Maracas

The girls are doing History Odyssey from Pandia Press this year. I wish we had started with History Odyssey. It is a wonderful program and I highly recommend it.
Anyway, one of the projects Butterfly had to do was to make maracas as part of a lesson on South America. The book gave us instructions but I decided to go my own way and do what I knew. So we made them out of cups. I used two plastic, disposable cups and filled one with beads (we have tones of small beads we aren’t using for anything). Then we put the open sides together and taped them. We then painted and decorated them. Poor Turtle didn’t get to do this project because she was a little behind on her history assignments. I did one with butterfly, however, and we really had fun. This would be a great rainy day activity. You can use rice, beans, pennies, beads, etc. inside the maracas. You can decorate with paint, paper, stickers, feathers, fabric, etc. Just have fun!

This is Butterfly's; she used stickers and little stick on charms to decorate it.

Mine is the one with the big gold bow.

The view from behind.

Butterfly decorated her's so that whichever way you turned it, it would always be right side up.

A fun project for any age.

The new schedule

Yes, yes, I change our schedule much too much; I think we’ve got it now. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that you can adjust the schedule to your own needs. We’ve found we need less time on some subjects and more on others. Why should they sit around waiting for time to run out when I can fill that time with productive activities?
Our new schedule follows:


7-7:30 Turtle: Bathroom time

7:30-8 Butterfly: Bathroom time

8-8:30 Breakfast

8:30-9 Morning chores and free time (all they are usually required to do is unload the dishwasher from the night before)

9-9:15 Tefillah

9:15-10:15 Box # 1: History

10:15-10:45 Box #2: Science

10:45-11:30 Box#3: Grammar or Vocabulary

11:30-12:00 Box #4: Spelling for Butterfly / Literature for Turtle (usually there is a few minutes left over to have Butterfly read a short story to me.)

12-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:00 Box #5: Penmanship or Reading Comprehension for Butterfly / Composition or Reading Comp. for Turtle

2:00-2:30 Box #6: Religion or Critical Thinking

2:30-3:00 Box #7: Etiquette 2 times per week, Music and Art once each

3:00 if they have math homework they can do it now otherwise free time until dinner

6 or 6:30 Dinner

7:30 Box #8: Math with Dad (he teaches both of them math)

9:30 Bedtime for Butterfly – Turtle has to go to her room but she can read if she wants to.

10pm Lights out for Turtle

Our schedule is a little different on Monday because Butterfly has dance and Turtle and Dad play tennis. Fridays are catch up days. We finish lessons that we didn’t finish within the week (usually only applies to history) and Butterfly has a vocabulary and spelling test. We also have a Parshah lesson and sometimes a craft activity either for that lesson or something else. We are usually finished by lunch and sometime have a play date in the afternoons. Now, I think my new homeschool group will be having a park day on Wednesdays afternoons so that will cut into some subject, but not the big ones. I’ve purposely placed subjects of lesser importance after lunch so that we can enjoy play dates and other activities without feeling guilty. If we skip a day of reading comp it won’t be the end of the world but if we skip a day of history it isn’t as easy to catch up. Subjects like Spelling must be done every day or we might as well just skip the whole week.