New Notebooking Pages

It is hard to believe that the end of the year is here. 2013 flew by didn't it? Hopefully everyone had the chance to enjoy every moment of it. I worked on some notebooking pages during December. I thought I would share them with you. This is a picture of the blank page I made. Click on it to download.

 The other pages look like this but they have drawings from  A Christmas Carol on them. You can find them on my HSLaunch page HERE. Be sure to check them out and let me know if you like them and find them helpful. Blessings! ~ Nikki

Nature Walks

With Fall all nice and settled in here in the Smokies, it is the perfect time for a nature walk. Roosie and I went last week and then BabyGirl went with us this week. We got some lovely pics that I wanted to share. I wish that we had been able to get a picture of our deer we came across but they moved too fast for us. We have a small herd that moves through our neighborhood every day. Sometimes I have to wait for one to move out of the driveway so I can head out to school. I hope you enjoy the pictures! They are not great because I took them with my phone but hopefully you will like them. Be sure to get out there and take a walk too! Blessing ~ Nikki

Who tree! This tree has an odd shape that you can't really see until all the leaves are gone. It reminds us of a Who tree from Whoville. It is one of our favorite trees. Usually in the Fall it is a very deep red but the other day it was more orange. 

 

 

Here it is from another angle with some awesome cloud cover behind it :)

The woods a week earlier.

A friendly slug

A baby "woolly booger" or woolly bear. he was only about an inch long.

Foxtails

Late purple aster

Heath asters

We also saw 2 deer, a chipmunk, a towhee, a Carolina wren, chipping sparrows and honeysuckle berries.

School Planner

Every year I peruse all the free planners on the internet and I always fall in love with several but they never seem to be that perfect fit. I've made my own over the years and now I just tweak it to suit our needs. This year I adjusted ours to fit 2 students instead of 3. I also updated my Planner cover. I used the wonderful graphics found at My Cute Graphics to decorate the front of my planner 

and our attendance calendar which I picked up at Calendar Lab. *Just a note: the original graphic on my cover only had 5 owls so I layered another single image onto it in Word because we have 6 in our family.* I copied and pasted my calendar into Word and dressed it up to fit my planner.

You can pick up my basic planner HERE. Use it for your planning needs or as inspiration to create your own. This is my dressed up "home" version, it's a little different. Pick it up HERE in Word, or HERE in pdf.

I also have another with a F.R.O.G. theme HERE. If you look around on my HSLaunch page, HERE, you will find other printables that go with that such as covers and address sheets. I also found a wonderful resource at Atlanta - Homeschool. It is a monthly record keeping sheet for "at a glance" things. Pick it up at their site HERE. 
Last year I found this wonderful binder at Walgreens. 

It makes a great binder for a homeschool planner. It has 3 inner pockets plus it has an inside clear view pocket which is the perfect place for our attendance calendar. I also print out our local school systems calendar to help me plan our holiday/break schedules. My kids have friends in public schools so I have always tried to match up a few days so they can spend time together.

Here is what I keep inside my planner. I keep page protectors, which will hold the planner pages, worksheets and stuff.I also have notebook paper. And I keep these wonderful tab dividers to separate my kids work. They can be written on and erased :) Love them! I also love the plastic pocket dividers too.

I hope you enjoyed my Planner tour. Leave me a comment  :) I would love to visit your blog and see how you are getting ready for this school year! Blessings! ~ Nikki

Preparing For A New School Year

Now that is is July I decided to get ahead and start working on getting things together for this Fall. I'm working on my planner and will post some pictures in a few days. This year I will only be homeschooling two of my Blessings. Tman graduated this Spring and is now enrolled in our local community college. He is taking his Emergency Responder class this summer and will start his EMT classes this Fall. BabyGirl of course is working on her Associates degree in English at the same school ( I am also enrolled in Nursing school at the same college and we all love it). So this year it is just Hoopy, Roosie and me :) Time is going by way too fast.
In the spirit of preparing, I thought I would post some links to printables I have created over the years. I keep them on my HSLaunch page, which is an amazing sight! So much FREE stuff! Be sure to check it out if you haven't already.

Today's links are for my upper level spelling test form : DOWNLOAD

 

and the lower level spelling test form : DOWNLOAD 

Outdoor Learnin'

With this warm weather it is the perfect time to head outside. Don't forget that there is lots to learn outside that will help your kids. Take a break from the books and plant a garden. Roosie has been helping my parents plant their garden this week. Hoopy and her will be helping me get our seeds started tomorrow.
 Let kids help with garden planning. It is a great learning experience for them. Learning the value of being able to grow your own food is priceless. Look into the different ways of preserving your harvests and let the kids help with that too. Blessings! ~ Nikki

There Be Whale....Sharks :)

Roosie has always dreamed of seeing whale sharks. These large animals have fascinated her for many years.So, for her 13th birthday we took her on a trip to the Georgia aquarium where they have not only a whale shark but FOUR whale sharks. Now, to be honest, overall I don't rate the aquarium itself very high. We had to wait in a line almost two blocks long for well over an hour to try and buy tickets.(We were already tired from the four hour drive.) Finally an attendant came along and told us there was another line for people who were going to pay with a debit card...a shorter line...much shorter. Then we found out the tickets were time stamped. You could only enter the aquarium at the allotted time on your ticket. Luckily for us we were able to get some of the LAST tickets for the 2:00 entry although by this time the dolphin show was sold out. They did discount our tickets by $5 though. By this time our patience was stretched pretty thin and we were ready to get inside. Inside the aquarium was packed and I mean packed...like sardines in a squished can. The displays were small (as in small viewing areas) and people were very rude (yes, almost everyone was very rude). Kids and adults alike were shoving us (and others) out of the way. If you were lucky you got to go up to a viewing window and see something, mind you only got to see it for five seconds but hey at least ya saw it. The "flow" from exhibit to exhibit was weird and difficult to navigate. Plus it was so loud and noisy you couldn't hear yourself think and you had to yell to communicate.Was there anything good about the trip you ask? Why yes, the whale sharks. Believe it or not we actually had no problem getting into the viewing area and finding good seating. We watched them for a long time. It was so amazing that something so large could glide so serenely and easily through the water. The whale sharks alone made the trip worthwhile....or more specifically, the joy it brought to Roosie to see them. And the manta rays....awesome! They were huge and may I say a bit show offy but it was so much fun to watch them. We may go again someday .... a slim maybe, just to see the whale sharks again. My opinion though is that the Ripley's aquarium we have in Gatlinburg is a much nicer aquarium. When it is crowded you can't really tell it. The flow is still good and it is still peaceful and quiet.The exhibits are amazing too. If only we had whale sharks up here it would be perfect :)

Anyway, I thought I would share some neat resources with you in case you were interested in learning more about whale sharks. Enjoy the links! Blessings ~ Nikki
Fact sheet with link for a PDF

Another fact sheet

Whale shark color sheets, even has a blank stencil so you could make a shape book for lap/notebooking.

Great printables for a shark report  

One thing I do love about the Georgia aquarium...Ocean Voyager webcam. Watch whale sharks :)