Latitude, Longitude, Styrofoam, & Apples

Here's a neat little activity that I came up with for Jenna to help with learning about longitude, latitude, the equator, etc.  She painted a styrofoam ball to look like Earth.  We put a chopstick through as the axis.  At that point, we were able to label the North and South Pole, and then cut on the "imaginary" lines to talk about the equator and lines of latitude.  We cut up an apple using an apple corer/slicer to talk about the lines of longitude, the Prime Meridian, the International Date Line, as well as regular meridians.  At the end of our activity, I was able to reinforce the discussion with a question/answer session.  With all the correct answers, Jenna got a slice of apple to eat.  It was actually pretty fun!

Getting Ready for a New Year

Our official first day of school starts on July 16th.  I'm actually very excited to start back with our homeschooling schedule.  I went to a conference held by Johnston County homeschoolers this past weekend and was really inspired by one of the speakers, Sue Patrick.   She has developed a workbox system that helps her organize her day with her group of homeschool students.  Although, I am not going to follow her system exactly as she explained it, I am making a spin off of it to suit our needs better.  This is what I've made for our homeschool:

This is made out of clear, stackable trays that I got at Staples.  Each tray represents one day's work.  I made the stars in Word, print them, cut them, and then laminated them.  When Jenna is complete with that day's work, she can take her completed star and put it on the tray.  This way, I will know when she is done and she can have a sense of accomplishment as well.  I used large bulldog clips on each side of the tray to attach velcro dots to.  If you haven't tried velcro dots for projects, they are terrific and relatively cheap.  Sue gave us this great tip: Always put the scratchy part on the moveable part.  This way, you can also put your moveable part on felt if you need to.  I hope this system will work out for us! 

Learning Place Value for some really big numbers!

I found this really neat card set online at Teacher's Notebook.  Teacher's Notebook is a cool site with a lot of freebies and some paid classroom resources.  Best of all, it is all made from teachers.  So, I printed out 2 sets of the People Place Value Cards and laminated them (I am in LOVE with my laminator!).  Today, Jenna and I reviewed place value. 

I went to the random integer generator website and printed out 10 random numbers and some decimal values for us to practice with.  By the end of my examples, Jenna was a pro!  Not only did it give her some practice on place value, it allowed her to use up some energy.  Those long numbers took a lot of back & forth!  It was great fun for both of us.  Two thumbs up for this activity!