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Showing posts from 2023

Tips & Tricks: Attention Span

I have seen people ask about their child's attention span. Other will get people telling them that they do not do school for long enough, blah, blah, blah. Here is my take on it. You do not need to do school as long as public school does. Do you know why it takes them so long? Because they have 25-36 kids to teach at a time! That will definitely take longer than teaching 1-5+ kids. There is no reason your child needs to sit doing school at home for 8 hours a day when they finish the lesson for the day in half an hour. The attention span is different. Each child will have a different length they are able to actively focus on things. Some children can focus for hours and others only a little bit. This is fine. Your child will build up their attention span a long the way.  Just like how popcorn pops at different times but they are all in the same bag; every child will pop when they are ready. What I do is when I see our daughter is at her limit I stop the lesson. This is especially do

Flash Cards & Games

 I am very excited to announce that I am now offering flash card and game printables! Each set it 3$. You will be able to print them as often as you like. Just send an email to daisy.oneluckeywife@gmail.com and let me know which ones you’d like. If you’d like me to make flash cards for you they start at 10$.  Here are the available flash cards: Japanese Hiragana (regular or colorful) Japanese Katakana (regular or colorful) Japanese Numbers (cards (regular or colorful) or game) Japanese Colors (cards or game) Japanese Months (cards or game) Japanese Shapes (cards or game) Spanish Colors (cards or game) Spanish Numbers (cards game) Spanish Months/Days of the Week (cards or game)

Tips & Tricks: Making Learning Fun

IF your child says they are bored or that they do not like school there are lots of ways to make school more fun for them. Here are a few ways that I make school more fun for our daughters: we use a lot of games that are educational most of them are critical thinking games you can use games that work on math as well like monopoly sometimes I let our daughter pick what class we do next for classes she is not as fond of I turn them into a game she does not like English class so I spread out all her reading cards and have her find them or she is an animal and has to catch the words by reading them properly using something other an a pencil to write with can make it more fun crayons, colored pencils, etc. for older kids you could let them type their notes talk in a funny voice this probably only works for younger kids become a new person you could have a different persona when you teach certain classes do more experiments with your science lessons take a class outside if you have to read a

Tips & Tricks: How to Study

Why did I not make a good great? I studied, what went wrong? Studying starts with proper note taking. If you are studying for a class that has equations you will want to memorize these and do practice problems so that you know how to use them properly. Maybe make a chart on the equations you have learned. If the class has a textbook you can reread sections or look over any handouts you complete or where given. Reread your notes many times. Do not just have one cram session the night before. Instead take an hour or so each day to go over the important things for that class. If anything is confusing then ask your teacher, use Google, reread your notes or textbooks to see if you can understand them. Sometimes it will take a few times of reading something to fully grasp the concept being presented.  Public school teachers often have open class hours either before or after school go to these if you, too. If you are homeschooled you can ask your teacher anytime and I am sure they will be wil

Review: All About Spelling Level 2

I love, love, love All About Learning Press! So with that of course we have kept with All About Spelling after finishing level 1. Just like before I have organized it by getting the teacher manual's spine cut and the pages spiral bound. It is so much easier to go through the book that way. The student pack comes with the cards (phonogram, sound, key and word), syllable tags, syllable rules, word banks, jail for words that break the rules when spelling, the progress chart with stickers for it and the certificate. You will need the tiles but if you have used either All About Reading or Spelling before than the tiles are the same. We got the app (for tablet only) instead so that there is no chance of losing the tiles. In level 1 there were tokens to help with making sure your child sounds out each sound in a word and then writes it. Level 2 does not come with any tokens but you can really use anything as a token. Our daughter likes to use Hot Wheels if she is missing sounds in a word

Reviews/Tests

I got a lot of people asking for my reviews/tests I give my kids. If you would like one let me know by emailing me at daisy.oneluckeywife@gmail.com Each grade’s review cost 1$/subject. Below is part of our review. Payment in the form of PayPal or Zelle. Please keep in mind the reviews are based off our curriculum. By no means does it mean you are not doing enough if your child doesn’t know the answers or y’all haven’t gone over what we have. Our curriculum of choice is Timberdoodle. You’ll find everything we use here .  Pre-K Subjects:      Math      Geography/Social Studies      Thinking Skills      Science      English (reading)      Social/Emotional Skills (emotions to know) Kinder Subjects:      Math      History      Thinking Skills      Science      English (reading)      Social Skills (emotions to know) 1st Subjects:      Math      History (history, a little of social studies (US based) and geography)      Thinking Skills      Science      English (reading, writing) 2nd Subjects

Review: All About Reading Level 3

This is the second to last level of reading! All About Reading  has been an amazing curriculum for it. Everything is laid out so nicely. The thing I love best about this curriculum is that even as a dyslexic parent I have been able to effectively teach our daughter to read all on my own! If you have read our previous reviews you know I organize this curriculum very particularly. the teacher manual gets spiral bound by Staples. The student book get the pages torn out and sheet protected. The cut outs get laminated and put into a zip lock with an index card to know what level and lesson they go with. The phonogram cards and word cards get laminated as well. This level has two books with many stories in them for your child to read when they pop up in the curriculum. My daughter loves the stories and likes to read the title for the next story before she learns the new lesson that will be in them.  I love that there is plenty of work so that the child can practice the new concept being taug

