Little Passports Space Quest Subscription Box

My kids got their first Little Passports subscription boxes TEN YEARS AGO! My then-10-year-old son got the United States box and it came with a disposable camera, a file pouch, a scratch book, a map, a passport, etc. My then-5-year-old daughter wanted to try it, too, so I got her one and it arrived quickly. The one she got was more of a world traveler box but had the same characters, Sam and Sophia. Hers had a map, a passport, a photo, and a booklet, all in a medium-sized cardboard suitcase. And, yes, then my youngest wanted his own suitcase of goodies. 

And they still have their little suitcases full of crafts, trinkets, maps, information, coins, and more. 

Little Passports is an award-winning subscription box service that ignites curiosity and celebrates cultures with globally inspired experiences, hands-on art and science activities, and stories for kids ages 3-10. And these days they have tons of different options, like the Little Passports Space Quest Subscription, which I plan to sign up for when I teach Astronomy to elementary-age kids at one of the homeschool co-ops!

Can't wait to launch a space adventure with cosmic activity kits, stories, and out-of-this-world posters!

Halfway Through Our Virtual School Year with Calvert (Leavenworth Virtual School in Kansas)

originally posted 2013ish

A homeschooling friend was asking my son some questions about our virtual school yesterday so I wanted to FINALLY take a moment to put this together to let you know how our virtual schooling has been going since I know a lot of people have questions about it.

Kindergartner Eva does some of her computer lessons, like typing, learning how to send email, how to do Excel spreadsheets, use Paint, etc.

We are eclectic homeschoolers usually ... ranging from an expensive Catholic curriculum one year to Sam's Club workbooks another to whatever is donated to us to IXL Math and CTC Math and general hippie or unschooling methods. We love free online resources like Khan Academy for Math and, believe it or not, Orkin for Science!

Virtual school has been a change but something I needed personally to keep on track. The testing does freak me out but I need that pressure ... you might picture homeschooling parents as all organized and teaching at the dining room table from 8-3 every day but that's actually pretty rare. We are all super different and I'm finally getting some footing here in my 8th year of homeschooling!

So here are the basics:
For $45 per kid we get EVERYTHING we need to homeschool. See my posts on unboxing curriculum for Kindergarten, 3rd grade, 5th grade and 7th grade.

There are 2 crazy days when you have to hit every subject and do one checkpoint for each subject. The district/state requires this and you just block it out on your calendar and don't plan to do anything else those 2 days.

We have to do 160 lessons total before the end of May. Each lesson might have only 5 checkpoints in 5 different subjects or it may have as many as 8 or 9 in a busy day.

You can go at your kid's pace. My boys are going to get their spelling lessons for the ENTIRE YEAR done by January 9 because spelling is easy and fast for them so why not knock it out and not have to worry about it anymore? Callie will do Picture Study for the whole year this week. Then we focus on harder subjects at a slower pace.

We like to do one or two subjects per day instead of one LESSON per day because it's a pain to switch from one subject's books to another. It's easier to just do several checkpoints for one subject ... keep reading on Science for a few chapters then it's easy to knock out several Science checkpoints.

We need to log 160 days of attendance for our virtual school to keep their accreditation ... (see tips below on logging attendance). It does NOT log TIME SPENT online per kid like K12 and other programs that REQUIRE your kid to BE ONLINE for 6 hours a day. There is no way we could do that. Also, if you have a kid who likes to work at night, they sure can.

I am behind on math for every kid and our awesome facilitator Gary is coming end of this month to do testing so I am feeling a bit stressed about that. I believe he only comes one more time for testing at our house but we also have STATE TESTING to worry about in April, I believe. I have to point out that I freak out about testing in general and it's not because the school is putting is putting any pressure on me or anything!

Tricks, Tips and Other Stuff:

If we have a sick day or day we were out and don't show attendance, I might have the kids each do one CHECKPOINT (not one entire lesson) on a Saturday or Sunday to show one day of attendance. Then we can work harder and catch up later but I like to see that we are on track attendance-wise so I don't have to worry at the end of the year.

