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Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

I have a really cool product to talk about today. From American Coaching Academy, we received the Healthy Habits Trackers digital download. This 17-page PDF is a fantastic resource that helps kids (and parents!) stay motivated for 30 days at a time in goals of all sorts. There are pages for household chores and being kind, and also for different styles of exercise – strength training, cardiovascular health, and flexibility (among others).

 

It’s easy to print out the pages you want or need; each focus has many activities on it and one sheet of paper gets you through the whole 30-day challenge. You can print as many as you need for your family. I started with the locomotor challenge for my younger kids and the Boot Camp challenge for my teens. The locomotor activity page includes six exercises, and my kids had so much fun with these! There were a couple of them that the took days off from, but for the most part, they did all the exercises every day. For example, after 6 days of tiptoes, their calves were a little tired and they needed a break. But crab walk, army crawl, and bear crawl were so fun and didn’t even feel like work for them!

The teens were a little more skeptical, but not too bad. They enjoy working out (and have missed it since we pulled them out of dance due to Covid masking requirements in our area), so having something specific to do quickly motivated them and they also got almost every exercise done each day.

Healthy Habits trackers aren’t just about exercise though! There are other pages for all sorts of things, including helping around the house (with activities like feeding the pet and setting the table); healthy body (brushing teeth twice and drinking five glasses of water); kindness (complimenting someone and giving a hug); nutrition (food tracker); yoga (six different poses to track); cardio (jumping jacks and running in place); flexibility (a variety of stretches); strength training (squats and pushups); and general health (one item from each of the other categories).

If you have trouble keeping your kids on track with the things they need to do to stay healthy, you should definitely check out American Coaching Academy and the Healthy Habits Trackers. It may provide just the motivation you need!

Don’t forget to head over to the Homeschool Review Crew for more information and additional reviews, too.

Blessings,

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

The Critical Thinking Co.™ has been a staple in our homeschool for as many years as we’ve been on the Review Crew. They’re a family owned company that’s been around since 1958 and are now run by second-generation owner Michael Baker (his father, John Baker, founded the company, but has since passed away). They offer a large variety of books for homeschool students, in all the major subjects. The difference in The Critical Thinking Co.™ is that they put the focus on learning to think through the problems rather than simply mastering formulas. All of their books, regardless of subject (and they cover everything!) have that spin to them. This year (specifically, for the past few weeks), Grasshopper (4th grade) and I have been using Building Thinking Skills® Level 2 -Grades 4-6 (Ages 9-12).

The book is huge! It’s nearly 350 pages of activities, plus an answer key, and printed in full color. It covers thinking skills in reading, writing, math, science, and test prep and is broken down into ten chapters. The first four chapters would make a great supplement to any math curriculum. The next two are science-focused, and the final four cover reading and writing. Test prep thinking skills are sprinkled throughout.

Grasshopper and I have been focused primarily on the math chapters for now. These worksheets are well balanced in their content, and even though I would consider this a supplementary book rather than a full curriculum, he has learned quite a few things that were completely new to him (the three types of triangles, for example). Most of the activities that we’ve done (and a lot of those we haven’t, as I look through the book to write this review) are based on shapes. Shapes are great for teaching critical thinking skills in math because they can move, twist, and fold so many different ways! The book does a great job of making students really evaluate and think through the answers, especially in activities such as “if you were to fold up this shape on the dotted lines, what 3D shape would you make?” That was a tricky one for my son!

Once we move on to other chapters, Grasshopper will be doing activities such as “explain the exception,” where the student is given four words. Three of them have something in common and one is related but different (for example, cloud, rain, snow, umbrella). Students have to explain the three that are the same and then also tell why the odd one out is different AND how it relates to the other three.

The science chapters deal a lot with describing things. Students take the observations they make through their descriptions and write sentences to describe the item (which varies from animal to food to occupation and more). There are also activities where they are given a description and they identify what is being described. As they progress through the chapter, they start identifying and describing smaller and smaller pieces of things (there’s an entire page devoted to parts of an ant, for example).

The reading and writing chapters feature a lot of analogies, which are amazing test prep questions. On some pages, students complete the analogy; on others, they explain it.

Overall, Grasshopper has really been enjoying the math portions of this workbook. He works hard to understand the concepts, and he has been learning a lot. One caveat: even though these appear to be standard workbook activities on the surface, you might find that they take a bit longer than average due to the heavy thinking skills students are developing as they work through the activities.

