My Teaching Library (A REVIEW)

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

My Teaching Library is a great educational resource for all kinds of learning materials including worksheets, printable books, videos, games, puzzles, and much more! There is something for all ages and grades, Pre-K through high school.

We received a year of the download club membership which means we have unlimited downloads across the whole website. There is also the option to buy individual products as you'd like/need them. My Teaching Library has so many neat things available it was hard to decide where to begin.

With so many categories, grades, and subjects to choose from I had to decide what we wanted to focus on. Since we had a Nature Study about Sunflowers coming up I decided to search "sunflower" in the search engine (searching a specific topic is so easy!). It brought up a few things, and one of them was drawing sunflowers. This looked perfect for what I needed. It was actually a book about how to draw many different kinds of flowers, but I just printed up the page about sunflowers. Simple and straight forward. The cover of the printable book looks so inviting!

Cover

I downloaded the book as a PDF and was able to print up the sunflower page for my son to use as a reference when he drew his sunflowers in his nature study book.

Page 26 of the book: drawing sunflowers. He thought it was a coloring page at first and started to color it, otherwise the page is black and white.

He loved how simple this drawing was. It was the perfect level for him.

What else does My Teaching Library have? There is Amphibian Themed notebook paper. There are preschool coloring books. There are Mitosis Worksheets for high schoolers. There's character trait development, classroom management, and holidays. There's just so much it would take too much time to name everything, and all of the educational resources at My Teaching Library, that I've looked at, are really useful and well thought out.

This would be one of those homeschool resources I'd consider buying again after our review is up. I really like all the different offerings, and it makes a great supplement to our homeschool curriculum.

If you'd like to know what others had to say about My Teaching Library and all it has to offer you can click on the banner below.

 

Baking a "thunder" cake

We have added another Thinking Tree Journal to Alex's fun schooling list. I have to say, I am really loving fun-schooling and these books (if you want to learn more about what "fun-schooling" is you can visit The Thinking Tree books website). 

This actually was supposed to be Aric's book, but he ended up not liking it so I asked Alex if he wanted to work through it. He said "sure." So, here we are! He started The Baker's Fun-Schooling Journal. He's "majoring" in Baking this year for school.

One of my favorite things about these journals is this, they get to choose their own books to learn from! (And we have a better record of the things he's reading)

Alex needs help in this department because he's just not into books, so I put a few books on hold for him to choose from. One of the books I discovered (and thought he'd like) was Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco. He added it to his list of books.

 

I didn't know what this book was about, or even that there was a recipe at the end. I was just looking for books to get him excited about getting in the kitchen. He has not wanted to help bake or cook lately because he felt "he wasn't good at it." Which I have no idea why, but that was his perception, so I looked for picture books mostly because that's what he wants right now.

It was supposed to be a 2-layer cake. One layer didn't make it out of the pan right, so he called it his "off-road" cake.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this book was fun to read and it had a recipe at the end. He wasn't sure about trying the recipe at first, but I convinced him we should give it a try. It has a secret ingredient of tomato puree (we used tomato sauce this time). This is what intrigued us!

The recipe was pretty simple, but he still learned some pretty stellar baking lessons.

One of those lessons was mixing egg whites until they become stiff. He thought that was pretty amazing, and didn't know eggs could do that.

This kid wanted to do it all by himself too. I just helped him understand and find things when needed. He did all the work!

The finished product didn't quite come out as planned because the cake didn't release from the pan. Apparently we need to spray these pans more. But, voila! His first homemade from scratch cake!

I think he's a bit more excited about getting in the kitchen after this baking experience. While it was not a complete success, it was successful. He feels a bit more confident in the kitchen, and he got a yummy treat.

Wordless Wednesday: A Fall walk

I am happy it's officially fall, and I'm happy we were able to squeeze in a quick walk on the first day (yesterday).

 Place: Wilsonville, OR

 

 

 

Thankful Thursday

 Today I'm thankful for:

48. So many choices on YouTube for soft background music or nature sounds. It helps for sleeping, daytime work/study, and any time we just need something calm on while we go about our day to day business.

