critical thinking

While the kids are busy shakin’ their party shakers or rockin’ out to some Bingo Bonanza, the adults can have their New Year’s Eve fun, too. Actually, everyone can have fun with this homemade game of 20 Questions.     No …

We’re week three into our tabletop surprises, and this week, we rocked some sneaky math, literacy, and creative thinking. The kids woke up to some easy activities and ones that required more thinking—and two that required more movement. Sign language …

    Summer is kicking us hard over here. Actually, swim and dive are kicking us hard over here, like always.  And at five weeks in, between meets, practices, relays, pep rallies, and team events, our family has run a …

Some children are able to easily read the words on a page but cannot remember a lick of what they read. Believe it. Whole paragraphs, pages, chapters can sometimes decoded–words read, even fluently–but nothing.  The child remember nothing.  Frustrating right?  …

It’s actually hard for me to type this title after years and years and years of math drills that made my elementary-school head want to explode. Can learning math facts be fun? Is it possible that learning these facts can …

It’s Spring Fair time, Science Share time, Reader’s Tea, Poetry Share, and International Night time at schools all around the country. Kids are sharing their learning, and they’re learning about sharing. Or at least they could be! My kids are …

We are always looking for reasons to play with our food over here, so when we put away the last of the holiday decorations, instead of tossing our candy canes, we held onto those puppies. Today, in between a lot …

It’s been a busy few weeks for us, between school, sports, Blogalicious, Halloween, and my parents coming down to spend time with the kids while I attended the NAEYC conference this past week. But when I returned Saturday night to …

There may only be a few more days left until our Jack-O-Lanterns turn into lunch for the squirrels (if they haven’t already!), but the candy that my kids have collected this beautiful Halloween night will be around for days. Or …

me on the map: how to teach kids where in the world they live | circles to show where kids live on the planet, continent, country, state, city, street, home

Maddy, Owen, and Cora had an absolute blast performing candy experiments using their Halloween loot this week, but I think the most fun they had stemmed from our own experiment missteps. We tried to conquer the Color Separation experiment, but …

20 fun ways to learn spelling words | sight word games | spelling word games | best ways to learn sight words | teachmama.com

    Read-alouds are the perfect time to sneak in a little bit of learning, whether you’re talking simple reading comprehension strategies, concepts of print, or word recognition. Tonight, we rocked our nighttime read-aloud with a few more thought-provoking and …

    Lately, we’ve been so busy. May flew by, like it always does for us–a blur of end-of-school activities, yard work, picnics, park dates, and now pool time. So I’ve tried to sneak in what I can, when I …