Homestead Homeschool: Our Livestock Show!!!

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I promised that I’d share the results of the livestock show with you! The children had so much fun and learned so much. This was an all day event as we were there before 9 am and did not leave until almost 9 pm. I think we were all exhausted when it was over but it was a day well spent.

Elizabeth took her goat out in the ring a total of four times, once as a helper in the special needs show, once to be judged on showmanship, once to have the animal judged in the market class, and then for the final ‘auction’. She was awarded Reserve Champion (2nd place) for showmanship and 6th place for market class!

Matthew had three opportunities to take his pig in the ring, showmanship, market, and auction. He received 4th place in showmanship and 3rd place in market class. He did a great job and showed a tremendous improvement in control of his animal from last year. We were so proud of both of them.

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I hope you enjoy these pictures from the show. If you want to know more about their animals make sure you check out, Homestead Homeschool: Our 4-H Goat and Homesteading Homeschool: Our 4H Pig where I interviewed the children about their animals. Their next step will be to complete a project record book detailing their experiences and what they learned in the process. This is a great way for them to practice writing skills, typing skills, and financial math concepts. I love that they get a chance to use the things we are learning in a practical setting. It really helps them understand why they need the skills I am teaching them. Anyone else enjoy 4H projects?

When you sign up for our free resource library you will get a link and password to the library, we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

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This post may contain affiliate or referral links, including Amazon affiliate links. As always I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

Deals and Freebies

Don’t Forget Our Giveaway Going On Now at Launch Day and a Livestock Show!

Free Poetry Pack from Write Shop!! 39 page PDF for grades 3-9

Sign-up Now for this FREE challenge that starts Monday! Don’t forget to sign up for the 5-day no-prep crafts challenge from Jamie at Hands On As We Grow. The deadline is fast approaching! It’s perfect for preschoolers to get crafty without the hassle! Click here to learn more!

This is a deal I “splurge” on each year to give me inspiration and help throughout the year. Need a little homemaking inspiration? Join 100,000 women who have said YES to the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle since 2012. Get 129 eBooks, eCourses, and printables designed to help you declutter and organize your home, balance your many roles, meal plan and serve healthier meals, plus resources for parenting, marriage, working from home, self-care and much more.

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5 Days of For the Love of Reading

5 Days...For the Love of Reading!

I’m so excited to bring you a 5 day series, “For the Love of Reading”. Each day I will feature a short post on a different way to encourage a love of reading in your children. We will talk about audio books, a few favorite book series, Historical fiction (including an author interview), book parties, and location, location, location. These will be short daily posts each day that week. If you have any questions about encouraging a love for reading, ask them in the comments and I will try to answer them in one of our blog posts.

In addition I will be part of a blog hop featuring a variety of homeschool topics during those 5 days. There will be bloggers talking about history, books, manners, home ec and so much more. Check back each day for my post and a link to check out all of the others that are participating. If this sounds like fun make sure you subscribe to the blog to get notifications each time a post goes live!

Day 1: Where Oh Where Do We Read?

Day 2: Reading With Your Ears

Day 3:Keep Them Reading…Our Favorite Series

Day 4: History Through Reading

Day 5: It’s Time To Party (and Read)

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PS. On an unrelated but important note the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle for 2018 is out and has some really awesome stuff. There are lots of products I’m excited to read and check out but two of my favorite are “Teach me to Serve, 99 Ways Preschoolers Can Learn to Serve and Bless Others” and “Organize Your Homeschool in 20 (ish) Days” which sounds like a great summer project for me because we seem to be over run with homeschooling materials!! Check out the Ultimate Homemaking Bundle here. If you are not familiar with the concept, these are greatly discounted bundles that are only available for a limited time. This one includes 62 ebooks, 33 courses, 34 Printables, and 8 bonuses. I will never be able to read and use them all but just a few of them are worth more than the discounted price on the bundle!

