Spray can art

We went to a fab workshop where the girls learnt to use aerosol's to make pictures.

They started by lightly spaying black over their paper, then white over the black and used crumpled paper to texture it, next they masked off a circle (lid/plate etc) and sprayed over in black paint.

To finish they sprayed their fingers and splattered white paint to make the stars.

A few kids took it a step further and created backdrops and landscapes to go with their moon.

Notebooking Pages - TOS Review

We do lots of notebooking here, this means I've spent hours scouring the internet for pages that would work for us or having to design them. Thankfully that part of my life is over now we've been given a Notebooking Pages Lifetime Membership for NotebookingPages.com to review.

Notebooking is an amazing way to cut out the busy work and really improve your learning, it's flexible, creative and is an excellent way for journaling your students work. Notebooking can be used to assist hand writing, copywork, vocab or spelling lessons, map work, history, grammar, project work, unit studies and more. It can be used for all topics and fits in with many learning styles and most curriculum.

 

NotebookingPages.com was created by Debra Reed, a homeschool Mum of ten, she has designed vast array of notebooking pages for your use. There are thousands of topics to choose from and they are divided into subjects for ease of navigation, these include;

• Any Study (generic pages, mini-books and 3D pages)
• A-Z (alphabet copy work, A-Z animals, A-Z sports, A-Z transportation)
• Bible/character
• Famous People
• Fine Arts
• Geography
• History
• Holidays
• Language Arts
• Science/Nature

Debra's pages are well thought out, she seems to have thought of everything - some are plain, others include spaces to draw in or stick pictures in, some have beautiful images for the child to colour in, still more have fill in the blank spaces and more.

We downloaded some work from her artist study of Georgia O'Keeffe to go along with our current art studies

 

and also from her Plant and Tree study for our nature and botany work,

both were enjoyed by all the girls, they fitted easily into our existing studies and were simple to use.

I was very impressed by both the range available and the quality. I loved that she had created an easy start guide and tutorials to help those who haven't notebooked before. I received a number of emailed tips and video links when I first signed up which were very useful.

My favourite aspect by far was that all the work was done for me, I no longer have to trawl various sites to try and find something suitable - its all in one place, there is a massive variety to choose from and it only takes seconds to download. You just need to pick and choose what page layout and style will work best for your students.

Debra has even added lapbook templates including mini layered books, matchbook books, popup book, top tab books and bordered templates, which you can use to make your own lapbooks.

The lifetime membership is available for $97 which full you full access to all the notebooking pages and any new ones that are added. She even has some free resources for you to try so you can see how it works for your family.

You can see what my crew mates thought over at the TOS Blog.

You gotta smile when....

... your 7 year old tells you off in disgust for saying 'it's raining' and says ' it's precipitating - you should know because you taught me'

My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) - TOS Review

We've had the opportunity to review My School Year (Homeschool Record Keeping) from MySchoolYear.com over the last few weeks. We received the Annual Membership to review. 

MySchoolYear.com is an online lesson planner and record keeper. It's site offers many different tools to help keep your homeschool organised, help you know what is overdue, current and upcoming and to search, filter or sort lessons. These include;

Attendance - the automatic attendance will keep track of hours as well.
Lesson Planning - it can be used to create lesson plans and will reschedule lessons if you fall behind. It also lets you share and copy lesson plans for multiple students.
Reports - create transcripts, report cards etc.
Tracker - you can keep track of events, awards, sports, community work and any other extracurricular activities. It also tracks reading lists and there is an option to create materials lists as well. 
Grading - you can enter grades for an automatic grade average a well as keeping track of all graded work.
Teachers aid - automatic reminders for planning and tracking

You start by entering your homeschool information - name, school year, schedule, holidays etc. Then you start adding your students names and their subject, this does take some time so I would advise you find a nice quiet evening and sit down with a hot drink. There are some shortcuts that they have designed to make filling in this section easier (you have to enter lessons and times for each individual subject and student) called Quick Split and Rapid Repeat. Quick Split works by letting you divide a book into sections by day or lesson while Rapid Repeat repeats an assignment automatically adding the next lesson number for you (read chapter 1, read chapter 2 etc)

This is a well designed and well thought out program - they have made it as easy to use as possible and I was impressed with the Teachers Aid - it provided reminders and prompts that helped with the site navigation, it also sensed when I missed entering a piece of information or grade and alerted me so I could stay on top of things. I'm lucky that I don't need to keep records but if you do need to keep records, create reports or keep track of attendance then I can see how this would be really beneficial to you.

 

I really liked having the option to track and include sports and volunteer work for the girls but my favourite section was the Reading Log, it is really simple to use and you can enter as much or as little info as you like - you can assign start or end dates, chapters, genre, assign pages or you can just enter title and completion date. Personally I liked that I could enter the price and keep track of my budgeting (I have a real weakness for book buying so it helped keep me in check).

 

Some nice perks of the program are it's compatibility for use with iphones so it can let you and your students know what you need to do even when you are on the go and it protects all your records so no more worries about crashes or viruses ruining your records.

MySchoolYear.com is available for a monthly fee of $5 or a yearly price of $40.

You can see what my crewmates thought over at the TOS Blog

 

LearnBop for Families - TOS Review

We were given the chance to receive an online program designed to help strengthen math skills, LearnBop For Families from LearnBop is specifically designed for use at home and covers grades 3-12, they gave me a 12 month family subscription for review purposes.

 

LearnBop is designed to be a complete math curriculum offering personalised math support which identifies any knowledge gaps and helps your student to learn and more importantly master the concepts. There are over 11,000 lessons which include topics like Statistics, Geometry, Algebra, Pre-algebra, Trigonometry, Math Problems, Fractions, Decimals and more.

You start by picking an avatar for each student and a grade level (either grade level 3-8 or Algebra 1, Algebra 2, or Geometry) then they do an assessment to check where they are so an individualised Road Map can be created. You can alter their Road Map in the parents section if you feel they need something different.  

 

  
Each lesson starts with instructional videos to show the concepts they will be learning (and extra, optional videos if needed). They are then presented with the 'Bops' which are the problems they need to solve - these can be multiple choice, fill in the blank etc. Once they achieve mastery in a subject by scoring a set % they can pass to the next subject, however if they answer any of the questions incorrectly they explain step by step how to work out the correct answer. Students are motivated by earning achievement badges

Each of the girls had a dashboard that showed what they are working on, number of videos watched, Bops answered, time spent on the program, percentage completed and any achievements awarded.

 

The parent account shows all of the same information but for all students on the account so its easy to quickly check how your kids are doing in the program and to see if you need to make any changes. Being able to oversee means they girls could be fairly autonomous in their work - the only time I needed to step in was when there was a glitch in the system - there were 3 instances where the right answer was entered but the program read it as the wrong answer, but as with any new product they are working through and correcting these - they even have a option to report the error so they can act on it quickly.
 
I really liked the video lessons and felt they were thorough and well explained, I also liked the explanations for incorrect answers and that they showed each individual step in detail for solving them. I found the program fairly easy to use and was impressed by the ability to customise this program - I could switch the areas the girls worked on and they didn't have to work through it sequentially. 

 

 

Lilly got frustrated that some of her correct answers were marked incorrectly but I believe they are working on the kinks (you can send a report if there are any issues with the questions). Otherwise the girls seemed to enjoy the lessons and both Tulip and Rose loved the awards.

Single student rates are $14.95 per month, or a family rate (up to 4 students) at $19.95 a month, there are also options to pay yearly at $149.95 for a single student and $199.95 for up to 4 students (saving you two months of fees)

You can see what my crewmates thought over at the TOS Blog