Challenge Board #3: Gardens

Challenge Board #3: Fairy Gardens

Previous Challenge Board: Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Garden Planning Challenge Sheet

Our strawberries are already flowering, and the kids have been helping us plant and transplant lettuce and spinach. Soon it will be time for summer veggies! Before we start on our summer garden, I gave the kids a garden challenge of their own.

Shhh, it's math. My Garden Planning Challenge Worksheet instructs students to use toothpick "fences" and graph paper to learn about area and perimeter, beginning with guided word problems and ending with open-ended challenges. I designed this worksheet to have something for all three kids (7, 9, and 11). You can find it for free at my TPT page. Enjoy!

 

(PS. Jeff is our garden gnome. There is no reference to him on the sheet.)

Easter Crosswords & Word Scrambles

Easter Word Searches (Nonreligious)

Easter Crossword (Religious)

Easter Word Scramble from Crayons & Cravings

April is Poetry Month!

Our favorite poet is Jack Prelutsky, and you can find his work at Poets.org in: Poems Kids Like.

You can also find lesson plans and poems about spring.

My daughter and I are memorizing Los Pollitos Dicen Pio Pio. We've got the first few lines down. Wish us luck!

We're studying Freedom Train by Langston Hughes, a 1947 poem about segregation in America.

Still Life

Here are a couple of videos we used to help us with our still life challenge. My daughter absolutely adores Art for Kids Hub, do I found this for her: Healthy Snack Stack Folding Surprise. 

A lot of the videos I found on my still life search showed kids how to draw from a drawing tutorial, like Art for Kids Hub does. Instead, I wanted a video that encouraged them to arrange a still life and, you know, draw it. So for a bit of art history and an easy demonstration of how to draw a still life, we used: Paul Cezanne Still Life Project.

Challenge Board #4: Animal Cryptarithms & The Great Wave

(Link will work once the post is up)

Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

For our last Challenge Board, the kids made fairy houses for Saint Patrick's Day. But they made them a little early, and everyone knows that you can only catch a leprechaun on March 17th. But, oh, what's this?! The kids checked the houses early that morning and found new friends, along with the traditional fairy-sized horde of candy.

Tween child attracted a pixie, a being who appreciates camouflage and mischief. He has a dragon hatchling perched on his shoulder.

Middle child attracted a gnome, a being who appreciates good construction and forethought. He is riding a turtle.

Youngest's lean-to attracted a fairy who likes to draw and write, a creative being who knows how to enjoy the capricious winds of life.

How did we learn all this about our new fairy guests? Well, for our next challenge board, the fairies left us coded letters--it seems they're a bit shy and only share their with "kind children and our best fairy friends."

Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Coded Message Activity

Encode your own letters here: https://cryptii.com/pipes/alphabetical-substitution

Or print an encoded quote from: https://www.puzzles-to-print.com/cryptograms/index.shtml

We used a simple substitution code and talked about deductions and proof by contradiction. Each message contained predictable or common phrases to help with decoding ("My name is"), and if we had encoded the entire letter, "Dear" and "Sincerely" could also have worked as cues. Each letter also held a seed for what to write back. For example, one letter asked the student to help name a pet dragon.

Tips for printing: 

• Use a font where capital "i" and lowercase L look different, or chose to make them all lowercase.
• Use a large font with double spacing or 2.5 spacing, and increase the space between letters (the kerning). I reprinted mine bigger than shown.
• Leave space on the top or bottom for notes (A=z, etc.)
• If students want to work together, use the same code for each personal message. If they do not, use different codes. I ended up printing a new code for the kid who was determined to solve it himself, so overhearing answers wouldn't throw him.
• Keep a copy of the solutions.

Hints for solving a simple substitution code:

• How many single-letter words are there in the English language? Words with apostrophes? Two-letter words?
• It is okay to guess and wrong. You will be able to tell that you got a letter wrong once you have an impossible word or a phrase that does not make sense.
• The more you solve, the easier it is to solve more by reading what is there and guessing missing words.
• If you have trouble towards the end, check which letters you have solved and try out the ones left.

