Some Homeschool Helps

My last homeschool post was pretty Debbie-Downer. I can't help it. It's in my name for Heaven's sake. Since I'm behind on my goal of 4 post per month for this month, here's a not depressing homeschool post on some of the resources I've been using lately or recently discovered.

Podcasts:
We have been listening to more podcasts lately, and were looking for some family friendly ones. Johann found a few, and these are our favorites so far.

Tumble Science Podcast for kids
The link will take you to the blog for the podcast. I really enjoy this one. The last episode about the explorers club was really fun. One of the beauties of homeschool is that after listening to this podcast, and hearing how you can find meteors in your own yard, we just went and did it. I'm not always spontaneous, and I'm sure that causes some learning opportunities to suffer, but this was just so easy we went for it, and had a good time finding some bits of meteorites then viewing them under our microscope.

Brains on! 
This is also a science podcast. Henry's favorite episode was probably the one about life on other planets, and learning about the 'Goldilocks zone'. Annoying theme song, and the reading of kids' members' names gets old, but other than that it's solid. The mystery sound is also fun, and I'm pretty good at it, if I do say so myself.

From the Top
So this may not also be Henry's favorite, but he has enjoyed some of the performances, and it's good for him to hear some kids practice for HOURS a day, when I'm only asking for thirty minutes most days.

As a head's up, we tried Storynory, and we're not impressed. The first two stories we tried to listen to were about murder and ghosts. My kid get freaked out enough already, so we haven't tried those again. If anyone knows of any more literature or history based ones let me know. Still haven't tired out Short and Curly, so looking forward to that.

Apps:

Kids' Book Finder- An app from BYU that helps you find books for kids based on grade-level, topic, genre, and award. I mean, Amazon does a pretty good job, but grade-level helps a lot.

NASA-Henry has fun watching some of the videos.

MadLibs-Working on parts of speech? Henry didn't even realize. Sucker.


That's all for now. I need to get back to giving myself an hour or so a week to just go over resources because they can make such a difference. We also have had a better go the last week or so. Today was fun going through Sunset's Western Garden Book, coming up with questions for what we should base our plant selection off of, and finding out if the plants he liked met that criteria (no), and then doing more searching. He finally decided on 'penstemon ambiguus' or Beardtongue. Tomorrow we'll pick it up, and we'll plant on Friday for Earth Day.