Baby steps

I want to be more environmentally-conscious. In fact, my kids actively encourage me to do so, which I appreciate! I remember to bring my reusable bags into the grocery store a higher percentage of the time than I used to remember. Baby steps, right?

The next step? Cloth napkins. Ann gave me the brilliant idea of buying a bunch of bandanas for $1 each. They come in such cute prints these days! So I picked up 12 at Walmart today. I let the kids each choose two, and I chose the remaining eight (all matching.) I love the adorable owl print!

 

Assuming we like using cloth napkins, I think it would be nice to make some eventually, with thicker fabric. But for now, these will do just fine. They were inexpensive; they're cute (well, some are gaudy, I admit!), and I didn't have to sew the hems myself!

I like when baby steps are so easy to take! Maybe some day I'll eliminate paper towels in my house too!

Weekly Character Trait: Consideration

Each week as part of our homeschooling, we focus on one character trait. This week it is "Consideration."

Character Trait Consideration

To see all the documents I have available, just click the "homeschool downloads" tab at the top of this post. Or you may easily view and print or download all of my documents by clicking this: cbethblog's Scribd documents.

You may use any of these documents for any purpose as long as you are not selling them or otherwise making a profit from them.

All About Me lapbooks

Lapbooks are a homeschooling trend. I was going to try to define what a lapbook is, but instead I think I'll just show you the ones the kids made a couple of weeks ago. You'll get the idea!

Our theme was "All About Me." Much of our lapbook design came from the free download at this site.

The kids worked hard all week on their lapbooks. (You can see any of these photos in more detail by clicking on them.)

Chickie, Zoodle, and Coqui (Ann's son) all did this project. They then presented them to each other.  They each really enjoyed being the center of attention, showing each other what they'd made!

Here are a few more pics of Chickie's lapbook:

And Zoodle's:

Because Chickie is so interested in anatomy, I wanted to include a fun human body project as part of her lapbook. I drew an outline of the human body (available in PDF below). Chickie then traced it on five pieces of tracing paper. On the original paper, she decorated the body to look like herself, and "dressed" it in her favorite outfit. (Zoodle did this part too!) On each piece of tracing paper, she drew a different body system: Skeletal, Digestive, Nervous, Cardiovascular, and Muscular. These were all stacked and stapled together so that it made a book with "layers" for each body system. She did great--I love how this project turned out!

Here is the body outline I made. Feel free to use it or share it.

Body Outline