Happy Thanksgiving!

To all educators:  HAPPY THANKSGIVING!!!!!!!!!

Whether you teach in a public school, private school, charter school, or home school-- ALL educators who TRULY care about our students, are worthy of being thanked over and over again this season.

I know that I am grateful to home educate my two beautiful daughters. It is a blessing from God to be their teacher.


Enjoy the your day of thankfulness!

Using Issuu to Create Digital Learning Portfolios

There is a really cool website I've been enjoying for a few years that takes your PDF files and converts them to flip-style online magazines or presentations.

Check out ISSUU.com.


I've used this for my other websistes before, but never thought about using it to digitize ALL that paperwork we've accumulated during our home school.

Well...DUH!  My solution for classwork paper management was in front of me the entire time!

So I've recently begun a project to scrap all paper clutter and digitize nearly all of my daughter's school work (except a few exceptional, "can't bear to part with it" paper stuff).  All of her artwork will be not only kept in a hardbound cover at home, but digitized as well.

I'll be sure to keep posted here at the blog about how our paper digitization goes (or doesn't go).

Meanwhile, here's a peak at our History, Geography, and Social Studies portfolio.  This is NyGirl's portfolio, for grades K-1.  It doesn't include everything we've done, but it shows a good bit of the paperwork we've completed last year.

Singing, Organizing, and uh...toilets.

So it’s been an interesting week so far…and you’ll know why if you keep reading.

First of all, if you’ve been reading any of my earlier posts you’ll know that I’ve changed over to the Well Trained Mind classical method education for my daughter. This week’s homeschool structure has changed, and so has our schedule…and that meant getting ORGANIZED!

Here’s a little corner in our home near our washer/dryer that we weren’t using efficiently:


Quite a mess in fact.

There’s a little toddler art table, an end table, homeschool crates, binders, toys and organizing drawers that are in fact disorganized.

So… I brought in her computer desk, and did a little rearranging so now it looks like this:



Quite a difference, eh?

I’m quite proud of myself I must admit. Now we can think, breathe, and have school in a more organized environment.

Okay…now for the funnies…

What does a 5 year old do when she tries to flush a few wads (or maybe rolls) of toilet paper down the toilet?

Why, the only sensible thing to do, of course! Put up a sign!



Did you catch that? “OUT OF ORDER”?

yep.

That’s NyGirl for ya…my creative and orderly Little Lady.

Speaking of NyGirl…we spent a great deal of time last Thursday making out Valentine’s Cards for her little friends at our homeschool co-op. You remember back in grade school how important it was for our little boy and girl friends to get our Valentine’s in their goody bags?



This was an exciting time for her! We’re just really blessed that homeschooling doesn’t mean she still can’t have some of the social outlets we had as kids…and we’re SO blessed to be part of our local co-op, which is unbelievably awesome, (and I’m bragging!) but probably one of the best nationwide.

And one more pic for the day…

We always tell NyGirl she’s our little star…so here she is singing to her heart’s content (with her Daddy accompanying her on the piano next to her).

Wish I had a video of this!


That’s all for now.