Princess Cut: A Family Movie Review

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Am I the only one that has a hard time finding movies that are appropriate for our whole family but still interesting for the adults? So I was thankful to have the opportunity to review Princess Cut by Watchman Pictures. While I may be the one ‘officially’ reviewing this movie, we watching it together as a family movie night. The children were thrilled because we went all out and bought pizza to eat while we gathered in the living room to watch the movie.

As we started to watch the movie the first thing that caught the attention of the children was that it took place in our home state at a location that was very near a town where we have visited. The movie portrays a Christian young woman and her journey towards finding real love. Without spoiling too much of the plot, I can say that there are a few twists and turns in her journey that really surprised my children. She had setbacks but as any good romance movie should, it had a happy ending. One thing that stood out to me was how well it portrayed her relationship with her parents and how they were there to help guide her on this journey. It did not make it out to be a perfect relationship where no one made mistakes, but it showed how they could forgive and move forward after mistakes were made. I look ahead into my own daughter’s future and hope that we can one day (many years from now) help her along her own journey to finding real love.

The one ‘flaw’ that I noticed in the movie was that the timeline seemed a bit rushed. The entire course of the movie took place in less than one full crop season but lots of major decisions and relationships took place during that short amount of time. My children at 10 and 11 did not notice, but had they been a bit older we would have had a conversation about how they shortened things for the sake of the movie but in life those processes would take place over months or maybe even years. This certainly did not ruin the movie for us but is something that may be worth a conversation with your teenagers after watching the movie.

So what did everyone think? My 10 year old daughter said, ” I thought is was a good movie but I wish it had shown the wedding.” Before we started watching the movie, my eleven year old son grabbed a blanket and said he was going to use it to cover his eyes if they started any of that ‘kissing’ stuff as he does not much like ‘romantic’ movies. However, when I asked him after the movie what he thought he said that it was a good movie and he liked all of the surprising twists and events. My husband, who prefers historical films, watches these types of movies with me because he loves me. His thoughts were that is was like, a “Hallmark movie with Christian values”.

All in all, our family really enjoyed watching this movie. It was appropriate for the entire family without being boring for the adults. We felt that it shared values that are important to our family in a way that did not come across as ‘preachy’ or dull. I can wholeheartedly recommend Princess Cut to anyone looking for a fun romance with Christian values.

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Launch Day and a Livestock Show!

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This is an exciting and busy week in our house. The children have their livestock show this week and today is the official launch day for Heroes Next Door! I can not thank you enough for your support as we launch this book. It has been a dream of my husband’s to be able to provide a book that engages middle grades students while teaching them about history through story. This book shares the Vietnam War in a way that is real, relate-able, and age appropriate. In honor of launch day we are hosting a giveaway for a free copy of Heroes Next Door: Hornet 24. Enter the Rafflecopter below for your chance to win. (Hint, there is also a bonus giveaway on our Facebook page)

If you are curious about the livestock show, I interviewed my son in Homesteading Homeschool: Our 4H Pig and my daughter in Homestead Homeschool: Our 4-H Goat. You can follow us on Instagram @dawnpelusoschoolinswag to get see some pictures from the show this week and I’ll share a blog post about their experiences Friday or Saturday.

Finally, if you are like me and struggling with being consistent with your time with God amidst a busy schedule then I highly suggest you check out this free webinar by Jami Balmet and the folks at Ultimate Bundles titled, “Finding God in Your Busy Day”. I have heard several presentations by Jami and they all have been excellent. I am looking forward to the opportunity to hear her again as I struggle to get back to consistency since the baby was born. Jami will teach you where to find unexpected pockets of time for God and devotions, where to find Bible Study resources, and what your Bible study time should consist of.

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Deals and Freebies!

Don’t forget to sign up for the 5-day no-prep crafts challenge from Jamie at Hands On As We Grow. The deadline is fast approaching! It’s perfect for preschoolers to get crafty without the hassle! Click here to learn more!

‘History’ Lego Projects

I’m so excited to be able to share with you all of these wonderful Lego projects submitted by readers. These children have done an outstanding job with their building and creativity. I believe that building and creating allows them to not only build fine motor skills but engage their minds in creative and critical thinking that is every bit as beneficial to their brains as ‘book work’.