49. For the rain that is on the way, and any rain. I really like rain, for the most part.

50. For a new school year and a fresh start.

This is a continuation of my thankful list. My last thankful Thursday post was on 9/3/20.

Wordless Wednesday: Homeschool PE

Parkour is back, and this kid is in heaven. He loves parkour!

 

Learning for Mom

Sometimes the best way for me to keep my head in the homeschool game is to keep my own brain in the "books" too. Learning is a lifelong journey, and it's even more important for me as a homeschool momma to keep learning and growing myself as I teach my children. Often I will naturally pick up and learn new things as we go through lessons in our homeschool and I love that. It's so exciting to learn new things right along with the kids. It's also exciting to seek out learning for my own interests and desires beyond what I'm doing with my kids or for my kids. It inspires me in so many ways, especially for homeschooling.

With that said here is what I've been doing for my own learning and growth. I started a Journal for my own spiritual thoughts. This is separate from my regular journal. I started decorating the outside with some paint pens. I really had fun doing this. It needs more on the bottom, but I wasn't sure what to do, so I'm saving it for later.

I've also started a "Fun-schooling" journal from Thinking Tree Books. It's full of tips and ideas for homeschooling with books and journals, and whatever else we can dream up.

I love having this journal to do while we are at the table working on school. I can color and work on my book while the kids are working on their things. It gives me something to do with my hands, and it really helps my patience. Rather than sitting there waiting I can focus on coloring in my own book, but it doesn't require a lot of my attention that I can't just stop it to help them.

I also started my own personal nature study journal. I don't have a picture of it yet because I haven't even finished my first entry, but I did pull out all of my birds and blooms magazines to help me, and just doing that got me excited to read through some of these more. I have had a subscription to this magazine for a while now, but I actually hardly ever read them. I usually just look at the pretty pictures of the birds. They are loaded with some good information though!

Those are just a few things that I've decided to add to my own learning adventures. What do you do for your own learning and growth? Interestingly, I found this article, 151 Self-care ideas to increase mindfulness and avoid burnout. Quite a few of them involve learning something new or taking up a new hobby. It's a great list!

Our Weekly Notebook: an odd week

 Homeschool this week...

This was officially the first week back to school for us. Meaning we are getting back into the full-time school routine. It's also the first week back for our charter which means I have to actually do attendance and lesson plans for reporting to the charter. So, we did our best despite the challenges outside of our home (fires and smoke all around us). Tuesday morning went really well, and then the fires/smoke started getting really bad. Wednesday it was so hard to concentrate with a red sky outside. Thursday we just needed to get some more stuff done so we did as much as possible. By Friday it was just too hard to think clearly about school, so we didn't get a lot done that day. It was just a really odd week, but we did get some things done. We will postpone the "first-day" pictures though. There weren't any good days to take outside pictures.

I am still getting to know these (new to us) Thinking Tree books and trying to figure out how to organize the kids' books/work. The suggestion for these journals is to make funschooling baskets with their books and items that relate to the books. I love the concept but don't have room for baskets everywhere, so I'm doing a basket/workbox hybrid type thing. It has the whole day's work in it, including the funschooling journals and fun activities. I am forever trying to figure out how to keep books and daily work organized so we aren't chasing after stuff all the time. I think this might work with some tweaking. I don't know yet. It's a work in progress. This was all of Alex's work for Tuesday, our first day of school.

One of his assignments in his Minecraft math fun school book was to actually build something in Minecraft. He was thrilled. It really was "fun" school. This is what he had to build, a hobbit house. Counting the items was tricky, but it really made him stop and think about how to best divide up the items, and where to put them.

This was his completed hobbit house. I helped him a little (and learned some more about Minecraft), but he came up with the designs and put the items where he wanted to on his own. He just needed a little help keeping track of the numbers.

The inside of his hobbit house. We did have to discuss what exactly is a hobbit too.

