WHC

Some of you have been watching for the release of this website!!!

Here it is! FINALLY! More details will be added as they come, but you can now see what it is all about! This has been such a labor of love. Thank you for your patience! YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED!

Winter Homeschool Conference

I am flying us in an amazing speaker, Rachel Keppner from Mesa, AZ!! You will LOVE HER! We have one of the most fantastic line ups for a conference I HAVE EVER SEEN!

Please also check out the youth conference part of it! We have made it super affordable and what a great line up we have for you. We have chosen our family's very favorite speakers and we know this will not be a conference soon forgotten! We are so thrilled!!

We will also finish off the night with a family ball! If you have never been to one, I encourage you to bring your kiddos and come! It is a memory you all will cherish. 

If you have any questions, please be sure to let me know! And... please! Help me pass the word!

Thank you,

Tammy Ward

Linking Eternity Family Unit Study

Our family is venturing into a year long unit study. It is super exciting!

Yesterday my older daughters got to do 'Baptisms for the Dead' at the Salt Lake City LDS Temple. It was beautiful to walk around the grounds with the other kids while we were waiting for them.

I asked George what his favorite part was and he said "Jesus!" How cute is that?

Kaden said his favorite part was when we toured the Beehive house. He thought the bees and the train track carved into the stair case.

Braxee enjoyed going to the Family History Library. We had a couple ladies there teach Kylee and Aubree some neat stuff on the computers there. Afterwards, we enjoyed the Joseph Smith movie there at the Joseph Smith Memorial Building.

We also went to the Records building which is across the street from the Conference Center. Their website was down but they still took the opportunity to show us a few things. Some of the key things I learned there are:

*You can request patriarchal blessings for your direct line ancestors
*You can request to see materials in the morning and they will have them all lined up for you that day when you come. You can request to see photographs, journals, family heirlooms, etc.
*You can donate your own items and they will preserve them for you. They are all about preserving and sharing. VERY COOL!

He also taught me that most of the old newspapers are now digitized. That is awesome. You can even go to digitalnewspapers.org and put a name or phrase in their search engine and it will bring up images of newspapers that have them.  I just found out that my my 5th great grandfather was a SENATOR! Very cool. Here is the link:

 http://udn.lib.utah.edu/cdm/compoundobject/collection/boxelder/id/12516/show/12561/rec/2

What a cool way to get to know your ancestors even more. It was a very successful day! The girls are even more fired up about getting to know their ancestors more. ME TOO!

Chesterfield, ID was a massive success. I love family UNITS!

Each week, we work a little bit on our goal. We have been collecting records, information, photographs. We even started a blog all about our grandma so we can preserve her memory and share it with future generations. Now, everyone can share images and stories of her. :)

2012 School Theme: " Linking our Eternal Family"

Each year, I pray, plan and ponder... this year is no exception. God has spoken quiet peace to my soul about this year. I am very excited. Here are a few things for this year that we have planned.

(This is an ongoing blog post. Check back for more ideas as they are being collected continually.)







Sept: Visit Chesterfield for Kick Off (Labor Day)
Learn the how to's, collect information, get organized. Start extended family blog for easy sharing.
Oct: Start scanning data and pictures collected, Visit DUP Museum in SLC, Church Archives in SLC, visit graves, Aunt Norma (my grandmother's sister and my oldest living relative) My ancestors settled Tooele and she has promised us a tour! Get copies of pictures from her. Interview about mother and grandmother.
Nov: Emphasis on ancestors attributes, their sacrifices, and what kind of people they are. What can we learn from their lives? Search journals and notebook thoughts.
Dec: Continue scanning data and make copies of discs. Make Family History related Christmas gifts for extended family.
Jan: Ancestor Spotlight- Each person choose a person and get detailed information. Share at last FHE of month.
Feb:

Monthly Goal: 
300 Names submitted as a family for Indexing. Sparkle and Spice: Baptisms for the dead at Temple at least once a month. Mom and Dad Temple attendance: 1 day out of 10.

St. Patrick's Day and Rainbow Unit

I found this fun blog that has some great Montessori ideas on it! Here is what we did today (3/14):


http://mymontessorijourney.typepad.com/my_montessori_journey/2011/03/collaborative-rainbow-project.html

When that was complete, the boys and I had a "Rainbow Treasure Hunt." I hid a box of sour skittles in low random locations all over the family room. They decorated some green paper bags I picked up at Wal mart for $0.33 They had fun doing that with their sisters. Then, they came in and I had it all ready. They had a ball gathering the tiny bits of candy.

Astronomy Unit Study 2012

I have not written down all the fun educational stuff we did for this unit. This has been a very busy pregnancy. However, while I was reflecting on the past months I thought I'd jot down a few just because we love to share!

I think the Clark Planetarium is a must! That was a fun field trip to see. They are great to work with and have some fabulous programs if you hit their minimum numbers with your group. I couldn't believe that their Hansen Dome Showing was free to us! IT WAS BREATHTAKING!!

