Jackie Lee's Blog

It seems today you canhave just about anything mailed to you on a monthly basis, from fun activities for kids, science projects, a trip around the world from your kitchen table, even healthy organic snacks can now be found in a snack subscription box service.

That’s exactly what Urthbox is; a healthy snack subscription box.

We received a complimentaryUrthbox in the mail yesterday in exchange for an honest review, and believe me, all theopinions are ours. (Although Hanna is still learning the...

It all started with The Great 5th Grade Picture Book experiment.

I bought a copy of STEAM Kids last night. I’ll be honest, I saw this book the day it came out and didn’t order because I didn’t know if it would be appropriate for my 10 year old. It seemed like the experiments were meant for much younger kids. However, last night I was talking to my friend and fellow homeschooling mom Jen, from Practical by Default, who has kids older than mine, and she was super excited about it.

I had a little “patience” problem, so I ordered the ebook version. Immediatel...

As a first year homeschooling mom, I had done a ton of research, had big plans, and was really excited about a lot of things we could do. (I’m looking at you Build Your Library!) However, it didn’t take long (literally… one day) to realize it didn’t matter how much I loved something… if my daughter didn’t, it wasn’t going to work.

One of the biggest, heck the main reason we chose to homeschool was because every day, every year, in public school my daughter’s love of learning just disappeared....

In an effort to help my reluctant reader enjoy reading more we’ve embarked on what I like to call the Picture Book challenge. Before we go to the library I research some picture books that are geared toward older elementary readers. We now base our language arts program on picture books. It’s helping make reading fun again, and we’re really enjoying it.

Well, in my researching upper elementary picture books, I came across Girls Think of Everything. I grabbed it at the library last time we wer...

As a homeschooling family, it’s not just my daughter who does the learning. We all have projects we’re working on. This Summer my husband dug deep into learning how to catch catfish, not just one catfish a night, but how to go out, and catch your limit daily. It’s been quite a Summer… but he’s getting there. Thank goodness we all love to eat catfish.

We’ve been mostly deep frying our catfish, with this amazing deep fryer. However, last week when we went crystal digging at the Great Salt Plai...

I remember trying to learn the multiplication tables. It was a nightmare. I struggled with math. I didn’t enjoy it, and really didn’t want to spend time on it, but my mom was persistent. She would follow me everywhere I went yelling out flashcards and expecting an answer, and when I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. I still vividly remember being quizzed on multiplication while I was in the shower.

As a deschooling family, with a kiddo who is resistant to just about anything that looks like “school” we had to figure out a different, more fun way to learn presidential facts. A big fat list of facts to memorizejust wasn’t going to cut it. So… we enlisted the help of a couple of election books, and their corresponding audio books. I wasn’t sure if these books were going to be any more than just a fun little read, but it turned out they were jam packed with presidentialfacts, and informat...

This is our first year homeschooling. We’ve been at it a almost 3 weeks now. As we sat down the first week, Unit Studies in hand, I quickly realized we were going to need a little more deschooling time. I made the decision to try a bunch of different things to see what sparked interest, and then go from there. Subscription boxes seemed like a perfect fit for this plan.

This is our first yearhomeschooling. It’s only been two weeks and I’ve already thrown out all the grand plans I had for our homeschool. I had these big ideas, and they all looked a lot like school. After a first week of an insane emotional roller coaster, I decided to try a different route. I went to the Homeschool Gameschool Facebook group and asked a simple question… Can you help me put together a list of the best educational games for us to use in our homeschool?

You see, my only goal for...