This is his reading time journal. He picked The Book Hog for his book page.

It's like a little book report. He forgot to do the bottom left, and I sent the book back to the library. He'll just have to go by memory to complete it!

He put together all 50 states and capitals! I made this states and capitals game earlier in the summer and we finally got it done! He was only supposed to do 5, but he ended up doing all 50. Once he started he couldn't stop. I put little magnets on the back of them so they'd stick to the whiteboard.

We played an Uno matching game with pairs that add up to 10. It was Minecraft themed too just because we already had that game lying around. It works with any Uno game, just find the pairs that add up to 10, lay them out facing down, and find matches.

History this week...

History happened on Thursday. We jumped back into The Story of the World volume 3. We finished chapter 1, finally. We started it last spring, but it got pushed to the side with all the pandemic debacle. School was really hard last spring, and I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one. Anyway, it was nice to get back into it. We can finally move onto chapter 2!

We did mapping...

One boy (a certain 6th grader who thinks he's funny) colored his Charles V picture. He decided green hair was in during that time, I guess.

The chapter talked about how much gold had been taken by the Spanish conquistadors and the number was very large. This measuring activity turned out pretty fun for the boys to visualize that number in a different way.

Games we played...

We played Prime Climb. A new game I got for this school  year. It's been on my list for a while. This game is a great way to do some fun math.

I am going to finish here for the week as this post is getting very long. How was your week? Are you back to school yet?

Thankful Thursday: Simple

Today I am thankful for:

45. The boys' clean room.
46. Plans coming together for the new school year
47. Neighbor kids that Alex can play with everyday.

This is a continuation of my thankful list. My last thankful Thursday post was on 8/27/20.

Reading Eggs (A REVIEW)

Disclaimer: I received a FREE copy of this product through the HOMESCHOOL REVIEW CREW in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to write a positive review nor was I compensated in any other way.

I have been using Reading Eggs from Blake eLearning Inc. for many years, off and on, but always when my kids were first learning how to read we'd get a subscription. Now that my kids are all reading and older we haven't used it for a few years because I just wasn't sure that I needed it for my bigger kids, but I was pleasantly surprised to find with this review that they have a pretty great program for kids all the way up through about age 13. It's not just for early learners!

Alex (4th grade) doing the assessment to see where he will be placed within the Reading Eggspress program.

We received a 1-year subscription with access to the whole Reading Eggs program which includes Reading Eggs Junior, Reading Eggspress (for ages 7-13), Fastphonics, and Mathseeds for two of our boys. We focused primarily on using the Reading Eggspress since both boys are in the 7-13 age range. The two children that used this are in 4th and 7th grades.

The Reading Eggspress page where the child begins their lessons each time after they log in.

Reading Eggs is a completely online program so that means it's accessible anywhere with an internet connection. We simply log in to our main account and the child picks the tab with their name on it to get into their own personal page. Everything is easy to find and navigate, and there are many different lessons and games to choose from. But, there is always the main reading lesson ready and waiting for them to continue working on.

An example of the different parts of the main lesson for an older child

There is quite a bit of challenge for an older child on the Reading Eggspress. There are many "books" to read and questions to answer, but even more than that there is spelling, definitions, focus on different parts of a book like the cover, and much more. It's more than just read a section and answer questions. There's a lot of good variety in each lesson and it covers a lot of basic language arts topics.

An example of one of the "books" that an older child might read in Reading Eggspress.

For the younger kids, there are fun phonics games, Mathseeds, and of course the Reading Eggs lessons (ages 3-7). Alex (4th) grade struggled a little bit with the older section, so I had him start on the Reading Eggs lessons, and I will probably have him finish this section before continuing onto Reading Eggspress again. These lessons will be pretty easy and quick for him though, so it'll be a good review. At least they are super fun lessons and he enjoys them!

I really like Reading Eggs. I always have, and now I am excited to see all the stuff they have for older kids. Reading Eggs has helped my boys learn to read, and now I hope it will help them to become better readers.

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