Category: Homeschool

Family Activities

Summer Baskets are Back!

/

Hey Loves!

Every year, to welcome Summer and to say, “peace out” to our current school year, I gather up some goodies to get the summer party started! In the beginning, when James was about 2, I would lay these items on the table decoratively. For the past few years, I’ve fallen in love with the multi-use and containment of baskets and I don’t see myself stopping!

For their actual basket, I found some jelly baskets in the Target dollar spot and scooped them up as they would not only be super cute but would be useful for actual beach play. While in said dollar spot, I grabbed two personal bubble fans and sand toys. 

I scooped the cute pop-it sunnies from TJ Maxx and the ice cream body sponges from Dollar Tree. 

For summer morning starters and learning, I grabbed each kid a comprehensive learning workbook and journal. I couldn’t resist an affirming book to add to our library

I couldn’t not add items for Juneteenth! Each got a set of “Black Boy Joy” pajamas, a book and crafts.

I topped it off with some snacks, fun memory keeper and pennant. 

For a personal touch, I made these sea star name labels with items from Dollar Tree and my silhouette. 

What do you think? I linked everything I could here. 

Homeschool

History Curriculum Picks, 22-23

/

How goes it, my loves!

Today’s blog will be a short one as I have had some lengthy ones and have more coming. Per the title, we are covering our history topics!

Our main curriculum will be Curiosity Chronicles, Medieval. This non-eurocentric comprehensive curriculum has been awesome! We are wrapping up ancient history and just love the audio and ebook and the activities are engaging and fun, but not taking so much prep from me. We pair it with the Schoolnest History Timeline notebook. You can see it all here!

We will also spend lots of time exploring Africa with books, videos and cultural digging! It baffles me how the stereotype of this vast continent continues to prevail. 

Lastly, my little fact-spitter will love just learning random geography facts, so he can do that too!

That’s it! You can find the links to everything here.

Homeschool

Bible, Foreign Language and Morning Starters Curriculum Picks, 22-23

/

Hey Loves!

I know Yesterday was a lot so I am going to keep it simple today. I promise. Well, my definition of simple.

For Bible, in addition to Awana and our church lessons, we will continue with resources from Color and kindness, devotional and prayer books, the bible, worship and serving.

Foreign Language was a bit tricky! We had a wonderful experience with our hybrid program this year but unfortunately, the instructor will be at our other location full-time. While I am trying to convince her to start a language immersion playgroup, I am going to do what I can with podcasts, vocabulary units, verbs and activity books.

Morning Starters went ahhhhhhmazing this year and we are all thrilled to continue. As you read when I shared our language arts picks, we are working with Jude, God and a host of specialists to identify and then meet his unique learning needs. With that, his morning starters will be an emotions coloring and activity book, sight word activities and hand writing practice.

James will loop geography, daily grams, test practice, writing and critical thinking workbooks.

Both will also have a journal. You can watch me explain it all here.

Boom! Told you I would keep it simple. You can find all the links here.

Homeschool

Language Arts Curriculum Picks, 22-23: Brother James

/

Dearest Loves,

Let me preface this with, “we are eclectic homeschoolers”. We don’t use just one thing to teach one subject. Language arts is not the exception, it is the rule. It was very important for me to begin to expose James to the foundations of literature and to allow him space to apply literacy, grammar and comprehension concepts to literary works. I also really wanted to work on his creative writing muscles. Lastly, I wanted to formally introduce vocabulary this year. Whew!

Now that we got that out of the way, here is what we are using. I do suggest heading over to youtube to listen to how I plan on making all of this work.

Read Aloud for Literature Exploration: Black Boy Joy, 17 Stories Celebrating Black Boyhood

Reading: All About Reading, Level 4

Spelling: All About Reading, Level 2

Grammar: Kamali Academy, middle grades

Handwriting: Melanin Inspirations Cursive Practice

Creative Writing: LWT Building Writer, Usborne Books, Young and Brilliant Workbook

Vocabulary: Young and Brilliant Vocabulary Puzzles, Banish Boring Words, Word Roots Beginner, Schoolnest Vocabulary Notebook.
I know that was a lot. You can see all the items here. You can read what we are doing for Jude here.

Homeschool

Language Arts Curriculum Picks, 22-23: Brother Jude

/

Hiya Loves!

