Something happened this week that is so typical of Allie right now.

One of our cats, Zeus, is testy. He has a giant personality, and he always has. He doesn’t like men at all, and he has always pushed Grace around.

Grace is afraid of him. She won’t walk over him in the hallway; she waits for him to move. If he meows at her, she will jump off the couch, jump out of his way, or jump up onto a chair to get out of his reach. She’s learned that he only talks when he’s mad, and if he’s mad, a swipe may soon follow.

Just today, Zeus and Grace were sitting in our oversized chair with me. I was brushing him (a task of which he does not approve), and he complained. Grace was off my lap and across the room in one step.

When he started purring again, Grace came back to sit in the chair with us. Allie joined the party, sitting on Grace’s lap next to the cat.

I was still brushing.

He cried, voicing protest to the ruffling of his feathers.

Grace gasped, trying to wiggle out of the pile.

Allie sat up straight, looked at me with wide eyes, and squealed, “ZEUS! TALK! TO ME!”

And then she grabbed him around the neck with both arms and hugged and squeezed and rocked his head back and forth.

“Zeus! Nice! Nice Zeus!”

I held my breath, waiting for him to cry again and scratch her, waiting for him to stand up and defend himself.

He never got the chance. It’s hard to scratch someone who’s hugging your neck.

She continued to hug and rock and gush about “Nice Zeus” and “Zeus talk!” for longer than I thought he would allow.

He never made another peep, and he never scratched.

When he’d had enough of her loving, he stood up and jumped down and left the room.

Zeus may have a giant personality, but Allie’s is bigger.

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

I would have posted these photos anyway, but this is a sponsored post for Hershey, PA.

Last summer, Joe’s brother gave Grace Hersheypark tickets for her birthday. We spent eleven hours at the park, staying from before the park opened until almost closing time. We all left exhausted but excited for our next Hersheypark adventure.

Shortly after that, we bought season tickets to Hersheypark.

This year, our first Hersheypark trip was opening day.

Allie is too small for a lot of the rides, but Grace is big enough to be her responsible rider for some things. This makes Grace feel very grown up, as you can imagine.

Hersheypark has over 65 rides – everything from crazy thrill rides (like the Great Bear) to little kid swings (which Grace says don’t go as high as her swing at home).  There are rides that everyone can ride together, like the giant historic carousel, rides just for kids, and rides just for adults.

We spend most of our time on the kids’ and family rides, as you might imagine.

When I was about ten, I loved driving my mom and sister around Geauga Lake Park in these antique cars. We’d all pile into one, and Amanda would laugh the whole time.

I remember the smell and the jerky motion of the cars like it was yesterday.

Now it’s Grace and Allie’s turn to pile in and laugh the whole time.

The first time, Joe and Grace sat in the front, and Allie and I sat in the back.

The lines were short, so we immediately jumped back in line so that Allie could drive her own car. Joe said she turned the wheel the wrong way the whole time. (Fortunately, there’s a rail that keeps you on the track.)

Of course, Grace couldn’t ride while Allie drove. She had to drive her own car, separately.

Allie fell asleep not long after we arrived, so Joe and Grace rode some grown-up rides like the Whip and the Music Express. (Can you tell that the ride isn’t moving?)

After Allie woke up, we had lunch. I was pleasantly surprised to find gluten-free pizza available by request at the pizza shop. There were other gluten-free options too, according to the park map.

After lunch, we set out to ride the girls’ favorite rides.

Since I’ve gotten older, I can’t ride many of the fast, exciting, grown-up rides, so I stick with the things the kids like (for the most part).

We all love this steam train. It’s in an old time pioneer area, and in the fall, they decorate it for Halloween.

I love that the family and kids’ rides are sprinkled all through the park. If they were all in one place, we wouldn’t get to see the whole park, but we cover Hersheypark from one end to the other, stopping here and there for rides and shows.

Grace and Allie both love the seal and sea lion show. It’s not to be missed, especially if you have kids.

We all like the Ferris Wheel and the Monorail, both rides for the whole family.

Joe and the girls rode almost all the kiddie rides. Grace is getting a little too big for some, but she still rides along with her sister.

