Vanilla Joy - Family * Motherhood * Me

Math Games vs. Math Curriculum

My heart has been changing about math over the last year or so. I’ve been a curriculum gal from the beginning (Saxon, yeah!) and we have stuck pretty much to a lesson a day since we started homeschooling 7 years ago. But you live and learn, right?!? Some of my kids are not math lovers, […]

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Math Magic

Games

In the past I have been a curriculum gal when it comes to math. Using games felt like so much more work! But I love that games show kids how math is practical and useful in real life and playing games teaches them so much more than arithmetic skills. Also, I used to collect playing […]

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Experiments in Soap Making

Home

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Folk Songs Sheet Music

AmblesideOnline

am working on putting together a large collection of simple sheet music for folk songs to be used in homeschools or where ever! Music is a big part of our family and it’s easier for us if we can listen to the song and look at the music. If you’re like us and need something visual […]

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Ambleside Online Books by Time Period and Form

AmblesideOnline

I have three students in Years 6, 4, and 2 and after having everyone in different time periods with the Ambleside rotation last year, I knew we should never do that again. We could’t do any books together and it was hard for me to manage. I came up with a new rotation combining the streams […]

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New Hobby: Birds!

Homeschool

I used to completely ignore birds. I did not find anything interesting or valuable in watching them, knowing their names, or even noticing their existence. Can you believe that? A year or two ago a friend was telling me about reading and studying at her desk by the window where she could see her bird feeders. […]

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To Twaddle…or Not?

Uncategorized

Twaddle – – the highly debated, variously defined, fascinating word used to describe material that talks down to a child and/or does not feed their intellectual appetite or imagination. From Volume 1, Charlotte says, “Even for their earliest reading lessons, it is unnecessary to put twaddle into the hands of children. That children like feeble […]

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Paper Mania

Uncategorized

Paper clutter drives me crazy, which is probably why I eventually settled on a homeschooling philosophy that doesn’t require a lot of paper. We use worksheets and pre-fabricated lesson material as little as possible, but for those few subjects, a spiral binding machine is my best best friend. I spiral bind all our math worksheets (for […]

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What We’re Reading: March 2019

Homeschool

We’re trying something new in the read-aloud arena. At the beginning of the year we each picked a book (my husband and I and our three oldest boys) and assigned them to a day of the week. For a few weeks we successfully read each book once a week and it went really well. My oldest […]

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RECIPE Monster Cookies

Food

Monster cookies are one of life’s greatest pleasures, and in an attempt to find a semi-healthy but appealing calorie packed snack for my SIX SONS, I fiddled around a bit with a recipe and came up with something we are all very happy with. I like to think of this cookie more like a […]

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