Notebooking Spotlight...Notebooking Fairy Interview

In the Notebooking Spotlight, Jimmie features homeschool moms who use notebooking with their children. This week she is interviewing me!

When did you start notebooking?

Notebooking is something that has grown just as our homeschooling has grown. I can’t really pin-point when we started notebooking, but I began collecting their work as soon as they were old enough to sit at the table and make their own pages. We usually began with blank pages of paper because when children are little they want to be able to express themselves without any limitations. When they get a little older, they might begin asking what types of things I wanted for their narrations. Then the structure of a pre-made notebook page was helpful...

Pop on over to the

The Notebooking Fairy
for the rest of the interview...

We are Featured on Gingerbread Snowflakes Today!

Pam at Gingerbread Snowflakes has posted a very sweet post about our homeschool, along with another mom, Rebbecca of Roots and Wings. This came coincidentally on the same week I posted my 1000th post! If you would like to see it, hop on over. Thank you so much, Pam.

Charting the Weather: a guest post by What Do We Do All Day?

What Do We Do All Day?

Today  I have a  guest post from What Do We Do All Day? 
 Because she lives in the city with no car, no yard and a tiny apartment in a big city, she sometimes she has to be creative to keep her young ones busy. We all benefit from her creativity. Today she shares her project on charting weather. This is an activity that is simple and open to a wide age group.

In November Kiddo tracked the daily high and low temperatures on a piece of graph paper. This was fun for him since he is so attracted to numbers and all things weather-related. He liked studying the graph everyday while he ate (it hung and the wall near the table). I think if we do this again, we will use a larger graph (easier for little fingers), but he enjoyed it.

For older kids you could make this into a more advanced project by:

1. tracking the difference in high and low temperature every day
2. tracking the discrepancy between the predicted and the actual temperatures
3. calculating the change in temperature from day to day
4. calculating the average temperature

For Preschoolers there are lots of fun ways to track the weather, take a look over at this post at Blissful Kids or take a look at the weather wheel Kiddo made two years ago.

Extra Credit Reading:
The Best Book of Weather
If Frogs Made the Weather

What Will the Weather Be?

Another Polymer: guest posting over at What Do We Do All Day?

We have been having fun with polymers, or long chains of molecules that link together to make slimy or rubbery things...just the kind of thing boys like. Here is a simple experiment using things you probably have around the house that will engage your young boys. They love making something they can play with.

Pop on over to What Do We Do All Day? to see the how-to's...

What Do We Do All Day?

Faux Stained Glass Lanterns for the Holidays; a joint post with Pam of Gingerbread Snowflakes

I am very excited today to present to your a series of projects I have been working on with the help of Pam from Gingerbread Snowflakes. I have enjoyed her blog for some time now as she posts regularly on a wide variety of holiday crafts, recipes and the such. I have learned about the customs of many holidays that I was not familiar with from this blog. And today we are sharing ideas on making stained glass for the holidays. She gives a step-by-step tutorial for adults to make beautiful candles for Advent or for gifts. You must go over to Gingerbread Snowflakes to see her part of our joint adventure in making Advent Candles. Aren't these candles gorgeous? She will tell you all about the symbols of comfort she has put into these candles.





  My part of this joint post, is stained glass candles for Advent that you can make with children. Pam, however, has helped me with many steps along the way, which I will share with you.

Quite some time ago she posted these beautiful lanterns at and I was amazed at how such few and simple materials could make such beautiful lanterns. I have always had an appreciation for both lanterns with candles and stained glass. I told her that I had done Mod Podge lanterns with colored tissue paper before, but not with colored Mod Podge.

"Funny thing you have mentioned the mod podge/ tissue on jars because I
have been playing with the idea during the holidays of maybe a
similar thing only trying to make it look like real stained glass by
adding lines between the pieces of tissue with a black sharpie!"-Pam of Gingerbread Snowflakes

With that thought in mind, I just had to give it a try with my boys.
I had some clear glass votives so we gave it a try.

I gave them some Mod Podge, a brush and some tissue paper. They painted on the Mod Podge...

place pieces of tissue paper over the Mod Podge and then paint on another layer of Mod Podge to seal it. Even the youngest child can make these because it doesn't matter if there are spaces between the torn tissue paper. Let dry.

When they dry, they look like this.

Then we added the leading lines with a black permanent marker...

The results were these lovely faux stained glass votives, which would be great homemade gifts for children to give.

This is a beautiful example at First Palette of making this type of stained glass using puffy paint instead of a plain permanent marker.

"I was thinking of buying one of those tall devotional candles.
Sometimes we are able to get them without images...
on them - just clear. I think they would be just beautiful used in this way."
- Pam of Gingerbread Snowflakes

This got us started with experimenting with different ways of making the faux stained glass effect.
Gallery Glass sells a faux Liquid Leading so we thought we would give it a try with our tissue paper and Mod Podge votives.



Just like before, we used Mod Podge and tissue paper but instead of the leading lines being made with marker...

apply the Gallery Glass Liquid Leading around the edges of the tissue paper. For the youngest children, you might want to do this step for them.

Once it is dry, the lines are more raised than that of the marker, giving it more of a look of real stained glass.

Wonderful for gifts or just to light for decorations during the holidays.

I then thought about making my own leading out of white glue and black paint. The white (Elmer's-type) glue dries clear, so mixes with the color of the paint quite well. When we began applying it, though, we could immediately see that this faux leading was much thinner and more prone to spread or drip. We used on the votives, but I didn't like the effect as much as with the Gallery Glass leading.

I thought that it might be more successful on a flat surface, so I turned to Plexiglas

 with this result!...

 and this result!
(Tutorial for these here.)

