Eye have my eye on you! Kids’ Home-made Valentines

Weeks after I posted the sign-ups for our homeschool valentine exchange, I found out that my son’s class was going to do an exchange. So, of course, we’re a bit in over our heads in pink hearts and lace at the moment.

I love homemade valentines, especially ones with the SUPER EMBARRASSING puns on them. The punnier, the better. Now, since I don’t totally want to ostracize (ostrich-izing them WOULD be cool though) my kids, I don’t make them put horrible puns on their school cards.

For this year’s class, we made heart crayons. This is a great way to reuse the old broken crayons in the bottom of your kids’ art boxes. Crayons below the RoseArt quality should probably be avoided, because when you melt them, the color separates from the wax, and you get a layer of clear wax on top of the crayons.

Materials:
Broken, peeled crayons, in about 1cm long pieces.
A baking pan with small compartments. IE: Mini-muffin pans. Big muffin pans are fine, but they make large crayon pucks that take a lot of crayons to make.

Preheat your oven to 325.

Break up your crayons and put them in your pan. If you mix too many colors together, you’ll get brown. I liked the idea of having some without pink/red, because most of Tommy’s class are boys.

Check your crayons every 3-5 minutes; when they are fully melted, take them out of the oven. Place them in the freezer for around a half hour.

Remove the crayons carefully. Be gentle, they are rigid and very breakable at this point.

I’m pretty sure these are going on card stock with the words: “You make Valentine’s Day so much more colorful!”

Unless I can think of something MORE embarrassing.

Tommy made collage valentines last year. A fun way to use up paper scraps.

Ami is working through an aggressive math curricula, using Saxon math. Her main goal this year is to get her caught up & comfortable in her math skills.

Our local school has been struggling with getting their kids to pass the standardized tests, especially in math and science. When we were looking for curriculum to order, she placed 2 grade levels below her grade on every placement test we gave her. The thing is, she was in the top of her class. It makes me sad to know that her old classmates are still so far behind. Anyway, she does a minimum of two Saxon lessons every day, often we do up to 4 or 5, and sometimes on the weekends. Math is not covered in their Parent Partnership Program.

For Tommy, we’re not using a curricula. We couldn’t place him in a grade level, so we are all over the board.

My absolute favorite resource for math worksheets is Homeschool Math.net. It is my favorite because the worksheets are broken up into grades, easily searchable and my FAVORITE feature? The Math Worksheet Generator. On this page, you can create worksheets for your children to drill math skills, tailored to their level. You set the parameters for the basic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division) your child is working on, and click create. You can choose how many questions you want on the page, to create timed drills (great for when your child is memorizing the multiplication table!). The best part? Each time you click “create”, you get a brand new, randomly generated worksheet, within the parameters you set.

I found free, printable graph paper that you can customize to suit your needs at Incompetech.com.

TLSbooks.com is my favorite place to go for printables for all subjects. Broken up by grade and topic, it’s easy to find worksheets that will add to whatever you’re working at the time.You can find holiday themed puzzles here, and Dragon’s Daily Drill, a fun way to start your day. Dragon’s Daily Drill gives us a new grade-appropriate logic, problem solving, or skill building question every day.

CarrotSticks : Online Math Game is a multi-player site for elementary aged kids. Create an avatar, and then answer math problems that progressively get harder as they correctly answer questions. While answering questions, they can be challenged to play against another user in head to head, timed contests. An account to let your child work on his addition skills is free, then for $4 a month, your child can get subtraction, multiplication and division questions as well.

If you’re looking for a math-based computer game that’s free, the Linux Tux games are the way to go. Open source always makes my heart happy, and what is not to love about Tux, the Linux penguin? Your kids (and spouse) will love the games. My husband plays them from time to time, shh.

What are your favorite homeschool, or after school, math suggestions?

Sign ups have now closed, and lists have been mailed out. If you feel like you signed up, but didn’t get an email from me last night, there’s always the possibility that your email address got saved incorrectly, or some other mishap.

Please let me know as soon as possible, and thank you guys for the time you put in telling other families about the list and helping me spread the word!

Remember, all cards need to be mailed out on or by February 5th. I did extend that by a day, since the mail should be calmer this time of year than at Christmas.