October has come to a close, and so has all our fun fall and Halloween activities.
We went to the farm instead of the pumpkin patch this year for two reasons:
1) I wanted to support locals who are struggling from the pandemic, and I know that in year's past Miller Farms had opened it's doors to people who were hungry. For this reason I wanted to give back a bit.
2) Picking pumpkins and corn mazes are fun and all, but picking vegetables is a great lesson in hard work and learning farm-to-table basics. I want my kids to appreciate where their food comes from.
Talking about harvesting food has been a great lead-in to our history lesson this last week. We are still studying Colonial America and began talking about what life was like for these families once they were here and settled. So naturally there is a discussion about how they grew food.
One of the questions I get a lot from people is how I get my "curriculum" since I don't pay for prepaid stuff. The best answer is that I feel revelation is a HUGE part of parenting and homeschooling. More often then not I feel impressed about a direction we should go, then I find ideas to go along with it. Since Sofi is still young and not able to direct her studies independently, I try to show her how easy it is to make learning interesting, applicable and fun.
While looking up ideas for Colonial America, I stumbled upon this book and it has been great this last week.
I ordered it used off of Amazon for a whopping 2 bucks including shipping. It was fantastic. The book is old and falling apart, but that didn't bother me one bit. We blow more money at the gas station. Luckily I found it about a month ago, because it did take a long time to arrive.
At first we just decided to read different chapters from the book, but as we started getting more into the stories, we decided to make a "Colonial ABC Book" out of all the new vocab words in there. It was Sofi's way of being more creative and not just sitting and listening. If there is a way to incorporate glue and mess, it is usually a winner!
The book talks about so much more than food. It goes into detail about the struggles they had while trying to make and grow food, as well as social etiquette.
In other news....
I wanted to show a couple websites that I LOVE.
The first is an online worksheet maker at worksheets.com
Sofi has really struggled with all things related to sentences her entire life. Capitalization, punctuation, spelling, comprehension and especially handwriting. We spend a lot of time breaking each of things down and working on them individually. Even last year you wouldn't be able to read anything that she wrote. I know most kids are working on cursive by now, but I really need her print to be legible.
Of course, she doesn't think it is important. But this is an example when mom wins.
So I love this website. I can find funny facts, or tongue twisters, and paste them into this worksheet maker and it prints out a worksheet for her to practice her handwriting. She loved the random facts, but she really loves the tongue twisters. I try to mix them up. I was so surprised this week when her paper looked AMAZING! Of course there were still some spelling mistakes, but that's okay. We are learning to slow down and focus which is always hard.
This is drastically different than what she used to produce. She was so proud of herself and so was I.
Another website I love is Seterra.
Of course, we also use Raddish kids for cooking lessons. This last week we talked about the eye. Hahaha. Like she doesn't get enough of that.
They say it takes a village to raise a child, and I feel so blessed to have so many resources from the internet to help me school my child. There really is a ton of resources out there for free to help your child reach their full potential.