You can read more reviews, featuring a variety of books from The Critical Thinking Co.™ on the Homeschool Review Crew website.

Blessings,

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

We have been big fans of YWAM Publishing over the years. We’ve reviewed books from both of their biographical series, Christian Heroes Then and Now and Heroes of History. This year, they offered members of the Homeschool Review Crew books from the Christian Heroes series, and I chose Jim Elliot: One Great Purpose for us to read.

I didn’t grow up in the church; I started attending when I was about 13. But I spent a lot of time as an adult learning about missionaries (I attended the Church of the Nazarene’s annual missions conference for many years before we left that church in 2019), so I’ve heard the basics of the story of Jim Elliot, but I didn’t know a whole lot. What I knew could be boiled down to just two points: he was a missionary to a remote area (I couldn’t have told you where), and he was killed by the natives for being there. In fact, whenever I hear the word “martyr,” Jim Elliot is the first name to pop into my head. So I was very interested in getting my hands on this book by Janet and Geoff Benge.

Like all of the YWAM biographies, this one also starts with chapter 1, which is really more of a “prologue” than a chapter. In fact, I wish it was labeled as such because chapter 2 always goes back in time, and the story progresses from there. It’s a great literary tool, starting with a really exciting part of the story and then going back in time to drive the story to that moment. It definitely draws readers in, and is a very effective literary tool. In this book, that opening chapter tells of the moments that Jim and his companions, Ed McCully, Roger Youderian, Nate Saint, and Pete Fleming, learned that the Auca Indians of Ecuador – those they were there to reach with the gospel – were on their way to find the missionaries. Of course, knowing the tragic story of Jim, that is one of the final moments of his life.

Unlike a lot of the YWAM biographies, the story of Jim Elliot doesn’t spend any time on his early life. Starting with chapter 2, it dives right in to the beginning of his missionary journey in 1952. The story of those four years is full enough that they would have needed 2 books to tell if they’d included his early life too! The story progresses rather quickly through the time Jim et al spent in the jungles of eastern Ecuador, and like the other YWAM books we’ve read, the chapters often end in exciting places (not quite cliffhangers, but close), and my kids always want me to keep reading. One thing that was different this year is that Grasshopper (9yo) is a strong reader on his own now, and sometimes he would read ahead. Like when I read the Jacob de Shazer book to my older kids a few years ago, I was sobbing by the time we got to the end of this one. I just love these missionary stories!

In addition to the book itself, we received the matching study guide, but we didn’t utilize that this time. The books themselves are fantastic sources of literature and history (biographies are my favorite way to teach history to my kids) in a homeschool setting. But if you are interested in making a full-blown unit study from one of the YWAM books, including ideas for presentations, comprehension questions, critical thinking essay questions, a multitude of hands-on activities, and more.

We were the only family to receive the Jim Elliot book this year, but there are plenty of other reviews of other books from the Christian Heroes Then and Now series. I encourage you to head over to the Homeschool Review Crew website to learn more!

Blessings,

When we were planning Bumblebee’s Cocomelon birthday party, one of the options for large banners really caught my eye. We chose a different banner for the party, but I couldn’t get the other one out of my head. I knew it would be pretty easy to create a crocheted blanket inspired by that banner, so I set out to do just that.

I started by making a rainbow chevron blanket. The chevron, or zigzag, blanket is a pattern nearly as old as crochet itself (the way I understand it), and almost every designer has their own take on it. The one I’ve always had the most success with is the version by Jayda in Stitches on YouTube. I followed her pattern exactly, except that I changed the colors and added 2 repeats to what she does on her tutorial. I wanted a decent size, so I chose to do 16 rows of each color. Because it’s a double-crochet blanket, that gave me about 8 inches per color, and my blanket ended up being about 40×48 – perfect for a toddler! My favorite border for a chevron blanket is a simple, one-row single crochet border. I love the design of the chevrons so much that I don’t want my border to detract from the blanket itself, so every time I make one of these blankets that’s the border I use. For this blanket, I chose white.

When it came time to make the Cocomelon logo, I referred to Google images for the inspiration. Rather than giving a specific pattern, I’m going to describe my method instead; if you want to make this, I hope it’s easy enough to follow. If not, feel free to leave questions in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.

I went back to Jayda to get started, making a solid granny square (10 rows around) for the main portion of my watermelon logo. When I finished making that, it was time for the green stripes. I finished the square off by making an eleventh round, but this time using single crochet stitches. I also did 3 single crochets in each corner instead of the standard sharp corner to get the rounded look I wanted. Then I lined the square with a row of white single crochets. I made 2 single crochets into each of the corner stitches from the row before.