There were so many things to do that we didn’t get to all of them on opening day. There wasn’t enough time, and the girls got too tired.

Grace especially was dying to visit ZooAmerica (included in your park admission), but I told her we’d do that another day. You can get into it from Hersheypark or go just to the zoo through its separate entrance.

I’m hoping to get there every week or every other week all summer. It’s important to me that we take a break and spend time having fun as a family.

Hersheypark also has motorized wheel chairs available for rent, so my mom is going to try to come with us to the park. The girls and I are really looking forward to that.

I participated in a campaign on behalf of Mom Central Consulting for Hershey Entertainment and Resorts. I received a promotional item as a thank you for participating.

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

Need to entertain your toddler for an hour?

Give her a bottle of glue and a box of buttons.

Okay, it might not have been an hour, but this was definitely the longest-lasting activity Allie has ever done.

It all started because Grace was working on her rainbow button craft, and Allie was not content to be left out. I spread some glue on a piece of paper and gave her a handful of buttons.

There is something amazing about a pile of buttons, whether you’re 2 or 35. They’re all different sizes and shapes, colors and finishes, weights and materials. Some have shanks, and some are completely flat.

This was a fun art project, but it was also a nice sensory experience and fine motor skills practice. Chubby little two-year-old fingers have to work pretty hard at handling the smaller buttons.

Safety note – This is not a good project for toddlers who still mouth things. Pay very close attention. Buttons can be a choking hazard! 

At first, she was content with this situation. She picked through her buttons, declaring them pree! which I can only imagine means pretty.

When she ran out of buttons, I gave her another handful. She stuck them into the glue one by one.

And then she decided that she didn’t have enough glue.

This part made me a little twitchy.

Allie grabbed the giant glue bottle from the middle of the table, and she began squeezing blobs of glue onto her paper.

“No, Allie! You just need a little bit of glue!” I said, taking the bottle away.

She didn’t seem to mind that I’d taken the glue. It was more about making some puddles, I think, than about who controlled the bottle. She was happy to stick some buttons into her puddles.

Eventually, she declared her picture finished and threw all the rest of the buttons on the floor.

Her picture is hanging on my china cabinet with Grace’s masterpieces. It may not be much to look at, but it’s her artwork, and she’s proud of it.

I think it’s really important to display kids’ artwork in your home (even the ugly ones). Seeing their work on display gives them a sense of confidence and importance that saving it in a drawer or box just can’t provide.

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

Joe gets up and goes to church early every Sunday morning. He’s part of our church’s worship team, and they practice before the service.

This leaves me to get the girls fed, ready, and out the door by myself.

I don’t mind getting the girls fed, ready, and out the door by myself. I do it every day of the week, but the process is complicated slightly because I can’t seem to get myself in bed early enough on Saturday night.

So.

I came up with a getting ready for church plan that I thought was fairly brilliant.

I dress the girls on Saturday night in their church outfits, and they sleep in them. We almost always go for knit, comfy, unwrinklable fabrics, so they are no less comfortable than pajamas, but they look nice.

One Saturday evening a few weeks ago, my dad took us out for a fancy Taco Bell dinner. Joe and I had both forgotten to bring a bib, and Allie’s food ended up on Allie’s shirt.

I mentioned that I’d have to change her clothes before she went to bed, and I was disappointed that I’d have to find another church outfit.

“You dressed her on Saturday for church?” My mom asked, incredulous.

“Well, yeah,” I replied. “I don’t have to dress her again on Sunday morning. Ingenious, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t call it ingenious. I’d call it lazy.” She said.

I was speechless.

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

I get excited by volunteer plants, remnants of last year’s planting that survived the winter or grew up to make seeds that sowed themselves. We have at least one volunteer every year.

I read a neat article on Nurture Store last week, about gardening with wild cards. Cathy and her two daughters garden in the city in the UK, and her experiences are a bit different than ours (gardening in our backyard in Pennsylvania).

We have more similarities than differences.

In her post, Cathy says one of her favorite gardening traditions is throwing in a wild card each year – something they’ve never grown before, something that is exciting, something that is a risk.

Joe is growing loofah gourds this year. I think those qualify.