So, our LA curriculum is expansive and that is because my kids are not “one-size fits-all”. They need specifications and alterations. Through this year, we’ve observed lots of difficulty with Jude’s reading fluency although he can recognize both upper and lower case letters and their phonemes. He can segment cvc words and even spell them but reading is difficult. It is affecting his confidence as well so we are taking interventions.

With that, these are what we are choosing so far but may change

Reading: Teach Your Child to read in 100 Easy lessons, Orton Gillingham Workbook, Explode the Code

Handwriting: Melanin Inspirations copy work, Schoolnest Copywork Notebook, Letters and Numbers for Me

Spine Read Aloud: I Affirm Me

Everything is linked here and you can watch me explain it all here. 

Oh! You can read what we are doing for James here!

Homeschool

Science Curriculum Picks, 22-23

/


Hey Loves!

We are rolling full-steam ahead in sharing what our homeschool will use for learning for the 22-23 academic year. You can check out our math picks here if you missed them. Today is all about Science.

To be clear, I’ve never once been excited about this subject. I am so excited to share that I am for this upcoming year. Part of it was finding our stride and identifying my kids interests, another part was realizing and healing part of my traditional school trauma and another part was finding resources!

Y’all I am stoked!!! Better than that, my kids are stoked!

As we are wrapping up what we planned for this year, I asked my kids what it is they wanted to explore and having a solid grip on their interest and capabilities, I began the hunt. Jude was easy. He likes nature, rocks and robots. Sold! I’ll go hard with exploring nature with children, supplementing with other books and things he will learn at our hybrid homeschool program. We will also delve into some earth science folder games and do all the things with rocks. All of them. We recently decided to throw in some weather robots units too!

James was a bit more tricky. He was quite a bit more detailed about what he wanted to explore (muscle movement, animal life, propulsion, distance) and adamant about the things he did not (the human body systems). Great. Just great. Thanks To Erica at Melanated and Well Educated, I was introduced to Science Fusion and grabbed grade 5 and 2 grade 6-8 books. Those will be our spine and we will use other library books, videos and activities to round it out to fulfill his heart’s desires.
You can get all the links for these items here.

Homeschool

Math Curriculum Picks, 22-23

/

Hello My Loves!

Can we just take  a minute to acknowledge how fast this year has just flown by? I mean, wasn’t I sharing curriculum picks like two weeks ago for the 21-22 school year?

Le sigh… time flies when you are having fun! That’s what we did this year and I am anticipating lots of fun for this upcoming year as well!

I won’t bore you with all the deets as this will be a series of blogs. I value your time and attention span. Today’s subject? You guessed it! Math!

True story, this was the easiest subject for me to choose. Per what we used last year, I added a few things to our math manipulative stash and quickly decided on Saxon Math 3 and Singapore Math 3 as James’ main loop and we will throw in Horizon’s math grade 2 as a review and confidence boost. Saxon and Singapore worked so incredibly well this year and I feel like the math gains were significant but they weren’t painful for us.

For Jude, we will continue with Singapore math as well and I’ll bring out our faithful Math U See Primer from demme Learning. Jude’s math gains were great but the Demme learning provides a number sense foundation that is unmatched.

You can check out our math manipulatives here and all our curriculum picks here.

crafting

Pool Days Teacher Appreciation Gift

/

Hey Loves!

To know me is to know I love celebrating and although gifting is not my ministry, I love to show appreciation. This year my two most precious gifts have been loved,prayed over, protected and taught by some amazing people and I am so glad to show our appreciation to them.

As always, budget was a concern. nWhile teachers are worth all the dollars, I am not rich. I also needed to find a gift that would work for both genders and/or those not specifically identifying as female. I also really wanted my kids involved. They loved putting together the Christmas gifts for teachers and coaches so I knew they would love this too.

Once we narrowed down a theme, with lots of guidance, we decided on some items to help make summer time at the beach or pool more enjoyable. I ordered drink floats, cookies, hair ties and chair clips from amazon. You can find everything here.

Then, with my silhouette, I quickly the names of their teachers and applied them to the cookies.

Next, I designed these cute gift tags to to add.

After combing all the items in a Dollar tree cellophane bag and finishing with ribbon and tags, my kids and I wrote quick thank-you notes.

That’s it! To see how I put it together, check it out here.