Slices of Life

Over the weekend I was going through and updating some old posts.  I stumbled on quite a few about St. Patrick's Day and realized that it's coming up soon!  So I decided to compile a list of books that would be fun to read all about St. Patrick's day, Ireland and the Potato famine! Here are our picks for St. Patrick's Day reading: 1.   The Night Before St. Patrick's Day -- Written with the same lilting rhyming patter as The Night Before Christmas this cute story is sure to be a hit.  2.   The Leprechaun's Gold -- A classic Irish tale about two harpists who decide to have a contest to see who is the best.  Told with beautiful pictures and a real "Irish" feel this book is great.  3. The St. Patrick's Day Shillelagh -- I can not wait to read this story with my boys! I love the illustrations and the facts about Ireland, the potato famine, and this one family's story about immigrating to the United States.    4.   ...

I have often summarized our day and how the general flow of our day goes but I have never done a read day in the life post before.  I have been reading so many of them lately that I decided to give it a shot.... and realized that it's really not that easy to keep track of the clock and what we're doing each day. Each day is totally different from the next day.  Some days we have errands and planned activities.  Some days we plan to be at home for the entire day.  The only thing I know for sure is that our day will never go as planned.   Here is what our day looked like LAST Monday: 6:00 I wake up and creep over to boys' room doors closing them quietly hoping not to wake the boys.  I am my husbands alarm and I wake him for work.  I then finish folding the laundry he started last night and head downstairs. I settle on the couch and start on social media; posting the day's blog, linking up to any linky parties ( here is a list of all the Li...

My kids love geography!  They are always looking at our world and states map, asking about countries and states, and watching travel videos.  They love reading books about new places and pick a country or state to study each year for our homeschool geography fair. But as much as they love learning about geography there's just something about games and hands on activities that make it even more fun and exciting.  Over the years we've found quite a few family favorites and I find that even as my oldest approaches 7th grade these games are ones that we can all play together and still learn something new. Here are our top 10 pick for Geography Games and Activities: 1.   GeoDice -- Is a great and fun game to play.  The board has two different sides to it so there are a variety of ways to play.  Playing helps learn countries and capitals all over the world. 2.   Scrambled States of America -- If you read my blog regularly you already know that we...

This is one of those weeks where I was just glad to see it end.  It started with my two younger boys giving us a super hard time, then we spent three very difficult days adjusting to a new homeschool schedule, and ended with one of the worst storms we've had in ages.  There's nothing quite like having three kids awake and scared in the middle of the night from 1-4 to make you appreciate all those nights you do get to sleep.  We were just thankful our house was still standing in the end and we were all OK.  It was that scary! But our week wasn't all bad and the boys did work hard.  Attitudes showed remarkable improvement and the boys got along rather well the majority of the time.  We even made it out for an impromptu field trip meeting up with old homeschooling friends we hadn't seen in years! Reading-- We read another dozen chapters together in Hero's Guide to Being an Outlaw; the book is getting so good it's at the point where we don't want to p...