This month’s theme was ‘history’ and you can see we had a variety of ideas related to that theme. (If you forgot to send in your pictures I will take submissions through the weekend.) The theme for April is ‘free choice’. So anything they create!

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Please feel free to share this post to show your friends and family your hard work and invite your friends to join in next month’s Lego Challenge.

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Victory Gardens and Ration Books

20180405_120333 — It doesn’t look like much now since the seeds have not sprouted but hopefully by the end of the month it will have beautiful plants.

World War II changed the fabric of the United States in ways that are unthinkable to us today. How do we help them understand what life was like here on the home front during the World War II period? I really wanted my children to understand the sacrifices that were made by both our military and our civilians during World War II. This week we have been focusing on life on the home front. In addition to conversations about what it was like we planted a Victory garden and started using our simple version of ration books.

For the Victory garden, the children first researched what types of foods would typically have been planted in a Victory garden as well as the types of seeds that could be planted in our climate this time of year. Then they had to till the soil and remove any weeds. Once the soil was ready they went through and found seeds that were appropriate and planted the seeds. Over the next few weeks they will tend to the garden and hopefully get to enjoy some of the ‘vegetables’ of their labor.

If you do not have enough space or have other restrictions that do not allow for a full garden a few small containers can still give you a hands on experience. My three year old wanted his own so we cut off the top of a milk carton, filled it with potting soil and planted lettuce. You can make something simple like our milk carton planter or purchase indoor gardening kits like this farmers garden window sill kit or these herbs in a jar.

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Rationing can be a difficult concept for children who have been blessed to never live through it to understand. So we created a simple ration sheet and chose three things to ‘ration’ in our house for the month of April. We are rationing chocolate milk, candy, and kindle/computer time. Real ration books had removable stickers that you turned in to procure your goods. However, in the interest of simplicity ours is more like a check sheet that will get marked each time they use one of those items. Once all the boxes are checked for an item, they do not get any more of that item until May. If this is something you are interested in, you can find a copy of it with the items left blank in the free resource library (you can sign-up for access at the bottom of this post). The children are very excited about the project, but I’m not sure how they will feel when they run out of something before the end of the month. I’ll keep you updated in our history updates.

We also watched a few video shorts from training and propaganda videos for World War II. These were popular cartoon characters that were used to encourage support for the war or train soldiers. There are many of them but some of them may not be appropriate for all ages due to crude humor. I have shared some links below to some that we found were good examples.

I have also found a few recipes that were designed for making foods using rations and limiting ingredients that were hard to come by. We are going to try a few of those recipes over the next few days. If they are enjoying that, I may challenge them to modify some of our favorite recipes to be more ‘ration’ friendly and see what they can create.

I have included some links below that have great information on Victory gardens and rationing. I would love to know if you try any of these ideas or if you have other ideas for helping children understand what life on the home front was like during World War II.

Victory Gardens

Rationing

Videos

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Deals and Freebies!

As someone who is trying to balance a six week old, homeschool, blog, and all of the other things life is throwing at me and still be consistent with my daily walk with God this webinar really appeals to me. I also happen to love Jami Balmet and have done several of her online workshops.

Want to learn how to find God in the middle of your busy life? Jami Balmet and Ultimate Bundles are hosting a free webinar called Finding God in Your Busy Day (creative ways to grow your faith when you don’t have time for devotions). Jami will teach you where to find unexpected pockets of time for God and devotions, where to find Bible Study resources, and what your Bible study time should consist of. Register for the webinar.

Our new middle grades historical fiction novel, Heroes Next Door: Hornet 24 is now on Amazon available for pre-order with a release date of April 10th! We are super excited about this and would love to have you share it with your friends!

It’s Raining, It’s Pouring But It’s Not Boring!

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When spring finally arrives it seems like everyone wants to be outside and enjoy the warmer temperatures. However, spring often brings some rainy days. Rainy days can bring complaints of boredom or a bit of stir crazy but they do not have to be boring ‘stuck inside’ days. There are lot of fun things to do on those rainy spring days.