The same day I read Cathy’s words, I went outside with the girls and found two (2!) volunteer plants in places they shouldn’t have been.

I found both of them in flower pots still holding remnants of last year’s annuals, apparently planted by squirrels hoarding seeds cast aside from last year’s pumpkin adventures.

(I may have neglected a pumpkin or five in the backyard to be devoured by the local wildlife.)

I have no idea what these little plants will become, nor if they will become anything at all.

We’ll see!

After I wrote and scheduled this post, we had a hailstorm that I fear killed the smaller of my two wild cards. Time will tell, but I think the stem is broken.

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

We had a pamper yourself day at MOPS last week. There were stations set up around the room with massage chairs and nail polish and assorted paraphernalia.

One of the areas was a craft station where we made hand scrubs.

I’m not a hand scrub kind of person.

I think I still have two salt scrubs that I bought for myself in my teen years. Or maybe I purged them in the last great bathroom decluttering.

Probably the latter.

At any rate, I was pretty excited to make a scrub and give it to my mother, whose skin has been decimated by chemo.

And then I smelled it and decided that Grace would like it.

And then I used it to wash my hands (because I was wiping off the jar I’d poured it into). I hated the gritty, dirty way it made my hands feel. Gross.

I thought about throwing the whole thing in the trash or bringing it home and rinsing it down the drain.

But then I rinsed them off.

It was magical. My hands were soft and smooth and smelled like chocolate orange.

How about that, I thought. Dirt under my fingernails straight through to nice and soft and pretty smelling in twenty seconds!

It was then I knew I’d have to share the recipe with you.

I made my mom a jar of chocolate orange hand scrub, but I haven’t shared my jar with anybody.

Every day, I work out in the garden (without gloves because they impede me). My nails get dirty and gross, and my skin gets covered with soil.

I come in the house and wash my hands twice with liquid hand soap to get all the dirt off. I scoop a bit of my chocolate orange scrub out of the jar. I rub it into my fingernails and cuticles. I rub it into my palms and the heels of my hands and all over the backs of my hands. I rub it into the wrinkles of my knuckles and into my fingernails and cuticles again.

Then I rinse and my hands feel and look like they’ve never seen a garden.

Ever.

It’s like magic.

It is magic.

I don’t know how it works. I guess the sugar is a mild abrasive and removes the dead skin and dirt, and the oil soaks in and plumps up your freshly cleaned skin cells? That’s just a guess.

I tried to find this recipe online, and I didn’t have any luck. I did find a similar recipe labeled as a lip scrub, so I think this one would work for that, too.

If you haven’t gotten your mother anything for Mother’s Day yet, you could throw this together in five minutes. If you don’t have essential oils, skip them. The cocoa powder will still give you a nice scent.

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

This is an awesome homemade Mother’s Day gift that you can make in an afternoon. If you are my mother, mother-in-law, or older sister, you should stop reading now.

Or keep reading and ruin your surprise. It’s up to you.

A few weeks ago, my little sister sent me these two photos on Facebook.

I thought they were really neat, but the link with them was spammy. I scoured the internet to find instructions to make them, trying all kinds of different searches on Swagbucks, Google, and Tineye.

Finally, I found the original crafter’s information on Craftster.org (a message board for crafters).

After reading over fifty pages of explanations, warnings, and tips, I decided we could make these melted bead suncatchers.

Melted Bead Suncatchers Materials

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of our materials. Sorry.

Here’s what you’ll need:

• Glitter Pony Beads - I bought these same ones at the craft store. Any plastic pony beads will work. If you use opaque pony beads, the light won’t go through your suncatchers (there is one opaque bead in one of my pieces below). Plain transparent pony beads are a little cheaper than ones with glitter, but we really liked the glitter look and spent the extra money.
• Metal pans – Any metal pans should work, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to eat out of a pan that I’d melted plastic beads in. The plastic does leave a ring around the edge that I couldn’t get out. We gave ourselves a budget of $15 and hit the Salvation Army Store. We got all shapes and sizes of dishes, including a really neat heart-shaped mini muffin pan. Most of the dishes were 99 cents.
• Normal cooking stuff – hot pads, timer, big metal tongs (for turning the pans)
• String – You could use fishing line, but I can never get it to tie a nice knot, so I got Classic Crochet Thread in Size 10. It is thin enough to almost disappear in the sunshine, but it’s sturdy enough not to fall apart.

