School Age Archives

67 Ideas for Fun and Learning This Summer

Summer is almost here! Woo-hoo! I love nearly everything about the summer (except for the bugs). I love the warm weather, I love the pool, I love longer evenings, I love having my kids home. I’ve compliled a list…

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Teaching Children the Difference Between Wants and Needs

Although our boys are relatively good about not constantly asking for stuff, I want them to know the difference between “needs” and “wants”. “Needs” are the things that we rely on to live (comfortably). “Wants” are not essential to our life,…

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Books for Brand New Readers

Finding books with engaging content for brand new readers is tough. If you regularly read high-quality picture books aloud to your child, she can easily become frustrated with the simple storylines in easy readers that she reads herself. But…

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Take Your Child to Work Day is Thursday, April 25th

Thursday, April 25th is Take Your Child to Work Day! This is an excellent opportunity for our sons and daughters to learn about responsibility and earning an income! If you don’t work outside the home, ask your husband or…

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Paint Chip Mosaic Earth

Earth Day is Monday, April 22nd. Last year we created this Earth Day project and this year we decided to try something a little more abstract–a Paint Chip Mosaic Earth. I had a few of these paint chip cards…

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Consonant Digraph Garden

Part of learning to read is learning to recognize the various graphemes within a word. A grapheme is the visual representation of a phoneme (the smallest unit of sound). Although we stress learning individual letter sounds, we often forget…

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Counting Up to Big Numbers with an Abacus

Another way to use an abacus is skip counting to higher numbers (and teaching place value in the process). If you don’t already have an abacus and don’t want to buy one, you can make your own! Write a two-digit…

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Skip Counting with an Abacus

Using an abacus is an excellent way to make skip counting tangible for young children. If you’re not familiar with the term “skip counting”, it is just another way to say counting by 10’s, 5’s, 2’s, etc. This is…

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Make Your Own Abacus

We stumbled upon an abacus at an antique store around Thanksgiving. Big Brother insisted that he needed it. When we reminded him that Christmas was coming up soon, he decided he would ask for the abacus. It was pretty humorous to…

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Marbled Easter Egg Painting

After being gone for several days in the Mountains, it was time to get back into some activities…just in time for Easter! We made these marbled Easter Egg paintings using the same technique as these marbled leaves back in…

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Melted Bead Rainbow Magnet

Our church is in the process of adopting a new workshop-model curriculum for our Children’s Ministry. Several of us traveled to a training a few hours away on Saturday at the church who originally wrote the curriculum we will…

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My First Cartoon Flipbook

Big Brother and I decided we would attempt his first cartoon flip book today. It turned out just okay (mostly because he got tired of drawing his person after a couple cards), but it was a fun experiment nonetheless! Here’s…

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Simple Brown Paper Valentines (Filled with Candy)

A few simple materials create these sewn brown paper Valentines are simplistic and charming. The sewn edges with treats inside make a unique gift for the special Valentines in your life. :) Here’s what you’ll need: a brown…

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Sight Word and Letter Pounding

As I shared on my Facebook page, we are in the midst of a renovation project at our house converting our small, barely used office into a mudroom. I have been doing a lot of reorganizing over the last several…

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Letter to Santa: A Lesson in Learning to Write

Besides writing a few words here and there, Big Brother has never written an actual letter. He came to me one day last week and asked if he could write a letter to Santa. We got a piece of paper…

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Christmas Letter Banner with Catalog Pictures

I went to get the mail yesterday, only to find FIVE catalogs stuffed in our small mailbox. Five…in one day! We’ve been getting an onslaught of toy and home decor catalogs lately (even though I have attempted to remove us…

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Handprint Reindeer Puppets and Treat Bags

This simple reindeer craft can serve two purposes: Turn the brown bag upside down and make puppets or fill it with goodies to make a cute bag! Here’s what you’ll need: Brown paper bags, construction paper, glue, googly eyes and…

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Angry Bird Election

My children are relatively clueless as to what is going on around our country and the world, apart from what we choose to tell them (which is how it should be at their ages, in my opinion). Since we rarely…

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