One fun and tasty idea is to get baking! You can choose an old favorite recipe or a brand new one and bake it with the children. One of our favorites is pumpkin chocolate chip muffins. They are so yummy and easy for the children to make. You could even have the children look through recipe books for a new recipe to try. My second favorite activity works great once the baking is done… reading. Whether it is everyone curled up with a good book or a family read aloud, rainy days are a great time for reading. Then you can enjoy your fresh baked good while you read.

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Do your kids love science experiments but you often do not have the time to get them all set up? Rainy days are a great time for those experiments that they always want to do. You could have a few prepared and ready or just give them an ‘experiment’ box and let them have some fun. For an experiment box, simply gather materials that could be used to perform experiments and let them design their own. This can be materials that are readily available around your home such as vinegar, baking soda, string, clay, balloons, foil, pennies, etc. If you want to make it a bit more exciting, you can purchase a set of inexpensive safety goggles and lab coat to make young children feel like ‘real scientists’.

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Arts and crafts are also a great option on those rainy days. We have been doing a Spring Chalk Art Pastel course that even includes a picture of rain that would be quite appropriate for a rainy day. There are tons of free resources out there with crafts for just about any age or ability. You could let them come up with their own idea or find one that you think would be fun. If you are looking for some help with independent activities Hands On As We Grow has a free “5 day indpendent activity challenge” starting soon to get you going with some easy ideas.

Finally, if none of those ideas sound like fun you can take the advice of my three year old and , “just ride your scooter in the rain.” I hope you enjoy some of these ideas and I’ve added a ‘Rainy Day Activities List’ to the free resource library with even more rainy day ideas. Share with us in the comments what you like to do on rainy days.

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Deals and Giveaways!

Deals and Freebies

Any other Green Ember fans? We are getting super excited to listen (we like to do the audio as a family) to the last book in the series after it releases in April! In honor of that release Your Morning Basket Homeschool Solutions with Pam Barnhill has an awesome FREE Green Ember Gala coming up! Sign-up today for FREE. https://pambarnhill.com/green-ember-gala/ref/247/

Schoolhouse Teachers is also offering a great sale right now.

Would you like to join us for a FREE study of Heidi? (or choose a different book of your choice). LitWits.com has generously offered my readers a free study when they use the code: 11READ4FUN These are a super easy and fun way to engage your whole family in a good book. https://litwits.com/product-category/kits/

Evan-Moor is having a special sale this week on their Teacher File Box! TeacherFileBox is a subscription to digital lessons from over 450 Evan-Moor books including ALL grade levels and ALL subjects

Little Women is only .99 on kindle right now! (Amazon prices subject to change always check before purchasing.)

FREE Baby Yoda Art Lesson from Nana!

All About Learning has released the best deal of the day: A FREE Snowman Pack with reading and spelling activities for a variety of ages.

Free Makeover Your Morning 5 Day Challenge! This is a great way to help re-focus and get your day off on the right foot.

Harry The Happy Mouse (Free on Kindle)

Illustrated Would You Rather Book (Free on Kindle)

Spring, One of My Four Favorite Seasons!

Spring is one of my four favorite seasons! Honestly, I enjoy all of the seasons, but by the end of one season, I’m ready for another. This year’s weather has been a roller coaster ride, and we have bounced between cold weather and warm weather for the last month. I’m hoping this warm weather is here to stay for a while.

Spring feels like such a time of renewal and new life. The birds are out singing, the flowers are blooming, the bees are buzzing, and life seems to hold so much hope and promise. I can’t forget my favorite part of spring, strawberries! We just had our first bucket of fresh strawberries for the season last week and they were so good!

Spring Fever Homeschool Solutions

One part of spring that could be viewed as a negative is ‘spring fever.’ The children, and if most of us are honest, the parents are ready to be outside. Sitting inside and doing schoolwork can seem arduous on the first pretty days after winter. To balance that natural desire to be outside enjoying the weather with our need to complete our schoolwork we take school outside.

