This summer we have been participating in the Delaware Great Parks Pursuit Challenge.  If we complete 20 out of 25 tasks we will receive season passes for the Delaware State Parks next year.  There are also prizes for completing 9-13 and 14-19 tasks but we are ambitious.  Tasks need to be signed by staff/park rangers.  Anyway today we went to Lums Pond  to check off pedal boating.  We also did a nice, short nature trail.  The extent of our wildlife viewing was a groundhog but that's better than nothing.  We are about half way through our list of challenges and have until the end of December to submit our sheet. 

 

 

 

Last week we took a ferry to Pea Patch Island to visit Fort Delaware, another adventure on the list.  This challenge is a fairly inexpensive way to enjoy the great outdoors and have some much needed family fun.

On another note, today completed our first week of homeschooling for this school year.  I must say it went well, much better than last year.  Emma is paying more attention to her work and Abby is doing her "work" (busy bags mostly--more on these at a future date) as well.

A couple months ago I joined a homeschool group on facebook and am now addicted to it!  This group hosts all kinds of fun swaps--penpals, geo boxes (fill a box w/stuff from your state/country and swap with someone from another area), flat travelers (based on the Flat Stanley book series, you send your flat traveler around the world and the host family takes pictures of your traveler doing different things there, most people also send info back about their state/country), and postcards from around the world.  These swaps are an excellent way for children to learn geography and we will be using the information we are collecting to start studying the 50 states this year.

This is the name of the group: Homeschool penpals/postcard exchange/geo-cac/book exchange/activity bagswap.  I highly recommend you check it out.  You do need to be a homeschooler to join and it is a closed group.

So far we have sent flat travelers to Alabama, Missouri, Montana, Ohio, Wisconsin, Canada, and Scotland. 
We have received geoboxes from Alabama, Arizona (coming soon), Lousiania, New York (coming soon), Canada, and South Africa (coming soon).
The only states we still need postcards from to have at least 1 from every state are: Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wyoming.  We have postcard from many countries as well but would love more.
When we receive things in the mail, we locate those places on a large map we have on our dining room wall.

If you can help with any of our geography studies please let me know. We can send postcards or information about Delaware in return.

Hello

So I finally decided to start my own blog.  I figure I spend so much time reading other peoples blogs that I should have one of my own.  Since I am a homeschooling mom to my two wonderful little girls most of my posts will be about my adventures in raising and schooling them. 

Today was our first day of school for this school year. I've already done two years of preschool/K with my oldest daughter, Emma.  However since she is 5 (6 in November) if she was in public school she would be starting K this year so I decided to go ahead with another year of K instead of 1st grade.  She's very good at math but still needs a lot of work on reading so that will be our main focus this year.  Emma was recently diagnosed with ADHD, so she is incredibly active and has a very short attention span (just another of the many reasons why homeschooling makes sense for our family).  I am trying to come up with as many fun, hands-on games and activties as I can to teach her and as few worksheets as possible (I think worksheets are boring too!).

Abigail, my 2 year old, has developmental delays.  So she will be needing to start therapy soon.  I will be working with her too, mostly on speech, as she can only say about 5 words.

With this blog I hope to share funny (and not so funny) stories about my kids, homeschooling books/lesson plans/unit studies that we use, crafts we make, reviews of products I like, other blogs/websites I like, and much more.  I also plan to use this as a diary of sorts for my girls to look back on when they get older to go along with the scrapbooks I'm making them.  If there's anything you'd like to see on this blog please let me know.  Thanks and I hope you enjoy reading it!