How to Make Melted Bead Suncatchers

1. Fill the container with a single layer of beads.

Get as many beads as possible into the container without allowing any to jump up into a second layer.

Grace was really into this part for about five minutes, long enough to fill up the heart tray below.

The hearts below worked pretty well, except for the ones that needed an extra bead. It took a lot of heating to get the two on the right side of the middle row to look like hearts. They didn’t have enough beads.

Another thing to note is that the beads that are flat (with the hole facing you) will melt into a sort of hexagonal shape. The beads that are up on their side will melt into a square or rectangle. A combination of both makes for an interesting pattern.

2. Melt the beads.

After all my craftster.org reading, I decided to melt these in the oven. Preheat to 400, melt for 20-30 minutes, check for adequate melting, heat longer if necessary, remove and cool.

Simple, right?

I also read that the melting plastic produces copious noxious fumes, including possibly cyanide gas (no idea if that’s true or not, just retelling what I read on craftster.org). I did this on a beautiful day, opening all the windows in the house, and turning on the ceiling fans. I gathered my three house cats and tossed them outside, and for the first time in ten years, plucked my turtle from his tank and moved him to a semi-enclosed part of the yard under Grace’s watchful eye.

Then we waited. I came back into the house to check on the beads after 20 minutes, and they weren’t done.

The fumes, however, were nauseating.

After 30 minutes, they still weren’t completely done, but I didn’t know enough to realize it. The arrows in the photo below show all the holes in my first suncatcher (partly due to not enough beads, but also due to not getting melted enough).

This one was in the oven at the same time. It melted perfectly, and is still one of my favorites even though I’ve now made almost twenty of these things.

This one is my most favorite. I just love the colors and the pattern they made. This one took almost a whole bag of beads; it’s really big.

During this outside siesta, the cats ran around, thrilled to have grass under their feet. The turtle was less thrilled.

Obviously.

It took a good three hours from start to finish before our home was re-inhabitable, and I was hesitant to go through all that again. The turtle alone was a lot of work.

Joe suggested that I try melting the beads in our grill outside. It seemed like a good enough idea – temperature controlled, well-ventilated, and required no evacuations.

For the next set of beads, I sorted out colors (making an all-red one, all-pink, all-purple, and all-turquoise, as well as some different color patterns), preheated the grill to 400-ish, and got started.

The grill worked so much better. I highly recommend using a grill if you have one. There were hot spots in the grill that required a little bit of moving and turning, but it was so much easier to deal with the fumes on a small scale (just within the hood of the grill) than throughout my whole house.

A note on that plastic pan – This plastic pan from the Salvation Army said it was oven safe up to 400 degrees. I may have overheated it. Or maybe the melting beads simply fused to it? I don’t know. The melted beads wouldn’t come out. I ended up breaking the whole dish in half trying to get the pretty melted bead disks out of the pan. Stick with metal pans.

I also found I was better able to control the melting of the beads in the grill, probably because I wasn’t trying to hold my breath to avoid breathing in poisonous fumes.

In the grill, the beads took a little less than 20 minutes to melt, and they took less than 5 minutes to cool outside. It was a sunny but very breezy day. I’ve since melted beads twice more using the grill, and the timing was about the same. My results have been consistently good with the grill.

3. Drill little holes in the plastic.

I knew I wanted to have a large piece, then a medium piece, then a small piece, then 3 hearts on the suncatchers for my mom and mother-in-law, and smaller ones for my sister and Old Grandma. I used a Sharpie to make a dot where each hole should go, and then Joe did the drilling for me using a very small drill bit.

I do not recommend Joe’s drilling method.

In fact, I only took this picture to show the Emergency Room doctor how Joe drilled a hole in his leg. Fortunately, I didn’t need it, but that does not mean this is a safe way to drill the holes.. Put the suncatcher on a workbench or something.

Also, don’t drill on the kitchen table, counter top, deck, or any other surface you want to remain nice. You have to put something underneath it for the drill to sink into.