We have only been on one field trip but it was entirely free for my virtual schooled students, leaving only myself and my 5-year-old son to pay for our portion. In December we went to see a play at The Coterie then ice skating at the Ice Terrace at Crown Center. What would have been a $72 field trip ended up only being $24 ... we had to get up earlier than our norm but it was worth it!

If your kid is "behind" for their grade, they don't ridicule you. There is a program called Verticy, which I have one of my budding readers in. If you don't like the math program, they will get you a different one. If you need lessons read to your kid they can get you a program to do that.

ANY OTHER QUESTIONS? Please ask! I'm happy to answer them in the comments or in another post!

Time4Learning $12 for up to FIVE KIDS in Same Family Through April 30, 2016

YES YES YES! Okay, so we already made the decision to switch over to Time4Learning instead of virtual school for 2016/2017 and supplement with some Teaching Textbooks for Math.

Anyway, it would be $90 for all 5 of my kids per month. But they give a discount for big families and it was going to be $70 per month, which I was cool with.

Then I logged in today to find some things out just for fun and saw that if you sign up by April 30, your FIRST MONTH IS ONLY $12 for up to five kids!

BAM! SOLD! Why not sign up now and get it going? I can pause the membership over the summer if we want to (I've heard some kids still dig doing it in the summer) and start back up end of August or early September.

I'll be back to let you know how it goes for our family. We only really have two computers and one is mine for work purposes most of the time, so I'm going to have to relinquish it for hours at a time ... which is no big deal because I wasn't using it when homeschooling usually anyway. So my plan is to get two kids going at a time on Time4Learning while the others play or read. Then the next two can go, then the final kiddo. Maybe that "final kiddo" will be Callie, who loves to homeschool at night anyway. Probably do half hour increments or so many lessons or whatever but we'll see how it works best for our family!

Here are some screenshots from the site:

Here's my referral code!

Union Station's Science City in Kansas City, Missouri

We asked my dad and stepmom for a membership to Science City for Christmas and got it and we were so excited to go for the first time. The membership for a family of 8 (which means I can take 2 extra kids or Mr. Kerrie and 1 extra kid) is only $125, which means we go twice and it pays for itself! Coupled with the Kansas City Zoo membership my mom gets us every year for Christmas, and we are all set for amazing, educational activities! Here are some photos from today:

Yeah, I was pretty annoyed when we went and found out they were CLOSED.

So we went to the Plaza instead and gave them our money

Cheesecake Factory, to be specific

Then went to Daddy's work to give him some cheesecake, chowder and have a snowball fight!

5th Grade Benchmarks (Scope and Sequence)

So I've typed up in Excel all the Fifth Grade benchmarks from the book by Rebecca Rupp called "Home Learning Year by Year". Benchmarks are things a typical school kid "needs to know." But you be the judge of that. 

Obviously, some stuff is important and leads to other things. There are other things on this list that you might just say, "Sure, but we can hit that hard later on." And you would be fine. If you are teaching one child right now, it will be no problem to hit all these points. If you are like me and teaching 4 kids while wrangling a younger one, you might choose to put some things off while focusing harder on others. Maybe you choose to focus more on life skills. You are not doing it wrong at all!

Other grades can be found here at the blog under the Blog Category of Benchmarks, as well as by grade.

Here are the benchmarks for Fifth Grade. As I'm putting them into Excel and uploading them to Google Docs.  I'll be adding the others as fast as my fingers can type!

I suggest buying the book so you can also benefit from all the wonderful resources the author provides, as well as a longer description of each benchmark.

The Tater Tot Casserole Cookbook ... #EasyMeals

I never thought I would put a cookbook together. Cooking is NOT my thing. Kids, yes! Writing, yes! Scrapbooking, yes! Homeschooling, yes! Travel, yes! Loving on my man, yes! Cooking and housework, not so much.