When my square was done, it was time to figure out the watermelon stripes. I started with dark green. My square was 44 stitches on each side, so to get that “round” shape to the melon, I did 7 sc, 7 hdc, 16 dc, 7 hdc, 7 sc. I repeated this pattern for 3 rows of dark green and then 3 more rows of light green.

The top ended up having 46 stitches once I incorporated the corner stitches, so I divided that up into the 9 sections of the logo. The two on either end were technically continuations of the dark green side, so I did 4 stitches for each of those. That left me with exactly 6 stitches available for each of the other stripes. I used the method of joining as you go for these stripes (as seen in this video – again, thanks to Jayda in Stitches). I didn’t count my rows, but each one is about 3 inches tall. The edge stripes start decreasing about halfway up – decrease on the outside edge (3), crochet 3 rows, decrease on outside edge (2), crochet 1 row, decrease (1), crochet 1 row. The rows in the middle of the melon are only decreased at the top, either on the last row or second-to-last row of each stripe (again, I wasn’t super careful here, hence the variation). The main thing is to end each stripe with 4 stitches at the top instead of 6. This pulls it in a bit at the top and bottom to round it out a little.

After finishing all of that, I realized that I needed a bit more of the light green at the top and bottom on each side, so I took a moment to add those in – 1 sc, enough dcs to “feel” right, and another sc.

For the pink nubby thing at the top of the cocomelon, I started my yarn a few stitches in and single crocheted across the top, stopping the same number of stitches from the other side. I did a single crochet decrease on both sides in every row, and worked until I had just 4 stitches left.

To make the antennae, I attached my dark purple yarn and chained up (16 for one of them and 11 for the other). Then I slip-stitched back down and fastened off.

The blue circles at the top of the antennae were made separately. If you’ve every made a crochet hat, you’ll know how to do this. Work 8 DC into a magic circle. For the second round, work 2DC into each stitch. Round 3: *2DC, 1DC* all the way around. One of the circles was 2 rounds and the other one is 3 rounds. Set these aside.

For Cocomelon’s eyes, here’s the pattern (make 2 of these using black yarn):

Chain 5.

R1: 2 SC in first stitch. SC in next 2. 5 SC in last chain. SC in next 2 (bottom of chain). 3 SC in last chain. Total of 14 stitches.

R2: 2 SC in first stitch. SC in next 4. 2 SC in each of the next 3. SC in next 4. 2 SC in each of the next 2. Total of 20 stitches.

Fasten off, leaving a long tail for sewing.

Sew the eyes onto the face, referring to a picture for placement. For the nose and mouth, use surface slip stitches to add them using black yarn. Use the same method but with white yarn for making the “shine” in the upper right corner.

Now you get to put the whole thing together! Starting anywhere you like, single crochet around the entire Cocomelon in white. When you get to the top of the antennae, place your blue circles there and continue single crocheting around them, joining them to the antennae. Put the bigger circle at the top of the longer antenna. I recommend increasing your circles during this phase (*2SC in first st, 1 SC in next 2* around for the bigger one; follow round 3 above except using SC stitches for the smaller one). I didn’t do this, and my circles were a bit tricky to flatten out when I sewed them onto the blanket. When you’ve finished your final border, sew your (giant!) applique onto the blanket in whatever position you’d like. There are about a million ends on this project, but the good news is that you don’t have to weave in any of them! Just make sure they’re tucked underneath your applique as you sew and you’ll be good to go.

My Cocomelon didn’t turn out perfectly. It’s a bit wobbly and more square than rectangular, but it’s close enough to get the job done. And most importantly, Bumblebee loves it!

If you make this, please tag me on Instagram (@ladybugdaydreams) so I can see!

Blessings,

I hadn’t made a fresh welcome sign for our door in a few months, and it was well past time. I took down the spring one a few weeks ago, and we went without one for a while. But it was summertime, and I wanted to look toward fall instead, so I waited. But by the end of August, I couldn’t really handle it anymore and I got something up there, just in time for Bumblebee’s birthday party. Here’s what I did and how I made it (using all Dollar Tree items except for the paint).