4. String the pieces together.

I used the crochet thread (which was exactly the right size to string through the holes Joe made) to connect the pieces together. I played around with spacing, deciding on shorter strings between the bigger pieces and longer strings for the hearts at the bottom.

I just strung the string through all the pieces and tied a plain old knot in the two ends of the string, pulling it tightly and trimming the ends.

I want to show you all of my creations, so I created a slideshow below. It contains some tips and tricks as well as photos of almost all the suncatchers I’ve made so far.

Melted Bead Suncatcher

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Picture 1 of 12

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

The best vacation of my entire life was our honeymoon. Joe and I splurged on a 10-day cruise to Florida and Mexico. It was incredible luxury vacation, from nightly 4-course meals to extravagant excursions at every port.

To me, a cruise is the ultimate vacation. Nothing will ever change that. I’ve been bitten by the cruising bug, and I’ve been looking forward to our second cruise since we got home from our first.

Now that we’re parents, our priorities have changed. We still want to go on a cruise, but we prefer kid-friendly menus over escargot and lobster tails. We prefer kiddie pools over adults-only pools. We prefer rowdy games and craft activities over the serenity and peace of the spa.

(I never thought I’d say that. I really like serenity and peace.)

The awesome thing about a cruise is that you don’t really have to choose. If your kids are old enough (and adventurous enough) to participate in the on-board kids’ programs, you can still experience some of the grown-up activities while they’re off making new friends.

The thought makes me giddy.

Norwegian Cruise Line has a program called Splash Academy where kids ages 3-12 can play, learn, and make new friends while mom and dad enjoy a little private time. (The program includes babies from 6 months to 2 also, but a parent is required to attend.)

I think Grace would be excited to participate in Splash Academy because they offer a circus program – juggling, tumbling, and performing tricks – as well as craft workshops, movies, and Wii.

At 5, Grace is old enough to flex her independence a wee bit and enjoy some time with Norwegian’s trained counselors, but if she preferred to stay with us, that would be okay too.

When we’re looking for family activities, we look for things that we can all do together, like the Kids Pool, family sports challenges, and the Nickelodeon on Norwegian activities.

Because Dora and Diego are Allie’s best friends after her sister. Dora’s Dance Party? Yes, please.

In any vacation, we look for family activities and family meal options. Our kids are little. They don’t sit still; they aren’t always quiet. They’re picky and messy.

And sometimes, they sleep through meal times.

Norwegian Cruise Line’s Freestyle Dining Program is perfect for families like mine. Basically, you can eat any time you want, in almost any restaurant on board. If you miss a mealtime because someone is napping, no problem! You can go somewhere else instead. (Having a prescribed dinner time was my least favorite thing about our first cruise.)

I love that Norwegian caters to families, with plenty of options for activities together and apart. I love that the price is all-inclusive. There are no extra fees for the kids’ workshops or for entertainment or for normal meals. (There are a few things that cost extra, like babysitting and some restaurants.)

We’ve been saving our pennies for another cruise. I’m pretty sure we’ll be cruising with Norwegian. I hope it’s soon!

Please visit Norwegian’s site to learn more about their family vacation experience

Enter to win a cruise for a family of four!

No kidding.

BlogHer and Norwegian Cruise Line is offering a voucher for a cruise for a family of four to one lucky reader. (One winner will be chosen from comments on all the participating blogs, not one winner from Feels Like Home.)

To be entered for a chance to win, tell me about your family’s dream vacation in the comments.
Rules: 

No duplicate comments.

You may receive (2) total entries by selecting from the following entry methods:

1. Leave a comment in response to the sweepstakes prompt on this post
2. Tweet (public message) about this promotion; including exactly the following unique term in your tweet message: “#SweepstakesEntry”; and leave the URL to that tweet in a comment on this post
3. Blog about this promotion, including a disclosure that you are receiving a sweepstakes entry in exchange for writing the blog post, and leave the URL to that post in a comment on this post
4. For those with no Twitter or blog, read the official rules to learn about an alternate form of entry.

Entries from all participating blogs will be pooled for winner selection; only two entries per household.

This giveaway is open to US Residents age 18 or older. Winners will be selected via random draw, and will be notified by e-mail. You have 72 hours to get back to me, otherwise a new winner will be selected.