But, with the help of our daughtersitter Jordan, it got done. You see, tater tot casserole all by itself ROCKS. It's the ultimate yummy comfort food. My kids see it's for dinner and are HAPPY! The next morning you can scramble the leftovers in some eggs for breakfast. It's quick and easy and has 5 basic ingredients.

Somehow Jordan and I brainstormed 34 total recipes for tater tot casserole, including BBQ, gluten-free, bacon cheeseburger, fish stick surprise, Italian, pizza and more! It's a great dinner for those nights when homeschooling has been a long process, whether fun or not!

Then I popped in 7 dessert recipes, including Tutu's Chocolate Stars and Grandma Solsberg's Easy Brownies! These come in handy when you have had a stressful day!

And you know cooking teaches MATH (measuring, counting tater tots, ounces, temperatures, times) and CHEMISTRY!

If you don't have a Kindle, no problem. I don't have one, either. There's a thing on Amazon called a Cloud Reader where you can download all your cool freebies and save them to read on your laptop or PC or iPad whenever you want to later! They also have an app for smartphones.

Here's the link!

Daily Homeschool Checklist Sheet Second/Third Grade

So I finally have my brain back. Well, the best it can come back after 5 kids sucked my brain cells up. That's a sacrifice I was willing to make, though. Moving on ...

My point here is that I WANT SO BADLY TO GET ORGANIZED in my homeschooling yet I am somehow a Type A Free Spirit. Yep, I am both organized/structured and also a rebellious hippie. I love my planner so I can see what we have done, even though my state doesn't require me to even keep records.

And I love when we take Forget Homeschooling days. There is a tad bit of guilt but as the years go on and I see that my kids are indeed learning and, most importantly, learning how to be kind individuals, it gets easier to take a day off to go to the zoo (nature/science!) or to Kaleidoscope (art there plus history at the Hallmark Visitor's Center!). I tell people we half homeschool/half unschool.

It's also difficult to get anything done in the midst of remodeling and not being able to find half the books, but that is another post!

So here's the Google docs link of Callie's checklist so you can see how I have set it up. She pretty much asked for this since she knows we are starting a new school year and she wants to keep all her stuff straight. I put it in a page protector so she can use a dry erase marker to cross things off. Maybe we'll do something like by Friday she has 5 checks by some stuff and only 2 checks by the history and science. Or maybe she'll want to cross it off each day and I'll log stuff in the planner.

Then there comes that day that I want to chuck the planner across the room and just play with my kids and read to them and have fun with them. It's all in the balance and moderation. I can be a Free Spirited Fun Homeschooling Mom and a Let's Get Some Stuff Done For Real Today Homeschooling Mom, too!

Homeschooling on Earth Day ... or Not

You might be surprised to learn that this blog is as much for me as it is for you! This is where I compile cool resources so we can all look back on them and use them when we are able.

For instance, I'm not really doing anything special for Earth Day besides taking a shower and taking 3 of my kids for the free hearing tests offered by our school district. My son has Scouts later tonight, I have to do laundry with some tea tree essential oil tossed in because I let the laundry sit in the washer too long sometimes and learned that trick (the oil one, not the moldy laundry one) from a homeschooling friend!

Oh, and my son is watching Jeff Corwin and PBS Nature. And we will recycle. Maybe we wil visit the cloth diapers in the basement. So there is Earth Day at our house THIS YEAR.

But for NEXT YEAR ... I have compiled some cool resources!

This is from the Homeschool Den over at Parents.com

General Earth Day stuff

A ton of great stuff at The Homeschool Mom



Herb Fairies Fun

Check this stuff out! Stories about herbs and their medicinal uses told by fairies that look like the herbs! One of my blogger friends got a free activity pack from this company for us to download .... meaning me and you! So just head to Eccentric Electic Woman and get it! My kids are going to love this!