Tea Time Tuesdays

Join us each week for Tea Time Tuesdays!

Summer is quickly coming to an end, and I am dreaming of our upcoming homeschool year. Like most homeschool mamas at this time of the year I have been busy setting goals, finalizing curriculum choices, and organizing our school room. During this process I realized that every year I say I am going to get my children into the kitchen more, but I never seem to follow through. This year that is going to change! Every Tuesday my kiddos will be in charge or preparing food and setting our table for Tea Time Tuesdays.

What will you see from us during our Tea Time Tuesdays posts?

On this blog I will share:

• Featured poem of the week
• A tea time snack recipe
• Our table setting

How will I prepare for poetry tea time?

 This afternoon the children and I will be heading out to find some new dishes for our special Tuesday afternoons. I already own a quite few teacups, but I think the children will enjoy selecting their own dishes. I will need to purchase a larger teapot as well. The only teapots I own are part of a “tea for one” set, and those teapots are not nearly big enough for four people to share. I will also gather a number of poems and recipes that I would like to use in the upcoming weeks.

I can’t wait to start this new tradition in our home.
Need some inspiration for your own poetry teatime? Check out this wonderful page from Brave Writer and come back each week to see what we are doing here at Homework and Horseplay.

 

 

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Easy Grammar Review

Brace yourself….
This may be the first negative review of Easy Grammar you have read!

I have used this program two different times now, and I will never use it again. My children are not typically complainers when it comes to school, but Kenten and Julia spent MOST of this past year complaining about their grammar work.

How does Easy Grammar work?
Easy Grammar is a mastery program that focuses on being able to find prepositions and prepositional phrases. This unique approach makes it easier for your child to label subjects and verbs. 

What do you need to teach Easy Grammar?
The only book you absolutely need to use Easy Grammar is the “Teacher’s Edition” of the level your child is using. The teacher’s edition includes everything from the student workbook in addition to the answer keys to each lesson. I highly recommend purchasing the student workbook along with your teacher’s edition, otherwise you will spend a lot of time and money photocopying the reproducible worksheets.

What level should I use with my child?
It is recommended to use the age-appropriate grade level that your child is in. However, Easy Grammar does provide Elementary Placement and 7-12 Placement tests on their page if you are concerned about ordering the wrong level.

What don’t you like about Easy Grammar?
My main problem with Easy Grammar is the lack of instruction. I don’t know if the lower levels had more to their daily lessons, but Easy Grammar Plus only had a few sentences of instructions and one or two sample sentences. This program is too much like a “boring worksheet” that my children complete and forget as soon as they are done.

Homework and Horseplay’s final thoughts…

Easy Grammar just is not the right fit for our family. Any program that causes my children to complain endlessly is more hassle than it is worth. Some people may enjoy having super short instructions, but for me I prefer more teacher involvement. My youngest son (Jack) used Shurley English this year. Although Easy Grammar and Shurley English both have a lot of repetition and similar work, Jack truly learned the parts of speech rather than just memorizing a bunch of prepositions. Kenten and Julia will not continue using Easy Grammar next year, even though it is one of the products included in the curriculum kits we plan to use.

 

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What Is Your Homeschool Style?

#NoGuilt

This summer I had big plans to get ahead on EVERYTHING, but life got in the way… I have been sick more often than not for the last few months. Every time I start feeling better some other kind of germ smuggles into my life. On top of our day to day life, I have been trying to get ahead with preparations for the partnership classes I will be teaching in the fall, making curriculum decisions for my children, and cleaning out our school room for the upcoming year (which is no easy task since we still use it daily). Life decided to give me an extra kick in the butt last week. Not only is our pool heater broken, but my trusty Macbook died. AHHHH! It truly was just a rotten week, so I decided to step back and take some time to recover. Instead of spending hours preparing and stressing for everything starting in the fall I spent three days in my favorite chair reading and reading and reading some more! I forgot how nice it is to read simply for enjoyment. I made zero progress on preparations, got behind on the housework, probably disappointed my children by becoming a book hermit, but I feel so refreshed. I am ready to jump back into things and focus on the positive. A few years ago I would have felt guilty about taking a few days off to do only what I wanted to do, but I have grown to realize that some “me time” is a requirement when you are a homeschool mama.

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Social Media Recipe

Have you heard of IFTTT? When I decided to start blogging again my husband told me about this amazing program that helps you “do more with less effort”! In the past I would go to each social media site I wanted to share my blog post on and make a new post. IFTTT allows me to simply write a blog post, and then it shares it to all the social media accounts I requested.

Setting this program up can take a little bit of time because you have to find the correct “applets” to complete the tasks you want, but I promise it is worth it in the end. I can’t even begin to tell you how much time this has saved me since figuring out the correct “recipe”! With the help of my husband we came up with the following recipe:

Download

As you can see I have set it up for my Instagram posts to automatically be shared to my Facebook Page and Twitter, Youtube shares to my WordPress blog, and my WordPress blog shares to Reddit, Pinterest, Google+, Blogger, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. This recipe may not work for everyone, but it is working perfectly for me. The time I was wasting sharing my posts on all my accounts can now be spent replying to comments and following my favorite bloggers. If you need further assistance with IFTTT try researching “IFTTT guides”, and you will find numerous step-by-step instructions.

Have you found any shortcuts to help you on your blogging journey? I would love to hear what everyone else is doing!

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