I found this super-soft “Pipsqueak” yarn and knew I had to make a blanket from it. I found an easy pattern for a hooded blanket which will be perfect for Nov/Dec when the baby is born. The pattern is a simple stockinette stitch. However, the yarn is so “fluffy”, that you can’t really look at what you’ve done to see if you need to be knitting or purling the next row.

Out of desperation, I grabbed a bread tab and wrote “P next” on one side and “K next” on the other side. When I stop knitting, I’ll place the instructions for the next row facing out so I know what to do next. (I wrote “next” because, knowing me, when I see a P or K, I won’t remember if that means I just DID a P or K row or if I’m to do one next!)

Bread tabs work for me! To see more Works for Me Wednesday tips visit We Are That Family.

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Sponsorship is a great way for your children to learn about other countries and the needs of families there. I love that it allows you to build a relationship with your child. Now, you are even able to log in and write a letter, upload a picture and send it right online. What could be easier?  It is our involvement in Compassion that gave us the idea to create our “giving jar”.

You can meet our sponsored child, Pascal, and read our story here.

Compassion Works for Me. How about you? To see more Works for Me Wednesday tips visit We Are That Family.

Oh, while you’re here, don’t forget to enter to with a copy of That Works for Me, below!Tweet

I’m so excited to share with you that we have been included in the brand new That Works for Me E-Book from We Are That Family. I have to admit that I’m a Works for Me Wednesday junkie. In fact, my friends would always ask how I knew all my odd little tips. I have to admit that I was a little embarassed to explain that they were from Works for Me Wednesday, which always required further explanation. As helpful (and fun) as the popular weekly linky party is to read through, it does take a good chunk of my time. Plus, I tend to find myself saying, “I read a neat tip for that, but I can’t recall exactly what it was.” Well, those problems are solved!

Now Kristen and Jennifer have compiled 800 of the top tips into one neatly organized volume. How convenient is that!? You can quickly and easily look for a solution to a particular problem or just enjoy browsing topics like decor, blogging, hospitality or crafts to inspire you. Tips are categorized by sections, but there are little icons to denote when a tip fits more than one category. There’s even one for homeschooling!

So hop on over and take a peek. Once you check out the book, click on the home page link to enter the contest to win a gift card for house cleaning ($150 value). Who can’t use that?!

As a contributor, we’ve been allowed to give away one E-Book via our blog as well. Woohoo! One of you lucky readers will get your very own copy and you’ll be able to convince all your friends that you’re a genius just like me. (smirk) To enter to win a free copy just leave a comment below, sharing why you’d like the book. If you’d like to sign up for our monthly-ish creative learning newsletter (upper right sidebar) or like us on Facebook, we’d love it, but we won’t make you do it for an entry. I will choose a winner using a random number generator at midnight Pacific time on April 20.

And if you’d rather just get started devouring all those wonderful tips right away, you can use the code SAVE1 to get one dollar off the already low price of $8. Enjoy!

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Now ask if they know how large a googol is? A googol is a 1 followed by 100 zeroes. To illustrate this, use a package of 100 paper plates.  First, place a large “1″ on the wall or sidewalk. Now, lay down all 100 plates, placing a comma (written on a post-it note) between every three plates. Now your child can see just how large a googol really is!

For a bit of word fun, scroll down a bit and have fun trying to say the big number word names on this chart. Have you heard of a googolplex or a googolplexplex? (I was told that duotrigintillion was the largest number. It doesn’t look like that’s the case, though.)

As a side note, you might discuss how the folks at the popular search engine, Google, chose chose their name.

How did Google get its name?
According to Professor “X” on Questions.com (and multiple other sources): Google derived its name from the word “googol“, a term coined by then nine-year-old Milton Sirotta, nephew of the American mathematician Edward Kasner. The story goes, Kasner had asked his nephew to invent a name for a very large number - ten to the power of one hundred (the numeral one followed by 100 zeros), and Milton called it a googol. The term was later made popular and in Kasner’s book, Mathematics and the Imagination, which he co-authored with James Newman. Later, another mathematician invented the term “googolplex“, which represents ten to the power of a googol - a substantially larger number.

Here’s a bit more about the history of Google (the company, not the number), if you’re interested.Tweet

This is a fun, hands-on way to better understand the need to reuse and recycle.

First, use masking tape to make a long line on the floor or draw a chalk line down your sidewalk. Mark the line in increments of 2-4 weeks, 1-6 months, 1 year, 10 years, 100 years, 500 years and 1000 years.

Now, give your children the following: a plastic grocery bag, a cigarette butt, an eraser, a banana peel, a cotton cloth, a milk jug, a piece of wood, a pop can and an apple core.  Ask them to place the items along the line where they think it will take the item that long to decompose.

Discuss what this means in terms of our dumps and what can be done about it. Have them find some more items of their own and first guess, then research to detemine how long it will take them to decompose. Were they close?

Answers to above items: apple (2-4 weeks), banana & cotton cloth (1-5 mos), cigarette butt (2-5 yrs), wood (10 yrs), diaper (25 years), plastic (25-30 years), can (200-400 yrs), glass bottle (1000 yrs!).

Linking to: Works for Me Wednesdays and Mommy Club.Tweet

Times Tales is based on mnemonics and has been proven extremely effective. Teach your children to practice mnemonic techniques and apply them to anything they have difficulty learning and they’ll be ones step ahead. In fact, I’ve taken my cue from Jennie and incorporate mnemonics when trying to remember simple tasks.

