Last night we saw two spectacular falling stars.  At least that's what we thought they were at first.    I know there are certain times of the year when large numbers of them can be seen so I grabbed our book The Kids' Nature Book by Susan Milord to see if this might be one of those times.  In this book they have a nature activity listed for every day of the year.  So I turned to August and found that the Perseids meteor showers happen at this time of the year.  Every year!  Isn't that incredible!  If you average out the number of meteors falling it's about 65 meteors lighting up…

I got this really great book the other day at Costco. It’s called Painless Grammar by Rebecca Elliott and published by Barron‘s. It retails for $8.99 but I paid $5.59 at Costco. The cover says: “An enjoyable, completely painless examination of parts of speech, sentence construction, punctuation.” The Introduction says, in part, “As I edited the students’ papers, I began to wonder, is it possible to teach kids to love to write – and to love to write correctly – without boring them to death? I believe it is, and that’s the other reason I wrote Painless Grammar.” Just today I had a question on when to use then or…

Most everyday my kids do a sheet of math facts practice (like Saxon or Calculadder). They were getting rather tired of doing this. To make it less tedious we are mixing it with a little physical activity. I give the problem 6×4 and throw a ball to them. They throw the ball as they give the answer. Simple, but fun. Sometimes we do exercise. For every row we do a different type of activity. It may be leg stretches, push-ups, jumping jacks, running up and down stairs, putting our arms straight out from our sides while turning them in small circles -whatever I can think of. We even use a…

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to set up a review system for poems, scriptures, etc.?  My kids memorize different things from each other so to set up a review system on index cards would take up a lot of space as they memorized more and more passages.  I would like to set it up in a 3 ring binder if possible since I could then just photocopy whatever it is they are memorizing and not have to resize it for an index card.   Also, how does your children work on memorizing verses?  How often?   So far, as far as reviewing goes, I have photocopied whatever they are memorizing…