The Official Rules are available here.

This sweepstakes runs from 5/7/2013-6/2/2013.

Be sure to visit Norwegian Cruise Line’s brand page on BlogHer.com where you can read other bloggers’ posts!

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

When I was a little girl, we had a lot of cookouts. Someone was always building a fire and cooking something over open flames.

My favorite things to cook in the fire were banana boats.

They’re quite easy:

1. Wrap a banana, peel attached, loosely in aluminum foil.
2. Slit the banana open to form a boat.
3. Stuff the opening with chocolate chips and marshmallows.
4. Seal the aluminum foil and place the package in the campfire, down in the coals.
5. Wait 5 or 10 minutes, carefully remove the package from the coals, let it cool (which takes forever), and eat with a spoon.

It is one of those foods that instantly makes me feel like a kid again: mushy cooked banana, sweet gooey marshmallows, and creamy melted chocolate. Every bite is a memory.

Campfire banana boats are not without problems. Because of the foil and the banana peel, they stay hot forever. You have to either set them down or burn your fingers trying to get to the gooey chocobanana mess inside. Sometimes both.

I digress.

My mom likes these a lot, too, and she figured out an easier way to make them. That’s the recipe below. I took lots of pictures to make it seem more like a real recipe than it really is.

As I mentioned, the thing that has always bugged me about banana boats is that they take so long to cool. I never wait long enough, and I always burn my tongue on molten banana and chocolate.

Always.

Sometimes twice.

Patience isn’t one of my finer points.

Turning them into ice cream sundaes completely negates this problem. The introduction of ice cream makes the banana cool almost instantly. You’ll be eating your banana boat less than a minute after it comes out of the microwave. (Do be careful and check to make sure it’s cool enough to eat, and don’t sue me if you burn yourself.)

Grace thought these were awesome. She called them special bananas.

Then she screamed, My banana melted! EWWWWW! and wouldn’t touch it again.

Bananas do get very soft when they’re cooked, but they don’t exactly melt. I think it was the combination of mushy banana and melting ice cream that gave her the heeby jeebies.

I ate hers after she left the table.

It was delicious.

Have you ever made banana boats?

Is this how you do it? What’s your method?

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.

5-year-old Grace will soon finish first grade, so I thought it was time to share the curricula we’ve used this year as well as what worked and what didn’t work.

We continued to participate in a cyber school for first grade (here’s why we chose that route).

I wanted to quit the cyber school (and its curriculum) partway through this year, but I thought Grace and I should make the decision together. Quitting meant she would have to give up the in-person classes she really enjoys (art), but it would have given us a lot more freedom and flexibility in terms of day to day schoolwork. Grace was adamant that she did not want to quit, so we stuck with it. Instead of abandoning our primary curriculum, I tweaked it to fit us better. It takes a lot more planning now, but it works much better for Grace’s unique learning style and abilities.

In the end, sticking with it was absolutely the right decision (even though we still have a lot of school left to finish before we break for the summer). The planning and the work are tough. Homeschooling is challenging me as much as it challenges Grace.

Disclosure – When I realized I wanted to use the curricula below, I reached out to publishers. Some agreed to give me a copy of their full curriculum in exchange for inclusion in my curriculum guide. If they had not agreed, I would have purchased it on my own. I believe in all of them that much.

Our First Grade Homeschool Curriculum

1. Calvert First Grade

To be fair, I want to first say that I am teaching an exceptional student whose needs and abilities are very different from an average kid. Calvert works for many kids, just as it’s written. It doesn’t work for us that way, but I doubt that any all-in-one curriculum would.

We get Calvert free from our cyberschool. Like any curriculum, Calvert has advantages and disadvantages.

We used the first grade curriculum in its entirety when we first started. I felt like Grace would miss something important if I didn’t follow each instruction and force her to do each worksheet and activity.

For a very young, very bright child like Grace, this made her grow to hate school time. It was constant worksheets and practice that she didn’t really need.

After a few chats with my friend Colleen (an elementary gifted teacher turned homeschooler), I realized that I needed to modify the curriculum to challenge Grace. I needed to leave out the vast majority of the worksheets and practice, because Grace simply didn’t need it.