 I wanted them to be able to use them for holiday decorations, so I took these stained glass projects made from the laminating sheets and made them into luminaries.

 I took some white lunch-sized bags... (I always get a kick out of these "Colors" brand white bags!)

 traced my finished stained glass project on the bag and then cut out a hole just slightly smaller than the project.

I then taped the project to the opening in the bag...

put a little sand in the bottom and lit a tea-light candle.

Can't you see them now greeting your guests along a walkway on holiday evenings?

"I am intrigued with your idea of using black paint and Elmers. And it
made me think to pass this on. Las year (09) Diane was experimenting
with a craft that wasn't working well because every product she tried
ran. In trying to help her find something that would work- stay put
on a slanted or vertical surface, I found a product called Aleene's
Super Thick Tacky Glue. It might be better if the color used is a
powdered material so as not to dilute it, but it might work."
-Pam of Gingerbread Snowflakes


And, to make full circle, I had to experiment with making faux stained glass with colored Mod Podge.

We made the outlines with permanent marker.

Then I mixed up a palette of stained glass color by mixing little cups of Mod Podge and food coloring.

We painted it between the lines, treating the lines like a coloring book.

And here is what they look like when the Mod Podge dries...it is translucent!

Here is hoping your holidays will be bright.

How to Make An Altered Composition Book Page; Guest Post by Susan of Stitching Life

Maybe you are like my children and myself and found lapbooking and premade notebooking pages dull much like workbooks. What are you to do?

You know you must read to learn and write to learn and perhaps you like to draw to learn too, as we do.

The answer for us is the altered composition book, a form of recording our learned lessons that developed out of our love for altering real books.

Here is an altered real book that Kathryn made when she was five years old...

it is the seed for the idea of the way we journal lessons now.

Before you begin to make your own altered composition books you will gather some supplies: colored pencils, a glue stick, a pen and thin black marker, some tracing paper and a composition journal.

Perhaps you are sure you like to read good books, the kind of books that tell good stories and have useful information.
To make an altered composition book start by reading a good book.

Read a bit at a time in a pace comfortable for you.

The children read one section in their Apologia Science books per day, or two if the section is short.
The assignment after reading is to narrate in writing some interesting to you information and draw/trace and color a picture to go with your writing.

Some students may ask how much information should they write and here the teacher can say three pieces of information or one bit of information whatever seems good for the child's level and the reading that is chosen.

The teacher should mix it up from time to time, change the assignment from bits and drawings to perhaps making a chart with something you learned comparing two things.

Or this week in your altered composition book I want a paragraph of one topic you were especially interested in that includes a title, an adverbial phrase and a who/which clause. I find Blooms Taxonomy of question starters inspiration for mixing up the altered book assignments.

It is helpful to have an example in the beginning of what you, the teacher, are looking for.

Here I made an altered composition book page for my son (13) this year, to show him how I wanted him to journal about what he learned.

Yes, think of altering composition books like journaling.

Here is a page from my sons altered science composition book this year

You will find many more examples of altered composition books under the category on my side bar at Stitching Life called A Trip Around the World.

Students think of the altered composition book page as a poster or presentation of their work. Since they are working on a bit each day it is not over whelming to them.

Starting with bubble lettering is a good way to begin. Bubble letter the title of your pages as we do in our geography altered books. Think about what colors might be good for your topic as in Ireland we chose red and green and white the colors of their flag or as in the Amish where we chose the colors of their clothes, the blues and grays.

The altered composition book encourages pride in work, makes a great keepsake and a good tool for reviewing.

There is no limit to what you might include in the altered composition book, mini books, origami, real photographs, printed pages from the Internet, all is useful.

The bulk or main part of the altered book should always, as I say to my children, be your drawings and writing.
It is far better to trace a person or map yourself than to put in a printed from the computer one.

Are you worried that the children will not include good information in their writing? Maybe they will not list the causes of the civil war for example or the parts of a cell as you might see in the prompts for lapbooks or the questions on workbook pages.

Trust, your children. Trust the good books you have chose for them. The children will chose good information to write and draw about, it just happens without much help from the teacher as the children's minds naturally are drawn to what interests them at the time of their reading much in the same way things interest you when you read.

The altered composition book does not replace writing assignments (written narrations) on topics for us.
The children write one essay a week this year using some mini writing lesson on a skill I am teaching them using the Institute for Excellence in Writing materials.

The altered composition book is not used in every subject every day this would be tedious for us.

I might have a schedule like this for a day.

Faith - do Seton wkbk, read Catholic Reluctantly three pages

Math - do next lesson

Science - read next section write and draw three bits.

World Geography - bubble letter and trace a map and read DK Geo. about Germany
Art - read about Durer outline an essay about him, two paragraphs, early life and works.

American History- Read about the flag.

Writing- Listen to mini lesson on sentence openers

Dictation - Copywork

Fix it - Edit passage, circle nouns underline verbs, put parenthesis around prepositions

Grammar - Play preposition bingo.

Roots - bag word review

Remember this...

"Like I said before, the kinds of ideas that children need to nourish their minds are mostly found in books with literary quality. If children are provided with these kinds of books, then their minds will do the work themselves to sort, arrange, select, choose, reject, and group the ideas together."

-From p.117 of Charlotte Mason in Modern English

Written by Susan of Stitching Life.

"I learned to crochet as a child. More recently I taught myself to quilt. I also home school our three children ages 10, 12 and 13, always have. On my blog I share my crochet and quilting projects, lesson plans for our school and sometimes recipes and book reviews."
This is a re-posting from Sept. 25 at Stitching Life.

Habits for a Happy Home: Family Camp; a guest post

Thanks to Trisha, I am guest posting at Habits for a Happy Home today.

If you would like to follow this year's camp activities, click here.