Adventures in Mama-Land

Welcome, welcome!  Only 2 days late and perhaps (as I tediously always say), a couple dollars short.  My excuse?  I have none… just working.  Life on Israel time is so incredibly fast-paced.  I would never have believed that having an extra working day in the week could possibly mean I would feel MORE busy.  Weird how that works.  So enough about that.  This is my third time I’ve been lucky enough to host the Jewish Book Carnival, and I’ve received so many terrific submissions from folks who are passionate about Jewish books.  Even if you're not Jewish, you can step inside (okay, scroll inside) and find some great books and writers about books from all over the internet.  I hope you’ll discover a new favourite blog or book today. What goes on in a Jewish book carnival? Glad you asked!  Here, you’ll find… Reviews of Jewish books Interviews with authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, librarians, etc. about Jewish literatu...

*** UPDATED with new chapter – July 3, 2012 We’ve been enjoying Explore His Earth for a few months now and now that we’re through some of the duller atmosphere bits at the beginning, are actually starting to have fun.  But I decided that what this very readable text really REALLY needs is a lapbook, both for enjoyment and for reinforcement.  There are activities within the book itself, but they are a bit few and far between at the pace at which we’re reading.  I think a lapbook, a la Story of the World, will really help this stick. I plan to create components as we read through the book, and have begun with the first four chapters, which is what we’ve covered so far.  These are VERY basic.  I haven’t provided many instructions – you may not need any, but please leave a comment if you get stuck (or if you love the lapbook)!  Be sure to link up if you have a blog with photos of your kids working on the lapbook. Disclaimer:  As you know, I am strictly ...

This is a project inspired, though not mandated by, our new geography book, A Child’s Geography: Explore His Earth , which we’re all greatly enjoying so far.  For Chapter 1, I believe, where it introduces Earth as our home, the book invites kids (with their parents) to make their own Earth, partly to see how amazing it is that Hashem can make the earth in only 7 days (and even quicker, if He’d wanted), while all we can come up with in 7 days is a crummy imitation. Well, I wouldn’t call ours crummy, but it certainly drove home the idea that there are a lot of steps that go into making the entire earth… We started this around the middle of January, but I hadn’t posted pics because I was planning to give it to my sister as a birthday present (makes sense – she loves the world!).  However, she did get a sneak peek at the project at a couple of stages along the way.  Nevertheless, I hope these photos will help her appreciate the hard work and many steps that went into creati...

We are just moving into this geography book, A Child’s Geography Book 1: Explore His Earth , by Ann Voscamp (not to be confused with the much older V.M. Hillyer book of the same title) which looks fantastic and fun except for the typical homeschool-curriculum abundance of exclamation points, and perhaps, as with our science curriculum , the occasional Jesus reference.  (though I think that’s more of an issue in Book 2: Explore the Holy Land ) Anyway, we’ve been working on building the papier-mache globe project that wraps up the first lesson.  Then, we’ll hopefully ramp up to a regular program of reading and narrating, just as we’re doing in science and history.  (though at this rate, by the time it actually FEELS “regular,” it’ll be Pesach and time to interrupt everything again! :-o) To make our geography work look substantially different from what we’re using for history and science narrations , I played around with the antique-postcard format suggested by the author...