this one thing, but one thing stands out for me.
When I was little, we had a cat named Muffin. Muffin was the coolest cat ever. She was part Siamese, and the sweetest cat in the world. After she died of feline leukemia, my mom swore we would never have another cat, but I wanted one so badly.
So when it came time to make shrinky dinks, I decided to make a picture of a cat with the phrase, “A house is not a home without a cat.” No guilt trip there, right? [Read more…]
Find out why read alouds aren’t just for babies and toddlers! Plus a $100 Usborne Books giveaway!
We all know that reading to our young children is really important. Kids that are read to at an early age tend to do better in school, have better listening skills, and it has even been said to raise your child’s IQ!
But most out loud reading stops once our kids are able to read for themselves, and that’s a shame! [Read more…]
Fun, free printable coloring pages for you to print out and color however you’d like! Mostly geometric shapes.
My kids love to color. And I’ll admit it, I love to color too! So when I was looking for a good place to get some coloring pages that dealt more with geometric designs, and I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I decided to make my own. [Read more…]