Earthy Mama: March 2015

Friday, March 27, 2015

Encouragement

It seems a lot of my home school friends are needing encouragement. I know I need it a lot myself. Right now local public schools are getting out for Spring Breaks and kids are all over the place. It maybe hard to get our kids to sit still and do work so they can get some free time as well.

Before you get to overwhelmed stop! Remember all the reasons why you started homeschooling in the first place. We can go at our own pace. If your child needs to go outside and run all day till he falls over, let him. Maybe yell out some random Spring facts so they have something to think about. However when they come in all tired start talking. Talking to each other is one of the best ways to promote learning and a love for it. Ask your child what kind of new things they seen popping up outside. A new flower? How about we look that flower up and see what it is called? Oh you saw a snake go across the road, let's look him up too.

There is always a way to turn things into learning. Just be open to it and let your child lead you with their intrests. It will save lots of stress on everyone.

Or you may have a day like this...

New eggs!

So I got 7 eggs from my hens yesterday! That was the most I have gotten. I average 4 eggs a day, which is good for my family. I am hoping by summer I will have some to sell to help pay for their feed! I am also waiting in my goat to get pregnant so I can have a baby goat too. Come on guys grow up so mama can have some bitty babies around!

Tuesday, March 17, 2015

The Critical Thinking Company Review

Vendor: The Critical Thinking Co.

Product: Editor in Chief Level 1

Age: Grades 4-5

Price: $19.99

About: Editor in Chief Level 1 by The Critical Thinking Co. is 136 perforated pages. The authors are Cherie A. Plant and Nancy Rowe. The book is broke down into 12 lessons with 69 activity pages for those lessons. The lessons include:

Content

Capitalization

Punctuation

Spelling Rules

Nouns

Pronouns

Adjectives

Adverbs

Articles

Verbs

Agreement

Conjunctions

Prepositions

Interjections

Confusing word pairs

Negative words

Homophones

Homographs

Run-on sentences

Sentence fragments

Each lesson starts out with teaching the lesson and going over the topic. After that then there is activity pages in which the child works at correcting the mistakes in the paragraphs by following the rules taught in the lesson. The answers are also included for this book as well.

How we used: I used this with my 4th grader. She is a very smart girl but does not like to write paragraphs and sentences. She can if I make her but it kills her love for doing work. So when we got the chance to review this book we were excited. Some of the subjects we have gone over before but it was always hard getting her to write a proper sentence using the rule. With this book it was the opposite, we learned the lesson then all she had to do was go and correct the paragraph already written. We worked on this book daily. Usually we would take about 30 minutes to an hour to learn a lesson and work on a few activities or review what we had learned. At the first of a lesson we spent our time going over the lesson and the examples and going over any questions that she may have had for the lesson. We tried to spend closer to an hour on this day to make sure she understood what each topic meant fully. Then the next day we would start working on correcting the paragraphs. You can correct them right in the paragraph but there is also the option of rewriting the paragraph as well. She wasn't to fond of that but sometimes did it. Another great thing about this book is the copyright allows you to make copies of the pages in this book. This is really good when you have multiple children that could use it or if your child is having a hard time learning a rule and needs to try to do it a few times to get it.

I think that this book would be great as a supplement to any homeschoolers. This is not a stand alone program but helps build more confidence in writing rules. I also think anyone that isn't homeschooling and needs something extra to help a struggling child would want to check this out. It is a pretty easy way to get a child to get some extra practice in with not a while lot of writing, which I am sure many kids will like that. I know my daughter can't be the only one that hates writing.

Check them out on Social Media:

https://www.facebook.com/TheCriticalThinkingCo
https://plus.google.com/114500823774999703181
https://twitter.com/criticalthinks
https://www.pinterest.com/source/criticalthinking.com/
Also be sure to check out what my fellow crew members had to say....

Sunday, March 8, 2015

Scalp Cleaner

Do you need a good scalp cleansing? Have oily hair?

Wash your hair with a cleansing shampoo. After you have rinsed apply a few drops of your facial toner (like Sea-breeze)to your scalp and massage in. Let this stand for five minutes than rinse and apply your conditioner.

Do this about three times a week to get it under control then once a week for maintenance.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Egglo Entertainment Review

Vendor: Egglo Entertainment

Products:

Glow in the Dark Egglo Eggs

The Egg-cellent Easter Adventure book

Egglo Treasures Scripture Scrolls

Egglo Bible Verse Stickers

Egglo Easter Egg Stickers

The Egg-cellent Easter Adventure Character Stickers

The Egglo Glow in the Dark Egg Hunt Event Curriculum

Price:

*Egglo Glow in the Dark Easter Eggs ($9.99)

*The Egg-cellent Easter Adventure book ($9.99)

*Egglo Treasures Scripture Scrolls ($4.50)

*Egglo Bible Verse Stickers ($3.29)

*Egglo Easter Egg Stickers ($3.29)

*The Egg-cellent Easter Adventure Character Stickers ($3.29)

*The Egglo Glow in the Dark Egg Hunt Event Curriculum ($9.99)

Age: Any age but ideal age is 4-13

Glow in the Dark Egglo Eggs are something we had a great pleasure in reviewing. Generally we do not make a huge deal of Easter at our home. We will do eggs and color them and do a quick hide, more for fun play than anything. I like my children to know true meanings of Holidays instead of just passing them off as no big deal. I love that a company has taken the meaning of this holiday and mixed it into the real meaning as well as some fun. Now the kids can do their egg hunt while learning about Jesus!

The Egg-cellent Easter Adventure book uses the idea that the eggs glow in the dark to represent the fact that Jesus is a light. You search for Jesus by looking for his light. All through the adventure of three kids.

The eggs glow in the dark, obviously, and after charging then and filling with the goodies I hid them around the house. We still had snow on the ground during the review so we couldn't do it outside. Though we will be pulling these back out when it is actually Easter and do a night time hide. The curriculum helps guide you and I've tips and ideas. This would also work well for a church group to do as well.

We also went over the story of the resurrection in the Bible. Having a children's Bible would be handy for the younger kids as some of it is hard to grasp from my NKJ version.

We read through the Adventure book and then we hid the eggs. There are 12 eggs that are in four different colors. Once the kids had found them we read the scriptures on the scrolls and talked about them. The scriptures do go along with the book as well. Some of the stickers also had scripture written on them. It was fun seeing kids get excited about Jesus and hearing what scripture they had. Just as much passion and energy they would have had if it was candy. Made my mama heart melt.

Overall this was a great activity for all my kids. We all enjoyed it from the fun I the hunt to the breat Bible time it have us before and after te hunt. I believe any Christians would love to do this with their family. This would also work really well for a church group, of course you would need many more eggs. Though it would be fun to mix them in with othe eggs and see who had the versus to share with the rest of the group. It is almost like finding a bit of gold in each one. It makes it even more exciting when you can do them of a night and hunt for them by the 'light of Jesus'.