Encode your return letter by hand:

For beginners, you can write out the alphabet and "slide" the alphabet so that, for example, A becomes B, B becomes C. My own codes were random, and one was the alphabet backwards, so if o=l then l = o as well.

For learning about more complicated codes, we love Codes, Ciphers, and Secret Writing by Martin Gardner. My oldest is planning to encode his using a wheel cipher. Break the Code by Bud Johnson includes codes for students to break to practice their newfound skills.

Suncatchers

Items needed: Clear contact paper, tissue paper in many colors, construction paper, hole punch, yarn, marker, scissors. 

Prep

1. Draw a simple shape on your sheet of paper. Cut it out, leaving an intact paper border. (Don't cut through your border to get to the middle). The paper border helps keep the contact paper from curling.
2. Cut 2 pieces of contact paper to almost the same size as your sheet of paper. They must be bigger than your cutout, but may be easier to place later if they're a little smaller than your paper.
3. Peel off the backing from one contact piece, leaving the contact paper sticky-side up. Place your paper border over your contact paper. The paper border should have a "window" that is now filled by contact paper. Replace the backing over the contact paper until your student is ready to begin.

Art!

1. (Remove the backing.) Students cut strips of colored tissue paper and tear off pieces to fill the "window." You can prep the tissue paper pieces ahead of time for younger children.
2. Once the window is filled and ready, peel the backing off from the second piece of contact paper and lay it sticky-side down, creating a final protective layer.
3. Hole punch and hang with string. You can also cut the string ahead of time, hole punch ahead of time, etc., but I like to let older students chose their string color and do some of this themselves.

 

DIY Word Searches

We used printable graph paper templates for our word searches, using larger squares for our youngest.

Fairy Names

(Shhhh... Our fairy's names are Shay and dragon Shamrock, Jeff and turtle Nina, and Moira)

Challenge Board #3: Fairy Gardens

(Link will work once the next post is live)

 We're starting something new in our homeschool: 

the Challenge Board!

Inspired by innovative math teaching, like this challenge posted on YouCubed, the board includes a wide range of challenges that cover all subjects. Open-ended challenges like "write a story about..." are great for covering the wide range of skills for my 7, 9, and 11yo, and St. Patrick's Day is this month, so it will be fun to include seasonal tie-ins like that. More on the fairy houses later!

Now, let's be real for a minute. Since anything new can be scary, I waited to show them the first board until after they'd already built the fairy houses. It's supposed to be fun, and much of it we would have done anyway. Despite my efforts, one of my three kids immediately had an issue with the board! A few hours later and we're all good now. Growth mindset can be so hard to learn, that it's okay to "fail" to guess the riddle or, apparently, "fail" to write an "epic" story.  Now that all three minds are feeling more open and creative, I am pretty sure we'll end up with three epic stories, haha!

Challenge Board #1: Fairy Houses

We've already erased some of the challenges and replaced them with new ones:

Fairy House & St. Patrick's Day Riddles:

Q: When is your mind like a fairytale?
A: When it's made up!

A: How many sides does a house have?

A: Two. An inside & an outside 

Q: What runs out when you push it?

A: Your luck!

Q: Why can’t you borrow money from a leprechaun?

A: They’re always a little short.

Q: Why do leprechauns hate marathons?

A: They like to jig more than jog.

Q: What do you call leprechauns who collect cans and plastic?

A: Wee-cyclers.

Q: What type of bow can’t a leprechaun tie?

A: A rainbow.

Q: Why do frogs like St. Patrick’s Day?

A: Because they’re always wearing green.

St Patrick's Day Word Searches

This website has different levels of difficulty available, perfect for kids of differing abilities:

https://www.bigactivities.com/word_searches/st_patricks_day/medium/st_patricks_day1.php

You can also find several websites for generating your own wordsearches.

Math Brain Teasers:

 I started the kids off with an easy square brain teaser--too easy, it turned out!

Here are some harder square counting puzzles that are still easier than the classic 4x4 grid with two squares overlaid.

We've also started with some Beginner Balance Benders, like this:

St. Patrick's Day Picture Books:

(You can find a lot of these on youtube read-a-louds)

The Story of the Leprechaun by Katherine Tegen - this book retells the same legend as Clever Tom and the Leprechaun by Linda Shute, which we also love, but this newer version is more sympathetic to the poor leprechaun who's gold Tom/Tim is trying to steal.

