Vacation Education

It has been a cold week here is Wisconsin, with temperatures around -30 and wind chills down approaching -60. So, with everything cancelled, schools and classes closed, even our mail service suspended for the safety of postal workers, we have been hunkered down inside for awhile. This afternoon the temps got up to -17 so we decided to give the boiling water turned instantly to snow experiment a try. Here are our results: What is happening here? Boiling water is being thrown into the air, separating the water and increasing the surface area of the molecules and they are freezing rapidly in the cold air creating a storm of snow crystals. Try this one on your next snow day!

The Timeline Game is a great way to learn and remember major events in history in chronological order. You can make your own timeline game to go with any subject you are studying. We have several versions of the  Timeline Game  from Asmodee. They come in various themes and usually in small packages so they are a game that travels easily. To make the game really compact, you can wrap a rubber band around just the deck of cards and be on your way. The canister does help keep it all together though and doesn't take up that much space. You can use these cards as they are, by subject such as "Music and Cinema" or "Inventions" but we chose to combine our cards and sort them into time period decks. So, when we are studying ancient history, we use all the cards that are "BC" so before the first year of our Lord, for example. We also make our own cards to fit with units we are studying. The Asmodee Timeline Game comes with very small cards, and ...

I'd wanted to try this recipe for homemade laundry soap for a long time after first seeing it featured on the show "17 Kids and Counting" featuring the Duggar family. It also appears in her book titled,  "20 and Counting!" The recipe is available on several websites. I prefer this one  Laundry Soap Recipe  because she gets right to the recipe without a lot of advertising, storytelling or begging readers to join or subscribe before reading the actual article. I cut the recipe in half simply because it claims to make 10 gallons and I am raising 9 kids in a 1400 square foot house - so, while I would love to have 10 gallons of laundry soap on hand, we just don't have the storage space. I followed the directions and ended up with 5 gallons of laundry soap. I transferred it into old laundry soap containers I had been saving for this purpose and have been using it exclusively for about 3 weeks now. We do several loads of laundry every day, including a load of...

This game has several features we liked, such as size. It is very compact and easy to take on a trip. Truly, a pocket sized game! It has a pretty good excitement level as the scoring is such than one person could score anywhere from 5000 points to zero points in a single round. It isn't all just luck either since each player decides when to stop rolling based on their score and the number of dice available to roll. The game comes in a cardboard box, just a little bigger than a deck of cards. It has a cardboard hanging hook in the shape of a dollar sign and we wrecked ours right away. It's a quick, fun game and great for travel. In terms of actual game play it is basically Yatzhee with some twists. Basic objective: roll six dice to create patterns that are worth points. High score wins. It comes with a score pad on the back of the rules, which I think is a waste because there is only room for four games and the score is just as easily kept on paper. Unlike Yahtzee...

Richard Scarry's Busytown Eye Found It Game is great for preschoolers. I would definitely add this game to your gameschooling collection if you don't already own it. You can add this  Busytown game  to your Amazon wish list right now. Here's why I love it: It teaches tenacity - some of those clues are not so easy to find. Like any I-spy puzzle, some jump right out at you and others take some searching. It teaches counting up to four. It teaches turn-taking. It can be played competitively as a race to the finish with one winner or cooperatively as in working together to find the clues and get to picnic island together in any order. It works a part of the brain that is required for finding things in chaos, like finding your shoes in the closet or finding your keys on the messy kitchen counter - a skill we all need in life. Playing Busytown is a race to Picnic Island where the pigs are already eating the food. But, don't worry, every time the pigs eat y...

Be a Viking! - In true Viking style: rush into the store, grab all your favorite snacks, make your mom pay a bounty to the cashier and bring home your treasures to share with your family.  Play some traditional games to celebrate the successful raid. The Norse word Vikingr is similar in meaning to the English word pirate. It originally only referred to those who went out to sea, but today is used in reference to an entire culture and it includes not only Norway, but all of Scandinavia. Spar Dame (Queen of Hearts) is a game similar to Hearts. You need a 52-card deck of regular playing cards and 4 players. Listed here are the basic, standard, common rules, BUT, we have learned from our Norwegian friends that, like any game played for generations, Spar Dame has a wide variety of house rules. So, feel free to add some of your own once you get the hang of the basic game. Objective: Player with the lowest score wins. This is a trick-taking game, so the goal is to play in such...