momgineer

A warm November, Halloween, and a brief homeschooling update!

We have been enjoying beautiful weather this fall! Today it is in the 70s (what? November?!) and we have been able to take advantage of it by taking lots of nature walks. We even got to do our STEM class outside today, woohoo! Here we are building and testing them out:


 


My kids had so much fun trick or treating this year. Here they are all dressed up:


This is the third year my eldest has been Darth Vader. Halloween costumes to be my kids' only low maintenance area! ^_^  My youngest made a Minecraft skeleton head and then he and I mad a bow and arrows together. We found some really cool glow in the dark tape to make the bones. Unfortunately I forgot to take a shot after it got dark out.

We continue to progress slowly through our studies though I am not feeling ambitious about homeschooling these days. I am reading a book aloud the kids seem to be enjoying, though I'm not sure they quite get the middle school flirting references quite yet at 9 and 7, they are finding the other parts quite humorous;



I have noticed that as we are focusing more on reading and writing at the moment, some math skills are slipping, so I'm thinking about getting 180 days of math for both my kids as review. There never seems to be enough time in the days to get through all of the things I want to do with the kids. Playing (imaginative, games, outdoor play) and our other activities (soccer, street hockey, swimming, music) eat a lot of our time. I know this is a common occurrence with homeschoolers, and that we are also attempting to tackle all kinds of subjects (like computer programming, engineering, and chess) that I never learned about as a kid. We have also been spending a lot of time outdoors and at museums, which I am okay with. This homeschooling journey can be tough, finding the balance of what needs to be done and what is okay to let go of in favor of other, more engaging, activities. Crossing my fingers these kids turn out okay in the end!

It's fall!

Fall in New England is an explosion of colors. I was worried this fall would be less colorful than in other years due to the lack of rain this summer. Boy was I wrong!

Happy Friday, everyone!

NEW site launch!

I am SO excited to share with you a brand new site I have just launched to focus on STEM! While I love blogging here about our homeschooling adventures and more, I really wanted to have a place just for STEM resources.

STEM Activities for Kids

I have asked several other STEM educators to join me and hope the new site becomes a solid and helpful resource for parents, teachers, and students!

I will continue to blog here at momgineer about what we are doing at home, gardening, and other resources I find useful as we navigate homeschooling. Thank you so much for being a reader, and if you are interested in STEM activities, please visit the new site. If not, I hope to still see you over here at momgineer! 

Halloween Math!

Halloween is coming soon! I recently created a fun set of math activities that can be used near Halloween (and several of the pages have only monsters, so they can be used any time). There are two levels for each of the shown activities, plus several pages not pictured. Place value with monsters and base-10 blocks:
Roll and cover is always a fun game. There are options for 2 dice and 3 dice. Of course this might be more fun to use candy corn, but I have a feeling too many would disappear! Each resource shown on this page comes in color and black and white, so you can choose to make some reusable at your math centers instead and save ink and paper by only printing a few copies!
The measurement activity is the most challenging in this resource but both of my kids loved it anyway!


My second grader enjoyed reviewing these math concepts and gave these two thumbs up. This is not the look of pain, but of silliness after me pestering him with the camera for too long. Here is the link to the resource over at TpT:

https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Halloween-Math-2140705
Don't forget to also download my FREE Halloween math resource and glyph while you're here! Work on coin math and more:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Halloween-Math-and-Glyph-FREE-926296

Happy Halloween!

Supermoon eclipse 2015!

Here are a few photos I took last night during the supermoon lunar eclipse. I know these don't compare to seeing it in person, or from a professional photographer's photos, but I so enjoyed this event!


Apple Picking!

Fall is my favorite season here in New England. This morning, we went apple picking! Here are a few pictures from our trip, to a very busy farm. Temperatures this morning were close to freezing, but by the time we finished picking they had warmed up enough that we were all pretty toasty.








STEM Challenge: Towers!

Today was the first day of our new STEM challenge class at a local makerspace! We had so much fun building towers out of plastic cups.


 This two-part challenge was to build the tallest tower using plastic cups (with a limit on the number of cups). The second part constrained the base to a 6 inch by 6 inch area (with large craft sticks, but you could use masking tape). A simple, yet effective task for demonstrating quite a few engineering design principles. They really got creative in the second part of the challenge!

You can download the graphic organizer sheet over at this guest post I did over at Minds in Bloom:

http://www.minds-in-bloom.com/2014/11/engineering-on-dime-3-stem-challenges.html

It turns out I wasn't the only one doing STEM challenges today! Cheryl at Primary Graffiti posted this on Instagram today too:
 
You'll want to follow her over at IG @primarygraffiti ! It looks like they had a great challenge in their class, and is making me anxious to go apple picking.