Tim O Toole and the Wee Folk by Gerald McDermott - oh, we love Gerald McDermott's folk tale retellings! The wee folk give Tim a goose that lays golden eggs, but when he boats about his good fortune and the goose gets stolen, hijinks ensue.

Jamie O'Rourke and the Big Potatoe by Tomie DePaola - another great storyteller who has written folk tales from many cultures. When Jamie catches a leprechaun, he agrees to wish for a magic potato seed instead of the leprechaun's treasure.  

Pete the Cat: The Great Leprechaun Chase by James Dean - this is a very modern story with the message that hard work and helping your friends is better than trying to catch good luck.

How to Catch a Leprechaun by Adam Wallace - this one's great for getting your kids to build leprechaun traps, unless they're my kids, which is why we ended up building fairy houses.

Fairy Houses!

It's fun to see how different each kids' designs are. My youngest built a lean-to with a bed and a pool:

Middle child is a wilderness survivalist and water-proofed the cloth for his house, then corrected me and said it's only water-resistant: 

Oldest focused on camouflage because fae hide from humans:

Hmmmm... I have it on good authority that you can only catch a leprechaun on St. Patrick's day, and we built our houses early. Do you think some other fae might stop by? 😇 (Please, no more tooth fairies!)

I'll be sure to report back!

Challenge Board #2: Fairy Code

Review: Tuttle Twins Book Collections

We've enjoyed so many Tuttle Twins books over the years, that it's high time I collected mine & other's reviews all in one place, so you can get a feel for the series. 

The Tuttle Twins books cover economics and government with an emphasis on "the time-tested principles of a free society," which includes free-market principles and principles of individual freedom. My kids pull these books off our shelves and re-read them frequently, and I'm amazed at how much they've absorbed. My kids are learning and thinking deeply about subjects that public school never taught me: the Tuttle Twins fills a much-needed niche!

If you sign up for their newsletter or follow their Facebook page, they tend to have sales when new books come out. Books can be purchased with an audio version and workbooks.

I started reviewing these books for a magazine, and I love them so much that I became an affiliate salesperson, because I think every family should have them. If you visit my associate sales link, anything you purchase there in the next 21 days gets counted for me: https://tuttletwins.com/1776?ap_id=michelleristuccia

First up, we have the Tuttle Twins' collection of picture books for ages 5-11. Caffy Duffy's Review calls it "an outstanding series of 11 books that teaches important concepts about economics, government, and personal responsibility through child-friendly stories."

Cathy Duffy Review of the series.

My review of Show Business.

My review of Road to Surfdom.

My review of Food Truck Fiasco.

The Law, Review by Gail at Learning Tangent, where I reviewed other Tuttle Twins books.

Each book is inspired by classic books that delve into the same topics. "Education Vacation" inspired my kids to read the original "The Underground History of American Education" by John Taylor Gatto!

Next up, for teens! All the teen books are newer, so I'm having trouble finding reviews for you. Maybe I should get cracking with writing my own reviews. Whoops! In the meantime, this review of their podcast for kids should give you an idea of what types of themes their books cover.

Who doesn't love a good choose your own adventure book?

We just ordered the newest books for preteens and up:

There is also a card game, and several non-fiction e-books for parents. Keep your eye out for the bundles, which often include audio, workbooks, and related nonfiction e-books. Enjoy!

Charlie Cat Takes a Break on Thanksgiving

Find Charlie Cat Takes a Break on Thanksgiving on Amazon, and add it on Goodreads!

Charlie cat loves Thanksgiving, but when noisy guests arrive, Charlie needs a quiet room. Find out how Momma Cat helps Charlie enjoy Thanksgiving.

Peek inside!

Charlie Cat picture book series explores challenging social situations through rhyme and fun illustrations. For ages 0-8 and special needs.

Join our author mailing list for free printables you can use at home or in the classroom.

Charlie Cat Draws His Personal Bubble on Easter

Susie Dog is so excited to hunt Easter Eggs, she forgets to look where she is going! When Susie Dog spills Charlie Cat's Easter basket, Charlie Cat teaches Susie Dog about personal space.