Here’s an example of a picture mnemonic my partner Jennie used when her sister wanted placed an order for a tall, hot, double-shot mocha with whipped cream.

Jennie pictured a tall, attractive (hot) cowboy in dark clothing (mocha), wearing two six-guns (double shot) and a white hat (whipped cream). Effective, eh?

To use mnemonics with your kids, make a list of things you’d like to memorize and then see who can come up with the best mnemonic for remembering it. A mnemonic can be a picture in your mind, a song or a silly sentence.

Below are some silly sentence mnemonics I found for the seven steps of scientific classification. I thought they might come in handy if you are studying plants now that the weather is nicer.

Phylum

Class

Order

Family

Species

King Pig Came Over For Grub Saturday

King Phillip Came Over For German Sausages

King Penguins congregate on frozen ground sometimes

King Philip came over from Germany speedily

Kings play chess on fine grained sand

You may feel like you’re just having fun, but if your student can learn to incorporate memory tricks into his study habits, he’ll be all the better for it. And besides, it IS fun!

Mnemonics work for me! To see more Works for Me Wednesday tips visit We Are That Family.Tweet

Over the next 30 days, I will be reviewing Time4Learning’s online education program. It can be used as a homeschool curriculum, an afterschool tutorial or for summer learning. My opinion will be entirely my own, so be sure to come back and read about my experience. You can write your own curriculum review, too!

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This is one of those fun projects that really took hold of my imagination! First, Click HERE to see the original instructions. How cute is that??!! But the real fun is the many ways I can see this project being adapted for homeschooling.

Yes, a personalized memo board is adorable and would be a wonderful craft to make with your children and give as a gift, but they also make perfect individualized dry-erase boards for schooling! Personally, I hate using a large chalk or memo board and prefer something small that I can keep right at the table with me. In fact, these would clip perfectly onto their school clipboards I shared about earlier.

You can customize each board with their special interests and colors or even with items they want to keep in mind for review on the back. The alphabet, cursive letters, periodic table, vocabulary works — there are all kinds of “memo” items you could have handy for reference on the back of the board.

The sample here was made years ago using a “plopper” or pre-made template. I just left the spot intended for a large picture blank. You could allow for a larger writing area or fill the space around the writing area with facts or encouraging quotes.

If you don’t know how to make digital scrapbook pages, don’t worry. Just make a regular page with stickers, papers, and/or markers and laminate it. If you don’t have a laminator your local copy shop can do it fairly inexpensively.

If you REALLY want to keep it simple (and frugal), just stick your decorated sheets of paper (front and back) into a sheet protector and slip a thin piece of cardboard in between the sheets to make it stiff. This option could even be stored right inside a notebook.

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We’re pretty conservative as far as our kids and technology go. As of yet, our kids don’t text or have Facebook accounts. We do have a family “kid phone” that a child who is going to be out-and-about can take with them, so that we can reach or they us. However, I have set my 12 and 14 year olds up with Gmail accounts. While close family members have their email addresses, the account is used mainly for school.

I like using email for school for a variety of reasons.

• If we’re studying a specific topic, rather than bookmarking a bunch of links to try and remember to share once we’re in the midst of a study, I can simply forward them to the kids to check out. Photos, videos, concerts, etc. are widely available on the web and are great study enrichments.
• I can send a link to a website with instructions to find specific information, study and write a couple paragraphs on a specific topic, or whatever.
• I can email a photo and ask the kids to “make five observations”, “make a prediction”, etc. This blog post gives some good ideas for using pictures in school. National Geographic’s Photo of the Day is a great resource. Paste the photo in an email, ask your child what he/she thinks is happening, then give the link for them to see how close they were to being correct.
• I make up my own worksheets and email them to the kids in an attached Word Document. That way they can type right into the document and print it out when finished. That way I’m not stuck trying to determine how much space to allow for the answers. The Corrie Ten Boom response sheet mentioned in an earlier post, is an example of a worksheet that I emailed to my daughter with instructions to, “please write a paragraph sharing your thoughts on this quote.”
• Emailing allows me to share specific information with the kids without printing out page after page.
• Sometimes I just send fun items like this link to what a song would sound like to someone who doesn’t speak English.
  http://freethoughtblogs.com/camelswithhammers/2010/06/01/english-as-a-foreign-language/

Another tool tool that I’ve found to be extremely useful in lesson planning is Boomerang Gmail. Boomerang allows you to schedule emails for a specific day. That way, I can have information sent one day, a worksheet the next and a video clip on yet another day.

As I was planning a recent study of Germany, I found a video clip I wanted Paige to watch, but I wanted her to have some background, first. Therefore, I set Boomerang to send this email on Thursday of the week we began our study. That way she had a few days to get a basic overview.

Watch the video clip, East Looks West. Write a paragraph or two detailing some of the difficulties Germany has faced in transitioning from communism to capitalism. http://www.learner.org/powerofplace/page4.html?pop=yes&pid=1929#

You can even schedule reminders to be sent to the kids (our yourself)!

I hope this gives you some ideas for using email in your homeschooling. Do you have some ways that you use email in your schooling? I’d love to hear.

Email and Boomerang work for me! To see more WFMW tips visit We Are That Family.

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