Sometimes, like today, we literally take our schoolwork outside. Math seems a bit less tedious when there is grass under your feet and sun on your face. The children either take a table cloth to lay on, sit at the picnic table, or grab a folding chair and take their work outside. To help us stay organized when we do school outside, we keep book bags where they can store their materials.

Rainy Spring Day Homeschool Activities

When it is time to come in or on rainy days, we can do schoolwork related to spring inside. This can be completing on of the fun Spring Chalk Pastel Lessons, doing a study on birds, flowers, or plants, or even reading books about Spring. We have started going through the spring chalk pastel art course and are really enjoying it.

It is such a fun and easy way to incorporate art into our nature study this month. A couple of good book options are Eric Carle’s The Tiny Seed or the one we want to read this year, The Penderwicks in Spring. We have read the first book in this series and really enjoyed it.

Other times, I use various parts of the season to create natural learning opportunities. It is the perfect time of year to learn about plants and gardening. You can study how to grow them, pollination, and nutrition by actually planting a garden, harvesting your crop, and my favorite part, eating what you grew.

If you cannot plant a garden where you live, you can plant a few windowsill plants or visit a local farm. In addition to gardening, we love to raise baby chicks to become laying hens which provide eggs for our family and some of our friends.

Even if you can’t raise chickens, it is a good time of year to visit your local lawn and garden or feed store and let the children see the baby chicks. You can also purchase simple kits to raise and release butterflies or lady bugs that let children see the life cycles up close. These are nice because it gives you the live animals and hands on experience without the long term commitment of animals like chicks.

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Spring Bird Study

Spring is also an excellent time to study birds. You can get a field guide, like this Peterson’s First Guide to Birds to help you identify the various birds you see near your home. This is one of my favorite bird guides because it is very simple and easy to use. Some other guides are more thorough but can be overwhelming to children (and parents that are new to bird watching).

If you want to entice more birds to your yard or make it a bit easier to study them you can put up a bird feeder. This can be a homemade one or something like this inexpensive bird feeder that attaches to your windows.

I’ve talked about Our Hiking Adventures before, and spring time is a great time to hike. This is a great way to see different plants and animals while getting a bit of exercise. There are other Peterson’s First Guides like the bird one above that can be a great way to learn more about what you are seeing as you hike.

If you have small children, they may enjoy just walking and looking for various colors or shapes. Whether you go to a local park or simply ‘hike’ though a nearby field or forest it is a great chance to get outside and enjoy spring.

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Spring Fun

Of course, Spring is not only about school. There are so many fun things to do in the spring. You can go to a local farm and pick strawberries or visit your local farmers market to pick out yummy spring vegetables.

My children enjoy picking (and eating) strawberries, and it seems they eat more than they put in the baskets some years. Our strawberry-farming friends even joke about weighing the little ones before and after picking. This is a great way to get children excited about eating healthy foods and provide an understanding about where food comes from.

It is a wonderful time to break out the sidewalk chalk and the bubbles and just enjoy being outside. Kites are also a big hit at our house; from little simple ones, they make themselves to larger ones that need a little help and guidance. They are a fun way to spend a spring afternoon.

In addition to these ideas, I’ve added a fun spring bucket list to the free resource library with lots of fun ideas for spring!

Spring Ideas and Resources

When you sign up for our free resource library, you will get a link and password to the library; we are adding to the library each month with new items. You will also get a bi-weekly newsletter email to keep you up to date on what we have going on.

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This post may contain affiliate or referral links, including Amazon affiliate links. As always, I will never recommend a product that I don’t believe in, and you will never be charged more for purchasing through our links. It does help pay for the costs associated with the blog.

Deals and Freebies

Schoolhouse Teachers is now offering a lifetime option! They are a great place for a one stop shop curriculum or a way to have a lot of options to fill in different electives and courses into what you have already chosen.

FREE zoo scavenger hunt from Journey Homeschool Academy

The Homeschool Curriculum Summit is coming soon! Grab your free ticket now!

Illustrated Would You Rather Book (Free on Kindle)

FREE Month of Kindle Unlimited: I have been using this for my own pleasure reading as well as books for my son and daughter and really enjoying it.

