Despite the fact that I have taught and directed children’s ministry, led middle school Bible classes, and taught adult Sunday School lessons, I have never experienced something more intimidating and exhausting than stepping foot into a new church. Even as an experienced church-goer and teacher, I still feel so much anxiety going to church now […]
Earth Day Earthworms: Natural Farmers
Today marked the day that we moved the firewood pile from beside the garage down to the barn. In doing so, we uncovered a habitat filled with all sorts of critters – several types of larvae, some roly-polies (or pill bugs), an orange salamander (I’m unsure but maybe it’s a red-spotted newt?), and earthworms galore, which […]
A Great Balancing Act
As I watched my son struggle, patiently steadying himself, starting out, wobbling a little, gaining speed, slowing down, wobbling again, toppling over, re-steadying himself, starting out once again, wobbling a little… I thought, My life is like that. How many times I set out to do something, I concentrate on steadying myself, I wobble a bit […]
ArtMaps
The students in our homeschool group are creating artistic representations of one week of our geography memory work for display during our awards ceremony. Stephen chose to paint a Monet-style watercolor of southeastern Asia because his daddy works in South Korea. Stephen drew his map free-hand, and it was a bit challenging because Guam […]
Shoestrings, or toad eggs?
During one of our in-search-of-spring walks out to Flat Rock, we came across this: WHAT IS THAT?!? At first glance, I thought it was a black string, but after finding more: and looking at it more closely, we realized that these WERE NOT strings. As if to confirm this, we came across this: And […]
Cardshark Math: Card Games for Math
Question: How can you make math fun? Answer: Introduce a deck of cards! I first started using card games to teach my students during my career as a high school and middle school math teacher. Though the games we play now are a little different than they once were, we are still practicing number sense and math operations (just […]
More Geologic Geometry
As we waded through the creek this weekend, we collected more rocks that were of various geometric shapes. The boys started singing our Geometry song: “Geometry, geometry, let’s learn some geometry. The area of a rectangle equals length times width. The area of a square equals length of its side squared. S squared! The area of a […]
The Wonderful World of Wasps
“They are so fascinating, Mom.” The words shocked me, really. They were spoken by our 7-year-old son who has been absolutely terrified of these little creatures ever since he stepped on one with his bare foot last year. Even though he didn’t want to touch our little inactive wasp nest collection, he was definitely into this. A little background: We […]
Math Monopoly (and other games to reinforce math)
As our 7-year-old played Garfield Monopoly with his daddy, it occurred to me that they were completing an entire lesson of math review. In fact, my math-teacher brain started kicking into gear as I overheard them discussing rules and strategy. Wow! Exactly how many math concepts were they reviewing? Well, there’s: Number sense Consumer math/budgeting/money Probability Addition Subtraction Multiplication Division Percents […]