First I found this “Gather Together” wood cutout. Dollar Tree does a really nice job with their wood laser cuts – they’re quite detailed and really high quality considering the price tag. I wanted to put it on a “fall” feeling background to make it more substantial feeling. I had a felt pumpkin in my hands, and I rather liked it, but then I found this pumpkin that’s made of planks. I liked that a whole lot better, so I bought it instead. I also picked up a door hanger that consisted of a ring covered in rope, a fall ribbon, and some jingle bells hanging from a sheer brown ribbon. I wasn’t entirely sure how I would incorporate that but I really liked it so I grabbed it anyway.

I started by removing the metal “Warm Hearts” bit from one of the pumpkin planks. If there’s one thing Dollar Tree loves, it’s adding metal and glitter to their wood signs! I wanted something a bit calmer though, so I took that off. Then I painted the top two planks with orange paint. I really liked the watercolor pumpkins at the bottom, so I left those unpainted.

Next I took my wood cutout and painted it. I chose red and brown to really emphasize the fall season. My red was a bit brighter than I wanted, so I took a tip from Kelly Barlow Creations and dulled it with brown. I really like how it turned out. The cornucopia is the weakest part of my painting, but it’s alright. When the paint on both pieces was dry, I hot glued the “Gather Together” to the top portion of my pumpkin planks.

Now I was left with my door hanger. I took all the pieces apart and laid out where I thought each piece would go best. The hanging portion, obviously, was ideal for the top, so I used hot glue to attach it there. I really liked the fall-themed ribbon and even though it would have been really easy to eliminate it and use it somewhere else in another project. I don’t do enough of these Dollar Tree projects to justify trying to save it, though, so instead I attached it to the top of the sign. Then I had the jingle bell ribbons. I really liked those, too, and I think they would really add to any project. For this one, I hot glued the ribbons right to the back of the bottom plank. I liked that the ribbons were each a different length, so they fall at varying points below the pumpkin.

I am really happy with the way this sign turned out. I like it quite a bit better than the spring one I made earlier this year, and I enjoy seeing it each time I approach my home.

Blessings,

I have a recipe to share with you today. It’s so delicious, though probably not the healthiest thing in the world. It’s not that it’s full of “bad” things, but because of the cream cheese, butter, and pasta it has a lot of fat and carbs. You could counterbalance that by using a low fat cream cheese, butter substitute (or just lessen the amount of butter) and low-carb pasta (or skip the pasta altogether and serve with spaghetti squash or other “noodled” vegetables). You could also skip the “bed” entirely and just eat this sauce as its own dish (it’s definitely thick enough to pull that off) with a side salad or other choice of vegetables.

I originally found the idea for this recipe on AllRecipes.com. My version uses all the same ingredients, but I’ve modified the cooking method to make it easier to cook well. It’s not necessarily easier, per se, but whole chicken breasts can be tricky to cook well in the oven. The original recipe called for making the sauce separately, then pouring it over the chicken and baking it altogether. It could be because I have kids, or maybe because I get pretty frustrated when my chicken takes too long to cook, but I like to chop the chicken up and cook the small pieces. This saves the trouble of cutting them up for the kids later when you’re ready to serve. Also, baking chicken breasts can be hit or miss. Just a couple of minutes too long and your chicken is suddenly unpalatable due to dryness. So I’ve combatted those issues by cutting up the chicken in advance and cooking it in a skillet (you can add oil if you want, but I normally don’t need to) and then adding the sauce ingredients and cooking everything in one skillet. The other benefit of making it this way is that it’s just a one pot meal (excluding the pasta, but that’s an easy pan to wash later).

Let’s get to the recipe!

Angel Chicken

(serves 6-8)

1-1 1/2 pounds chicken breasts, cubed
1 packet dry Italian dressing (find it on the salad dressing aisle)
8 oz cream cheese, cubed
2 cans Golden Mushroom soup
1/2 cup butter (1 stick)
hot cooked pasta

Cook chicken. Sprinkle dressing mix over chicken and mix well. Add cream cheese and soup. Mix until cheese melts. Stir in butter and melt. Serve over pasta.

What’s your favorite chicken recipe? Pasta recipe?

Blessings,

Wishing a very happy 15th birthday to Scorpion today!!

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew. 

If you’ve read very many of my posts, then you’ll know that my oldest son is putting his focus into getting his GED (he would technically be entering his senior year, but he’s ready to “be done” with school and start his working career in Will’s business). Even though the ACT college admissions test isn’t the same as the GED test, and even though Ballet Boy isn’t planning to go to college, we asked to review the ACT Mom Online Course with the thinking that if he could do well on the ACT, then the GED test should be a piece of cake for him. 

