Pixel Scrapper October Blog Train / That Teenage Life Pt 1

I am absolutely thrilled to share with you my freebie for my first time fully participating in a Pixel Scrapper Blog train!!!!

For those of you unfamiliar with Pixel Scrapper: It is an awesome online community for designers, and every month the members put on a themed blog train, where you can hop around to the sites and download whichever pieces you like.

What do you do with the stuff? Glad you asked ;-) I primarily use them to make digital scrapbook pages that I print for our albums. But the possibilities are endless! Cards, school projects, online albums and more!

My first portion is a set of quick pages. When you download them, each page has "holes". You use your program of choice to layer it over your own pictures, Add some journaling and you are done!

Here they are! Since this is my first time, I expect there might be some bugs to work out... please let me know, so I can fix them!!!

Template 1

Template 2

CSH Week 1 Science / Botany

This is a little botany project I found on Pinterest that we finally got around to doing! 

 We pushed trains up it while we sang the song from Week 1

"Plants pick up nutrients and water from the earth, 

                                                  they move up the stem through the Xylem and Phloem, 

                                            Then respiration releases water, through the leaves Stomata."

Despite having a tub full of train tracks,
we didn't have enough "Y" pieces to make a big tree.
I still this it's recognizable as one though!!

CSH Week 4 - Science / Botany

4 Types of Seed Dispersal!

The small selection of seeds we were able to find...

We talked about inventions, like Velcro, that were inspired by plants

Departed from the lesson plans a bit here... I didn't have CD cases, or a place to put them while they sprouted. I remembered seeing a plastic baggy experiment on Pinterest, so we did that instead. It was super easy! I mostly followed directions from here: planting-and-growing-beans-in-our-preschool-window  I will update later with a photo of our results. 

Baggies, Cotton balls, Water & Beans

N4 LOVED doing the experiment!

Actually they all loved it!

Update!! Here are our bean sprouts on the 5th day!!

CSH Week 2 / 3 Art - Bull Leaping Fresco

      Hi there! Falling a bit behind on posts, but hope to catch everything up soon. Turns out that homeschooling takes up a big chunk of my day ;-)

     I did want to point out that the post titles refer to what week in the lessons plans our project are from, to make them easier to search. My plan for this year is 2 weeks of CSH, 1 week review. Which has really looked like 2 days one week, 3 days the next, Family vacation, 1 full week.... You get the picture; we just do our best to roll with it!

      For art this week we tackled the Bull Leaping Fresco from Week 2. I changed it up a bit, instead of using muslin, I used some burlap I had laying around. We also used 5 minute drywall plaster we had in the garage, both seemed to work just fine!

Step 1: Sketching our Designs

N4 Mixing Drywall Mud

Gloves on! Ready to Roll. We spread the plaster on our cloths

Time to etch an outline

E2's Bull

      You can see in this picture how deep the outline is. We decided that didn't work well, and ended up smoothing more plaster over everyone's project so we could make the impressions lighter.

     Although we intended to only do the plaster as directed, my oldest, L1, REALLY wanted to paint right away (we read somewhere else that frescoes were painted on WET plaster, so that's how he wanted to do it.) So we dove into the Week 3 part right away!

L1 painting!

N4 LOVED spreading his favorite color yellow ALL over!

E2 decided to use lots of color.

N3 Painting

L1's               E2's
N3's               N4s
I took the liberty of painting a bull over the lovely
background N4 made :-)

All About Me Free Printable

Here is a free printable that I created for a Manners class I will be teaching this semester to 4 year old preschoolers. (Perfect audience for learning Manners, am I right?)

I am using the videos from The Etiquette Factory and the first week is just an introduction to what Manners and Etiquette are, so I decided to create a little poster for the kids to color/ decorate to help us get to know each other better. We will probably practice some manners, and take turns telling everyone about our posters. :-)

You should be able to right click and download/print. Please let me know if you have any trouble!
(and as always, please follow terms of use in the right sidebar, thanks!!)

I'm Famous! (Sort of ;-) )

We are back from our family vacation, and ready to dive back into our school work next week! (including our Co-op starting on Fri, which my kids are anxiously counting down to!)

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by a friend for her podcast recently. Since this was just before I discovered CSH, I don't touch on that specifically, but a lot on my own experiences being Un-schooled growing up, and on our more Un-schooly life the last 2 years. I hope you enjoy!


Un-Schooling is NOT Un-Parenting