Here are each of the Calvert subjects and how I’ve modified them:

Reading – We don’t do any sight word instruction at all, and Grace has a vocabulary far exceeding many adults, so we don’t do much of that, either.

We do read one story from the Calvert reader each day. We don’t do the worksheets or questions that go along with the story (too basic), but we do talk about the story. Sometimes, we role play the story or I have Grace write about the story in her journal. Sometimes, she retells or rereads the story to her dad when he gets home. My point is that Grace reads to me from her reader every day, and we make up our own comprehension/interaction activities to fit each story.

Phonics - Grace gets a lot of phonics with The Logic of English, below, so we do these activities rarely. When we do them, we use magnetic letters on a whiteboard or Scrabble tiles on the table, and we take turns making words with certain letters. (The last one we did was words with -r blends. I made crap, and Grace made trap. Then track and grab. We went on like that until we couldn’t think of any more words. I walked away, and Grace played with the letters for another ten minutes by herself.) We play games and try to make each other laugh.

Writing - The Calvert curriculum suggests writing prompts a few times a week, and I do try to get Grace to do them in her journal. We often modify them (instead of writing a friendly letter in the journal, we wrote a letter to her penpal), but we do try to do these activities.

I am a Certified Writing Specialist, and I know that the only way to learn to write fluently is to practice getting your ideas down on paper. Often.

Fine motor skills are a stumbling block for Grace (because she’s so young, I suspect), and the actual act of writing letters is still a challenge. I sometimes let her dictate her writing, and I do the writing on the page. It’s still practice in fluency because she’s making up the story.

Spelling - So spelling. I give Grace a pretest on the Calvert spelling words, and she gets every single spelling word correct, so I also count that as the spelling test and we forget about spelling until the following week when this process repeats itself. She’s never missed a single spelling word on the pre-test.

Handwriting - I really dislike Calvert Script, the specific-to-Calvert brand of cursive handwriting. I think Calvert Script is like a lazy version of cursive writing, with some letters almost-printed and some written in cursive. I am not using this AT ALL.

Because the Calvert tests (that we have to turn in to Grace’s cyber school teacher) require some cursive writing, we went back to The Logic of English cursive workbook, and Grace is learning that way.

Math – Calvert uses Singapore Math in first grade. I am impressed by the math skills taught here.

Right now, Grace is learning 2 and 3 digit addition and subtraction. I didn’t know these were first grade math skills, but they are an appropriate challenge for her. I can’t wait to see what’s next.

I should also say that I modify the math lessons quite a bit. We do the lesson, I do a couple of guided practice problems with Grace, and when she feels like she can do them on her own, I watch her solve 2 or 3 problems for independent practice. If she can do 2 or 3 on her own, we quit. She doesn’t need 10 guided practice problems, and she doesn’t need to solve 10 more independent problems if she can do 2 or 3 correctly without any help. Some kids need all that practice, but Grace simply doesn’t.

Science - Grace really liked the science curriculum at first (lots of hands-on experiments and investigations), but it quickly turned into a lot of reading and writing without hands-on activities. We’ve dropped a lot of that. I want her to do science, not to read about science in a textbook.

We do a lot of science activities and experiments that I find online instead.

Social studies - She enjoys the social studies for the most part. It started out really easy, so we’ve skipped a lot, but we’re into labeling a world map and learning about the continents and oceans. It’s good stuff for her to know.

Technology - We have done the technology lessons sporadically, but they’re pretty good. Right now, I have Grace working on the keyboarding skills lessons from earlier in the year.

Poetry, Games, & Activities - These are good. It’s nice that they build in fun things to the curriculum. We don’t end up doing them most of the time because we had other games or crafts or whatever planned, and we don’t have time to do everything. I get a lot of ideas from this section of the curriculum, though. Sometimes, I pull the activities out and save them for a day when we have more time to play.

The bottom line on Calvert – If the cyber school weren’t paying for Calvert, we would not use it. As I said above, I think it probably works well for most kids, but it is not a good fit for Grace. I wanted to quit Calvert partway through this year, but Grace wanted to stick with it so that she could continue going to her art class. We’re making Calvert work for us, but I am not comfortable recommending it as a first grade curriculum option.

