Learn About Maine Marine Life

If you would like to learn more about Maine marine life, there are some wonderful free resources on the web. The Maine Department of Marine Resources has a very nice Teacher's Guide to Marine Life of the Gulf of Maine which has information about clams, mussels, oysters, scallops, crabs, shrimp, lobster, sea stars, sea urchins, sand dollars, sea cucumbers, and more. Another great resource is the Gulf of Maine Marine Coloring Book. If you want to learn more about lobsters, you can print the free Lobster's Life Coloring Book for younger children and a Lobster Booklet for older children and adults.


Don't forget to read some great stories from Maine such as:
Blueberries for Sal
One Morning in Maine
Time of Wonder
Andre the Famous Harbor Seal
Miss Rumphius

Free Lapbook and Fun Spelling Website

I wanted to share that CurrClick has a wonderful free Inventors Lapbook available for download this week. Every week they have a new free download so I recommend checking their site often. This weeks free lapbook has some really good instructions for making a lapbook if you are new to lapbooking like I am. Another fun site I recently discovered is Spelling City. On this site you can type in your child's spelling words for the week and it will give your child a spelling test on-line. You just click a button to hear the spelling word and there is another button to click if you want the spelling word in a sentence. Once your child has completed the test, the program will show which words were spelled incorrectly and give your child a chance to try them again. They even provide a print friendly copy of the test which you can save and print for your records. There are a number of games included on the website which use the spelling words you entered.

I never liked spelling much when I was in school so I have tried to find ways to make spelling fun for my son. I bought a set of colorful dry erase markers for him to use only for spelling on our dry erase board. Jacob thinks spelling is fun because he gets to use these markers. When he is done with his spelling, I allow him to draw a picture with the markers. I am excited to have discovered the Spelling City website so we have more than one fun option for spelling now.

Fun Printable Custom Calendars

I want to share a free site with really fun printable custom calendars through DLTK. You can see in the photo, the calendar we created for October. My kids enjoy going on this site to pick out a special picture to put on their calendar page every month. I then draw little pictures to mark the important dates or holidays and tape the calendar on the refrigerator. Jacob loves to see when the next fun activity or holiday is coming and count how many days until it arrives. He has learned his days of the week, months of the year, and also practiced number recognition and counting by using these calendars. There are lots of themes to choose from including animals, holidays, seasons, and characters. The characters include Blue's Clues, Dora the Explorer, Thomas, Veggie Tales and lots more. My kids have so much fun picking out their own calendars and I love that the calendars are free!

Fun With Paper

Both my kids really enjoy making things out of paper. I love it too because it is inexpensive, keeps them entertained, often correlates with some unit study we are doing, and helps with fine motor skills. We are eclectic homeschoolers which means I like to pull ideas from many educational and homeschooling approaches and methods. I try to pick what motivates and works best with my two children's learning styles. One of the many things that inspires Jacob to learn is paper crafts. Certainly not every child is going to enjoy paper crafts. If your child does like paper crafts, adding related ones into your school day can generate more enthusiasm for a subject. At the Kids Love Learning Store, you will find a number of different paper craft books listed under different subject areas.

This year for history we are following the classical approach. We plan to study world history for two years and then United States history for two years in a chronological fashion. I borrowed a popular world history curriculum from the library and they had some good ideas for activities to complement the study of world history but also some ideas that I thought were a bit out there. The curriculum, which will remain unnamed, had a very interesting idea for an activity when studying ancient Egypt. The activity was to mummify a chicken. Now some of you Moms or Dads may have tried this, and kudos to you. I personally don't have time for such activities and I am not a huge fan of big messes or salmonella.

Instead of mummifying a chicken, Jacob was able to play a short on-line computer game that allowed him to create a mummy just like the Egyptians did. He also made a lovely three dimensional paper pyramid, built a pyramid out of legos, and demonstrated how the Egyptians moved large stones using hand weights and pencil rollers. I ended up creating a world history unit study of my own because I couldn't find one to buy that I really liked. My self created world history unit study has been a hit with Jacob and I plan to share it in sections on this blog as we move through the year and it gets tweaked a bit more.

Anyway, the whole point of this post was to introduce some of my favorite websites where you can print off fun and educational paper crafts and hopefully avoid mummifying any chickens.

Paper toys (you can find a pyramid at the first link):
http://papertoys.com/

http://www.thetoymaker.com/2Toys.html

Paper dolls:
http://marilee.us/paperdolls2.html#Printchildren

more paper dolls

Printable coloring pages of art masterpieces and lots more:
http://www.colormeonline.com/default.htm

Pop-up cards to print and make:
http://robertsabuda.com/popmakesimple.asp

Origami models with printable diagrams:
http://www.oriland.com/studio/main.asp