Charlie Cat Tries Earmuffs on Independence Day

When Momma Cat offers Charlie and Susie earmuffs for the loud fireworks, Susie Dog doesn’t need hers, but a new friend does! Learn about hearing protection and individual preferences in this rhyming picture book for ages 0-8 & special needs.

Charlie Cat Does NOT Like Halloween

Charlie Cat does not like scary monsters and ghosts. Charlie's friend Susie Dog loves to dress up for Halloween. When Susie Dog scares Charlie Cat, Charlie uses his strong voice to tell her STOP. Find out how these two friends get along on Halloween.

Charlie Cat Takes a Break on Thanksgiving

Charlie cat loves Thanksgiving, but when noisy guests arrive, Charlie needs a quiet room. Find out how Momma Cat helps Charlie enjoy Thanksgiving.

Charlie Cat Keeps His Paws Off at Christmas

Waiting to decorate the family Christmas tree is hard! Momma Cat helps Charlie Cat learn how to tell when he should keep his paws to himself, and Charlie is happy to find something he can play with safely.

Review: The Tuttle Twins and their Spectacular Show Business by Connor Boyack

 The Tuttle Twin’s newest adventure gives young readers a wonderful model of entrepreneurship in The Tuttle Twins and their Spectacular Show Business by Connor Boyack.

The 9-year-old twins begin by learning about investment capital and equity share, because as the saying goes, sometimes you have to spend money to make money. Readers then learn guiding principles for evaluating and executing their business ideas—for example, understanding competition and what attracts customers to your product or service, the importance of networking, and the need for a business plan. The way Connor Boyack breaks economics down into digestible chunks is both inspiring and informative for any student looking to understand small business from the business persons’ perspective.

The Tuttle Twins tackling entrepreneurship is perfect for this age group! My own 8 year-old is interested in running his own businesses and we are using this book to jump-start his efforts. I greatly appreciate how the twins encounter competition and the good attitude the book teaches for how to handle competitors by improving your business. I also love how the Tuttle Twins’ business clearly involves the risk of failure. Sometimes parents in our society feel pressure to protect our children from all risk. This book will help you address the potential risks with your children while equipping them with the tools needed for success.

Get your copy of The Tuttle Twins and their Spectacular Show Business

Recommended reading age: 5-11. Retail Price: $9.99

Other books in this unique series:

All the Tuttle Twins books also have a matching workbook, plus they have books for teens! Look for the workbooks, combo packs and more at TuttleTwins.com. Read more reviews here.

You can also follow the Tuttle Twins series on [ twitter ] and [ facebook ]

Book Rec: Evalina's Egg by Sarah & Rew Jones

"Evalina's Egg" by Sarah & Rew Jones is perfect for families who love adorable fiction with beautiful, classic language. Great photography gives each page a claymation feel that blends realism and fantasy. Evalina's egg serves a gentle bedtime or "any time" story to read to young children. Longer sentences help appeal to older elementary-aged children while still captivating younger siblings. My 6yo and 8yo love it.

Get your copy in English or in Spanish

Everyday, little ones depend on big people for everything they need, from love to a warm bed; and sometimes the little ones come into our lives in unexpected ways.Evalina's Egg is a beautifully written story, with charming illustrations, of a selfless, caring, young mouse who gives her all to take in an orphaned egg and lovingly care for it, in spite of risks and struggles for herself. When her community comes around her to support her, she is enveloped in the 

same care as she gives her egg, and the task becomes much more do-able. This story of love, community, and sacrifice teaches us about the value of caring for one another in our need, and is sure to appeal to anyone who has ever depended on someone bigger and stronger than them. Families of all different shapes and sizes, biological, adoptive, foster, etc, and the communities that surround them will appreciate this sweet story of what it means to risk and sacrifice yourself for someone you love, and come out the other side the one who was rewarded.

Watch the book trailer here

Help other parents find the book by leaving a review!

  

 Sarah & Rew Jones are creators of stories, films, and media for families. Find them on Facebook, and Instagram, and Goodreads for more family content! You can listen to or read Laurie Wright's interview with Sarah & Rew Jones on her podcast here.