2. The Logic of English

If there hadn’t been The Logic of English, I might have been happy with Calvert’s phonics and reading instruction. I didn’t know any better.

Fortunately for Grace, I was introduced to Denise Eide and her program, The Logic of English, and we’ve been using it for almost a year now. We started with 30 lessons on the phonograms (that’s the sounds made by each letter), and we moved into the actual curriculum after that.

The rules and the phonograms are not hard; Grace has a great memory. She understands how the rules work together to explain spelling words; this makes sense to her.

What’s really tough for Grace is the weekly spelling list. They can be quite challenging. While Calvert is giving Grace spelling words like look and good, The Logic of English is giving her spelling words like train and play and strong and hero (which seems like it should be easy, but trips her up every single time).

We just finished a unit review where Grace went back and practiced the words she missed during the last 5 lessons. She wrote each of the consistently-missed words on an index card, and we used those words to play games. She had enough to fill a bingo board!

I’m really happy that Grace isn’t able to skate through The Logic of English. It’s hard for her. She has to work at it. She makes mistakes, corrects them, and learns. It’s beautiful.

The bottom line on The Logic of English - We use this curriculum for spelling, grammar, writing, reading, and cursive. We had taken a break on the cursive handwriting, but Calvert forced us back into it.

3. Lapbooks

Whenever a topic comes along that interests us, we learn about it and then make a lapbook. A lapbook is a way of reviewing and displaying information, like a homemade book full of graphic organizers. Once I figured this out, I was in love. It’s a record of the cool stuff we learned.

I put our lapbooks together using stuff from a bunch of books: The Ultimate Lap Book Handbook (which is currently out of print, I think, but so good), The Big Book of Reproducible Graphic Organizers, Big Book of Books and Activities (pretty hard to find but worth it), The Big Book of Projects (another hard to find but really good resource), 3-D Graphic Organizers, and the website Homeschool Share (where everything is free).

We are currently working on a sloths lapbook. We might start a rainforest one next, since that goes along.

4. Lots and lots of really good books

We read constantly, voraciously, several times every single day.

Here are our favorite picture books (101 Picture Books to Read or Hear Before You Grow Up) and our favorite chapter books (101 Chapter Books to Read or Hear Before You Grow Up).

5. Experiments and activities

I mentioned in the Calvert section above that we do a lot of science activities and experiments that I’ve found online. We don’t do units so much as we explore Grace’s interests as they pop up or as I find cool stuff.

Last year, we did an apple investigation – sampled 17 different kinds of apples, created a graph of their flavors and textures, compared their sizes, and made applesauce.

We’ve done experiments with seeds, polymers, clouds, colors, and more. Some of my favorite sites for inspiration are:

• Nurture Store
• Raising Lifelong Learners
• The Homeschool Scientist
• Steve Spangler Science

6. Home Art Studio

I am so excited about Home Art Studio! It was created by Lindsey Volin, a certified art teacher who’s also a mom of two. It is a DVD-based home art curriculum designed to increase students’ appreciation for and love of the visual arts.

We’re started with the kindergarten curriculum (skipping a few activities because Grace has already done something very similar) and will move on to first grade after that. Ms. Volin recommends doing one lesson a week, but we pretty much always have a project drying or hanging or half done. Grace really loves art, and she asks to do it almost every day. (We don’t have time to do it every day, but she asks.)

One thing I really like about Home Art Studio is that each DVD comes with printable lesson plans. I view them on screen so that I know what materials are required and what the objectives of the lesson will be.

7. The Bible for All Ages

I really love this Bible curriculum. We’ve been using it for a couple of years, since Grace was in preschool. Each lesson includes a coloring page and a cartoon version of a Bible story.

8. We Choose Virtues

I’ve written before about We Choose Virtues. I really love it.

We don’t do this as often now, but we still talk about VirtueVille kids, discussing their virtue, why they’re important, and how to display them. It takes 2 minutes, but it has set the stage for some serious virtue discussions at other times. Those kids have also been a source of pride for Grace as she models her behavior after theirs.

© 2013, Tara Ziegmont. All rights reserved.