Review: Story of the Word Vol 2

We really enjoyed using Story of the World last year and I found it super informative even for me. So of course we are using volume 2 this year. For volume 2, I bought the item separately because we did not use the audio book last year. The main reason I do not use it is because some of the things in the textbook are gruesome and our daughter is sensitive. So instead I read the sections before had and summarize or omit the gory bits. I did get the activity book  and the test booklet . Volume 2 of Story of the World goes over the time period from the fall of Rome to rise of the renaissance. The activity book I feel is a must have for this curriculum. It has a bunch of information in the teacher manual section and the student pages are so much fun for kids. The teacher manual is hands down my favorite part of this curriculum. It lets you know other books you can get that talk about the same things that you are reading in that chapter. Review questions to ask on the most important inform

Review: Test Prep: Grade 2

I know that a lot of homeschoolers choose not to give test or do any sort of testing. Some states will require that you get test done or go to a place to have a test administered. In Texas, this does not apply to us. However I do give tests, quizzes and we do reviews. I do not tell our daughter when we are doing any of these except the review. I will mutter to myself while looking at my planner and say that week is a review week so she sometimes overhears this. Does this make her nervous? No. Solely because I do not make a big deal about it. I know a lot of kids get test anxiety and I do not want our daughter to think that they are a daunting thing. Last year We used Test Prep  and I really liked it. It touches and 2 of the most important classes in school: English and math. The English portions cover reading, comprehension, vocabulary, writing and grammar.  A lot of the reading will be reading passages and then answering the questions that go with them. The will need the skills of suf

Tips & Tricks: Setting Goals

I set goals for the school year at the beginning of the year. I go through all the curriculum and see what it goes over then make goals from that. For example in our Math-U-See curriculum for 1st grade it mostly goes over addition/subtraction and solving for X. While the child can use the blocks to help them I set the goal that by the end of the year I would like our daughter to be doing the problems either entirely on her own or using her finger or blocks as little as possible. For subjects like history and science my goals are they she remembers the main ideas from the sections we read. Our youngest, is 2, is just about to start school so she will be doing preschool. In preschool I just teach the basic things. So my goals for her are that by the end of the she can do the following: letters; upper and lower numbers; 0-25 counting shapes colors weather and what you wear for them animals and their sounds drawing different kinds of lines kinds of vehicles same, different sizes places bod

New Videos

New videos have been added to my Tips & Tricks page for  Reading Lessons . There will be lots more to come so be sure to check those out as well!

Review: Famous Figures of the Middle Ages & Renaissance

This year's history class is over the middle ages and the renaissance time periods. We got Famous Figures to go along with it since it was so nice to use for 1st grade. In the front of this book there are little paragraphs that go over who each person is and what they did that makes them so memorable. I did not really use these last year. In fact we only ended up using half of the pages. For each person you get a teacher cut out and a student cut out. Our daughter at first had fun coloring the people but by the middle of it she was bored and did not want to color them so instead I just had the teacher ones cut out and put together for her to play with.  Sometimes I do have her color them just so she learns some patience. She thinks it takes to long to color them. Or sometimes I will color them with her to show her she can take her time and enjoy coloring even if it take awhile. I wish that the book came with the little pins to to put them together with but I found them at Walmart

Review: Skill Sharpeners Geography - Grade 2

While our history textbook does have geography it is really only over the geography of the time and there is not a lot of it. So to compensate for this we use Skill Sharpeners Geography . I would not use this as your sole history curriculum but rather to supplement like we do. There are 16 different sections for your child to complete. Each one has passages to read, questions to answer and a hands-on activity to do at the end of the section. As to be expected there is a ton of map work for your kids to work on and there are a couple non map sections like suburbs vs city and ocean habitat. The kind of work that will be asked of your child are filling in the blanks (with and without a word bank), multiple choice and writing the answer. I will say that I wish some of the lines were longer because some answers will take a lot more space to write than what is provided for them. So for this we write the answers on a separate piece of paper and then I staple it to the workbook pages. This wor

Review: Word Fun

I really like using books in our homeschool so I was very pleased to see Word Fun in our 2nd grade kit. This book goes over the different types of words. Nouns, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, conjunction, interjection and preposition are all included. The drawing is really nice and colorful. Our daughter finds the art style to be very funny which keeps her interest in what I am reading and explaining to her. Each new type of word is explained and has the symbol for it. Then you get to read a few passages about if you were that type of word. I really like how they did this book not only does it give you the basic definition of the word but then the passages go more in-depth like saying that a proper noun has a capital letter. It introduces the different kinds of nouns not just giving a blanket idea of nouns. Hands down our favorite thing about this book is that at the end of each section about the kind of word there is a game to play! We often play the game multiple times while we a