Here are some links we used:
http://schoolofabraham.com/astronomy.htm

http://clarkplanetarium.org/
http://www.homeschoolshare.com/space_boy.php

Here are some of the hands on experiments we did with a group of other families. It was so much fun and great learning for all involved!!
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3386155865199070083 
http://www.clarkplanetarium.org/assets/uploads/files/ModelingMoonPhases.pdf

We also got some construction paper with glow in the dark paint and after studying the constellations, we had them make their own. We also had them choose a few others and use push pins with black construction paper. We hung those in the windows. We got a telescope for Christmas and spent many hours looking into the clear night sky. This January was terrific for star gazing! We loved watching the lunar eclipse as a family too!

One of the larger activities we had the kids do was to pick a person who influenced Astronomy in our world. They each did their own report on these people. One made a poster on their person, one watched a netflix documentary on their person and wrote a review and the other wrote a creative story after learning a lot of background. I think all in all, we watched about 10 netflix documentaries on space exploration, the evolution of the telescope, astronauts, different planets, solar storms, etc. That was a lot of fun to do. I NEVER let them get that much screen time, but I wasn't feeling to hot during my pregnancy right then and it fit with our unit perfectly. They took notes and ate popcorn. It was great! We also went to the OTT Planetarium in Ogden and watched a star show. Although it was interesting, I'd recommend the Clark Planetarium in SLC, UT over it any day. 

I wish I'd saved all of the other links and projects we did. I will have to get better at record keeping so I can share! The kids loved this unit so much! We will add on to this topic every year.

Roman Empire Unit Study

We are currently doing a fun Unit Study on the Roman Empire. We like to do seat work with out unit studies, but we also like to have lots of fun hands on activities for the kids to do. Here is what we have done or are doing so far:

Roman Empire Vocab List: (They write these each twice daily in their best handwriting.)

Roman
Empire
Republic
Julius Caesar
Augustus
Latin
Greek
numerals
villa
domus
cenaculum
Centurion
mosaic
toga
citizen
Emperor
Constatine
Claudius
gladiator
vomitorium
Colosseum
Tiber River
Patricians
Plebeians
Pantheon
Pompeii
Mount Vesuvius
Thermae
Bascilla
Aqueducts

.... okay.... that is all I will put for now. There are 30 more words. We went through our stack of books from the library and hunted for the words. When they know what a word means, they put a star next to it. I just have them pass off the words to me verbally.

This study is amazing as it covers all the subjects. (Science, history, geography, handwriting, language arts, art, math... literally everything....) We so far have covered the history, famous persons, roman numerals, inventions, architecture, entertainment, daily life, forms of government, etc.....



Hands on Activity Ideas:

Make a cardboard shield and sword.
Make a free lapbook at www.homeschoolshare.com/romanempire
Read lots of books together on the subject.
Do arithmetic with roman numerals.
Make a "Colosseum" with craft materials.
Make a laurel wreath out of construction paper leaves or actual leaves.
Do a report on a leader or type of government.
Make a game with questions on what you have learned.
Make some authentic recipes to enjoy.
Make a toga and have a party with food and games they played.
We also have a book that a friend loaned to me. There are all kinds of word searches, crossword puzzles and fill in the blanks. She got it from a school supply store.
Watch a documentary on the subject.
Make a volcano and talk about Mt. Vesuvius.
We have miniature Roman Soldiers complete with catapults, horses and chariots, swords, bows and arrows, etc. The little ones have been having a blast with that.
Make a cookie map of the area and mark the landmarks with decorations like marshmallows and m & m's. My kids LOVE this project because they get to eat it when it's done.

We are not done yet! I'm looking for a fun field trip idea. We are doing this Unit Study until Feb 15th so let me know if you have any additional thoughts or suggestions.

Underwater Animals Unit Study

These are some pictures of our Unit Study we did on Underwater Animals. I had them each choose an animal to do a research paper on. We did it in the form of "mini-books." I cut card stock paper into 4 equal pieces and stapled 2 of them with white paper in the middle. The older girls did more extensive research while the younger ones did more drawings. It was a lot of fun!

Another activity we did was "Blindfolded at Sea." We took 3 bins and filled them with something that resembled the "sea." One had a can of spinach to represent seaweed. Another was warm salt water and the last was some sand with sea shells. We didn't have sand handy, so we used baby oatmeal. It worked great. Then, we blindfolded them one at a time and brought them in to see if they could guess it just by feeling.

We also googled for some fun lapbooking ideas. You can see some of the stuff we did at 2 of my favorite websites: www.homeschoolshare.com/oceans and www.enchantedlearning.com

We also paid a field trip to a local Aquarium. We practiced drawing different underwater animals. They each wrote a poem about the ocean and the creatures that live there. We also had fun looking for videos on youtube.com The best one we saw was the octopus eating a shark. FASCINATING!

We also had a pretty long vocab/spelling list. They wrote creative fictional stories about sea creatures. We went to a Japanese Restaurant and ate some Calamari, sea weed salad, shrimp, sushi, etc. It was a lot of fun and they were surprised by what they liked and didn't like.

We learned many words in Spanish from this category. Kylee did an additional research paper on tides/currents/gravity. We did a bunch of experiments that we found on composition of salt water. Here is also a picture of the boys playing a game from D.T. called "A, B, Seas." We taught them a fun sea shell counting song and played some preschool games with them that we made, just for fun. Plus, a few other things. Gosh, I could go on and on. We had 2 weeks of LOTS OF FUN! Please feel free to post ideas that you have as we will probably do a couple days review on this unit at the end of the year and I am always looking for new ideas. Comments are also welcome.