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Our Vacation Books

October 26, 2012 By Erica Deuel 1 Comment

***First off, congratulations to Becca Stanley for winning my Embroidered Owl on last week’s giveaway!  Thank you to everyone who entered!  That was our largest entered giveaway to date!  I’m going to try to do them more often, since it seemed like a hit.  Please stick around and keep coming back!***

My project I would like to spotlight this week is my boys’ Summer vacation books.  We worked on them all week in school, and they are so completely proud of them!

I have wanted to incorporate making a summer book of our big road trip into our school days, but it kept getting pushed to the following week’s to do list.  Finally, I just decided we needed to do it, and this was the week!  I am so glad we did it!  We have all had a blast with this project!

We have talked about and learned so many valuable things this week through the process of making these books.  One of my main lessons was to try Super glue before many other strong glues needed to hold these thick babies together!  The boys have learned about the author and illustrator of books.  They know the names and the difference between the two roles.  They learned what a title page was and where it is located in a book.  We talked about key events and order and sequence.  We pulled out the map and showed the path we took on our 25 day road trip, while talking about states and distance.  We talked about the difference in opinions and facts.  They did a mock interview and are now doing “show and tell” for all who will sit through their reading of their books.

I love the pride that was earned with the completion of this big project.  Everyday Caleb wanted to “finish” his book, so it really taught patience to work a little at it everyday.

We picked out flag fabric for our cover since we drove across the United States for our vacation.  Caleb created both boys’ covers by glueing and wrapping the fabric around big pieces of cardboard.

We glued postcards that we had collected at our different stops on sheets of paper to insert as pages.

The boys sorted through a huge pile of pictures from our trip to pick out the ones they wanted to use in their book.  It was so fun to see and talk about the different things/events we did as the memories came back to us.  It is really quite funny to see the pictures they actually choose to use in their books.  They might not the the ones I would have chosen, but it is their books!

We worked on writing as they created title pages for their books.

Everyday, Caleb wrote a sentence for his book.

You know we love dictation.  He also dictated lots of stories or memories to me for pages in his book.

We printed out maps and drew the route we took to and from California on our maps.  We talked about distance and the United States, and had a blast talking about places we would like to travel next.  Caleb wants to travel across a different country on the other side of the world now.  Dream big my boy.  I love it!

Once we had finished creating all our different pages, we had to sort them into an order for the book.  We talked about events with similarities/differences as we placed all the “same state” pages in piles.

I get to do my job in my pajama pants. Awesome!

I had plans to sew the pages together with my sewing machine, but our books were too thick with all the pages and card stock.  We opted to punch holes and string thread though them to bind all the pages together.  I then glued the two outside pages to the cover.  It has taken several different types of glue to figure this step out.

The boys are so proud of their creations!!  They worked so hard writing, cutting, gluing, and learning this week.  I am just as proud of them as they are.

Today, we also talked about being a hard worker and finishing strong.  They were not wanting to complete the last steps, but they came around and finished strong and I adore their results!

Thank you so much for reading this week’s Project Spotlight.  Thank you again for all of you who entered my giveaway and might have started following me in a new way!  I really appreciate it!!

Tomorrow, I am attending the Country Living Fair at Stone Mountain with a group of other DIY Atlanta Bloggers, and I am so excited about it!  I will be sure to share it with you next week!

Do you have big plans this week?  Are you going to check out Mitcham Farm?  I hope whatever you do, you have a wonderful weekend!  Happy Friday!!

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DIY Wood School Calendar

September 15, 2012 By Erica Deuel 5 Comments

In preparation for starting to homeschool, we made a school calendar.  It is one of my favorite things in the house now!

We live in a fun 60+ year-old ranch.  Although we love our house, we don’t have any “extra” rooms.  Our school room is right in the middle of our living room.  I am so excited to be homeschooling, but I couldn’t give up my need to have a fun decor in this central room.  I decided to make a wood calendar rather than one of the laminated poster calendars found in most elementary schools.

My brother gave me this sign that he created out of an old wood pallet to start as my base.

What  a huge help it was to have the wood part done!  I decided to have the boys help me create the calendar, as it had lots of teaching opportunities.

We started by taping off the days of the week.  If it looks funny to you, it took me a while to realize it did to me too.  Yesssss, it was by accident that I gave eight days to our weeks.  OOps!  Hopefully, that is not telling of the kind of teacher I am going to be. 🙂 Sooo, we adopted that extra column into something cool.  

I spray painted it a light blue to give the background a little color.  The boys helped spruce it up…

I gave them about 7 or 8 bottles of bluish paints and let them squirt and drizzle the paint all over the calendar.

They LOVED it!

impatience

We are all working on growing some patience, and it was a hard lesson for me to model here for them.  I wanted to rip all that tape off just a few hours later.  It took over a day to dry enough for the tape to be removed, and even then it still had “gooey” parts.

We decided the “lines” to the “columns” needed to stand out a little bit more, so Caleb stained them for us.

I than tapped/screwed little hooks into each box for our number tags to hang on.  I liked this better than doing a velcro or tape system.

I might have gotten a few blisters while twisting and tightening those screws.  I moved the project inside and had another little helper.

We then found clip art pictures on the computer for some of our weather/season tags. The boys helped pick out the pictures.  We did a lot of printing/cutting and number prep.  We were than ready to laminate! I do have a laminater!  Best $20 we have spent in a while!  I may or may not be going crazy laminating everything these days!!

The boys might be equally as obsessed as me.  They come up with things daily we could laminate!

Do you remember my Creative Spot?  It has now been taken over by schooling tools.

homeschool corner

I am that homeschool mom who does the calendar with days of the week and months of the year songs.  We even say the pledge.  I am having a blast!

You see our “extra” column came in handy!  We post a bible verse for the month there, and we recite it during calendar time.  The boys pretty much have it memorized on week one!  The two brown tags are for writing things they are thankful for.  We talk about it everyday, but I will occasionally switch out writing them.  You see what my sweet Jeremiah came up with (all on his own too).  I don’t know if I will be able to erase that comment to write another.

We had some days that looked like both rain and sun this week :).

I know we have only completed our first week, but the calendar is my favorite activity so far!!

Thank you so much for checking out my Calendar!  I will eventually get back into a routine, after adjusting home from our trip and figuring out homeschooling, to get these Friday Project Spotlight posts actually posted on Friday!

I hope you all have a wonderful and relaxing weekend!!

Linked up at: Funky Junk Interiors, Southern Hospitality, Hip Homeschool Moms, and At the Picket Fence.

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Erica Deuel

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