Not Consumed has a new Pre-K and Kindergarten Curriculum for sale!

Harry The Happy Mouse (Free on Kindle)

Illustrated Would You Rather Book (Free on Kindle)

World War II and the Korean War

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As I sat down to find resources and determine how we would study these wars I found so much on World War II that I could not include it all. World War II had a profound effect on the United States. While we focus on the United States and American history we will certainly read and cover things that were happening in Europe and the Pacific because it is all so closely related. I have included a good overview of the history of that time with the resource list that is posted in our free resource library.

We are going to start our study of World War II talking about how things changed here in the United States. We are going to plan and plant a Victory Garden, use ration books, and create some dishes that would have been popular during rationing, fortunately not German sawdust bread. I have found several great resources on Victory Gardens and I’ll share those next week along with our plans and progress. If you are wanting to get started with a garden you can visit your local farm and garden store or check out this seed kit or this organic kit that you can order online. If you do not live in an area where you can grow a full garden, something like this self-watering tomato plant that grows in a jar or even these edible flowers are a great way for your kids to still get an understanding in a hands-on way. You could also complete a lapbooking/ notebooking project focused on life on the homefront.

Then we are going to study the war itself, the causes, the battles, and the aftermath over the course of the next two weeks. We have The Usborne Introduction to the Second World War book to help guide us through that process. It is a great book with lots of solid information and pictures to help them understand. I am also considering this great file folder game from Home School in the Woods. We will also listen to The Hiding Place or C.S. Lewis at War by Focus on the Family, both if time allows. We will finish up our month with a study of the Korean War. There are not as many readily available resources for children studying the Korean War but we found several good websites that will help us facilitate discussions about the Korean War.

We are looking forward to two field trips this month in our study of World War II. We hope to go visit the USS North Carolina Battleship as well as the North Carolina Museum of History. Both of these are places we have been before but it has been several years since we had the opportunity to visit the Battleship.

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Deals and Freebies:

It is the March “Building Readers & Writers from Preschoolers to Teens” Bundle! Do you have a reluctant writer? Does your child have a desire to read? Do you have a preschooler at home? If you can answer “yes” to any of these questions, you need this month’s March bundle at The Old Schoolhouse® – 13 eBooks and 4 Print Magazines for only $29!

Fit2B Girls Ecourse and Fitness

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I want to take just a few minutes and talk about Fit2B. As you may know if you read my post about My Tummy Team Experience and a Sale!, I have had issues with core strength and had to do some physical therapy to strengthen my core and heal a diastasis.

Through that I found that many traditional exercises can be harmful to your core muscles and make the diastasis recti worse. However, Fit2B offers online fitness courses (both monthly subscriptions and one time purchases) that are specifically designed to be tummy safe.

*Some of the links in my posts may be affiliate links see below for more information. *

They have some great programs that are easy for a busy mom to do from the comfort of your own home and they are well done and modest enough that I’m comfortable watching them in front of my children. For only $14.99 a month you can have access to great safe fitness programs to help you get healthy or stay healthy. I believe that we serve our families best when we do what we can to be healthy and strong.

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Another program that they offer that we are enjoying is the Fit2B Girls Course. This is a video course that I am working through with my ten year old daughter. It has components on modesty, fashion, core strength, female anatomy, periods, eating healthy, fitness, and more. Each portion is set up so that you can cover the topics in any order and wait on any you do not think your daughter is ready for.

For example, we did the Fashion module but skipped the part about make-up because she is not yet at an age where we are considering make-up. The ones we have covered so far were well done and a great way to help teach my daughter and start some conversations. This could easily be a health course for your daughter or just something you work through together.

Another key fact to note is that it does not cover physical intimacy. This course is focused on, “holistic, non-sexual body education that empowers her to respect her body and keep it healthy.”

I hope that this resource blesses some of you that are looking for ways to incorporate safe fitness into your busy day. I’d love to hear in the comments about your favorite fitness programs and how you continue to stay healthy and strong.

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