He and I talked it over when the product first arrived, and decided to start him with the math course. There are four sections all together – math, science, reading, and English. By working about 2 hours a week, it should take 4-5 weeks to complete each section. The entire course is 13 hours (excluding practice time). Here is Ballet Boy’s experience with ACT Mom.

ACT Mom is one of the best test prep programs I’ve done. It covers every topic in a way that is very thorough but also fun and easy to understand and keep up with. It’s not a super heavy workload, and for me especially that’s great because I can keep up with school and work without difficulty. It has an interesting way of teaching, and it’s one I always prefer to standard learning. Basically you learn by doing instead of sitting for a two hour lecture and trying to keep up with your notes.

There are videos and worksheets, but the basic way of teaching is a lot more action based. You learn by doing practice tests and questions, not by hours and hours of studying. It is how I’ve always done well with testing and it’s actually how I took my written test for my driving permit and license. I skimmed the book, but ultimately I learned by failing a few practice tests online. This isn’t to say that there’s no teaching at all – there is. But the focus is on practice tests (including some interactive worksheets on the website).

The ACT Mom course comes with an online account where there are lessons and quizzes, as well as a full physical workbook/binder. The binder has several ACT tests in it. It’s important to note that when I say it has ACT tests in it, I don’t mean homemade practice tests that may or may not be accurate. These are legit ACT tests issued by the ACT Board from previous years, so with this program what you’re practicing for is the real deal. Each page in the binder has a plastic sleeve on it and in the binder you have a dry erase marker with a fine point. This makes it so every test is completely reusable so you can retake them again and again without difficulty or complications. 

All in all it’s a great curriculum. It definitely caters to my way of learning and I think it’s going to be one of the things that puts me over the edge for my GED test this winter.

Please remember to check out other reviews from the Homeschool Review Crew as well.

Blessings,

Ballet Boy

Disclosure: I received this complimentary product through the Homeschool Review Crew.

Critical thinking is a really important skill to have, and part of that is being able to recognize bad reasoning, or “straw man” arguments. The Fallacy Detective by Nathaniel Bluedorn and Hans Bluedorn aims to help students do just that. Over the past few weeks, my teenagers have been having good conversations together using the lessons in this book as a jumping off point.

I remember being in high school, and my World History teacher was huge on making sure we understood fallacies. What is a fallacy? “A fallacy is an error in logic, specifically a place where someone has made a mistake in his thinking” (from the back of the book). The main one I remember from my former teacher is the ad hominem or “personal attack” fallacy.

The book is divided up into five different parts, and each part has between three and ten lessons, for a total of 38 lessons. The first three lessons, in the “The Inquiring Mind” section, are designed to help your students understand why critical thinking is so important. (Hint: It’s so they can spot others’ faulty thinking more easily and be equipped to make their own informed decisions later on.) The rest of the sections each tackle a “big picture” issue, with the lessons showcasing the different fallacies that fall under that specific heading. Take my ad hominem from before, for example: that falls under the “avoiding the question” section because the whole point of that fallacy is attacking your opponent instead of focusing on the issues at hand. It’s easy to point fingers, but a whole lot harder to come up with a sound argument.

Each lesson has just a few pages of text (no more than 3-4), followed by some questions designed to help your student further understand the topic being taught. It’s sold as a workbook, so students are encouraged to write directly in the book. In the beginning, the questions are simple, multiple choice – just check the correct box. As you work through the book, they get a bit trickier, and kids need to pull specific examples of the fallacy being discussed from the sample. It definitely requires some fairly intense critical thinking skills! But through all that, there are also fun comics – both familiar (Peanuts, Dilbert, Calvin and Hobbes) and unfamiliar – to help illustrate (pardon the pun) the points being made. The comics not only serve to clarify the points in the lesson, but also break up the text a little bit, which is good for kids who get overwhelmed with too much reading.

So what did my kids think of it?

Ballet Boy: I really liked this book. I enjoy studying logic in general, and this book was no exception. It was nice to have something specific to discuss with my brother, too. I liked having something to do with him in the evenings while my parents were getting work done and the little kids were in bed. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone – teen or adult – who is interested in learning more about different types of fallacies and how to combat them.

Scorpion: This book was pretty easy to read, but I found the fallacies a little tricky to identify. The comics were fun to read, and even though the lessons were kind of hard (I haven’t had the same amount of logic training as my brother) I liked trying to figure them out.

Members of the Homeschool Review Crew are discussing both The Fallacy Detective and Archer and Zowie (also by Hans Bluedorn), so make sure to head over there to learn more.

Blessings,