This homeschoolers life

  Hello friends,  When I first began homeschooling I remember feeling so overwhelmed with all the choices, the stress and pressure of not knowing where to start and not wanting to make the wrong decisions or miss anything important. It was so much to try and sort through and I didn't know which direction was up. Thankfully I had several friends who had been homeschooling for several years share some of their wisdom with me, gave me tips and pointers and helped answer my questions. That was so invaluable to me as a newbie to homeschooling and I will always be so appreciative of their advice, encouragement and their time. It is my hope that this blog will be like a good friend to turn to when you are feeling stressed and overwhelmed and need somewhere to turn to find some advice and encouragement. I don't have all the answers and I don't know all the tricks, tips or cool home-school hacks but I can share what I've learned from my experiences with you and hope you will fee...

  Today I'm going to share one of my family's favorite weeknight meals with you, our version of a cafe' yumm bowl. It is a very simple recipe that can be altered to cater to even the most picky eaters and easily adjust for everyone's various health needs. Of course ours includes rice, we prefer to use long grain brown rice or jasmine rice but it can be made with any type of rice or quinoa. I'm sure it could be made with tofu as well or another substitute for rice that you prefer.  I always like to make a big batch of rice in my favorite small kitchen appliance, my instant pot. *Friends if you don't have one of these babies yet you are missing out!! IMHO ;) For our family of 4 I like to make 4 or 5 cups of rice (that usually leaves me with plenty of leftovers that can be used in another meal later in the week and for lunch the next day). After my rice is cooked I empty it from my I.P. and mix in my previously cooked/shredded chicken (I like to make mine in my I.P...

Hello again friends,  In my last post I shared a list of over 170 field trip ideas to help get your creative juices running and thought today I would share a list of some of our favorite extracurricular activities, life lessons and fun learning opportunities that we have incorporated into our school life over the past 6 1/2 years.  I'm also including a fun list of things you may enjoy or want to try for the holidays. Especially since this year has been so different than every other year (thanks to Covid-19) I think it could be a really great year to find some new activities or traditions to try with our family and hope you might find some fun ones you want to try as well. obviously not all of these will be available in every area or at all this year due to everything surrounding the corona virus craziness in our country.  My hope is that you will find at least one new thing that looks like fun or peeks your interest and that it will help your family make some fun memories...

Hi friends~ Here is the second half of my fabulous field trip list & educational travel tips with 75 more ideas:  1) Take tour of one of the famous Caverns/Caves 2) Zoo (check if your zoo has a program for students or home-schoolers. Ours has a sleep at the zoo event that allowed my daughter and I to spend the night at the zoo, tour areas of the zoo not typically open to the rest of the public, learn how trainers care for their animals, meet several species, observe animals in their natural habitats and learn about several career/job options available at a zoo or with animals. 3) Visit a reptile zoo 4) Visit some stables 5) Visit a wax Museum 6) Tour a Riverboat 7) Try a Ropes Course/Zipline Course Holiday Related Activities: 8) Visit a Pumpkin Patch 9) Go through a Corn Maze 10) Go Christmas Caroling 11) Volunteer at a food bank or to serve a meal at a soup kitchen 12) Go Ice Skating 13) Take a Christmas Tree Farm tour 14) Watch a Christmas Play/Pagent 15) visit holiday bazaar...

          Lets talk about Field trips and educational travel:                   I ’ve had several requests to find out about how we do field trips lately so in this post I will share a few tips about making field trips & educational travel memorable  and    I compiled a list of over   160 ideas for you to parouse or earmark for future reference. This post will include the first half of the list and the second half will be in the next post. I will also go more into depth about how we include field trips/learning/educational lessons when we travel, what we pack, how I plan our adventures and how I map out our to do’s in another post so check back for those soon :) When we started homeschooling one of my first thoughts was that we would have so many more options for field trips, and so much more flexibility and freedom to include them into our routine! As a family we love taking new ad...