November 2011 Edition of The Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival

Welcome everybody!  We're going to start this carnival off with a couple of posts that go quite nicely together and will give you great inspiration if you are studying the Middle Ages.  And since this is a study we just completed in our homeschool and I haven't blogged about very much, I'm going to intersperse today's carnival with photos from our unit.  I know you will gain a plethora of fabulous ideas this month so grab a cup of coffee and a pen and notepad because you are going to want to jot these ideas down!

Tiger's Mum presents Medieval Stained Glass posted at The Tiger Chronicle.

Susannah presents Paper Mache Motte and Bailey posted at The Five of Us.

Field trip to Higgin's Armory

Transitioning from history to science we have a delightful post about Egyptology which I think is sort of history but then it's kind of a science too isn't it?

Sarah presents Egyptology Leads To a Dig posted at All That's Goood.


Emily presents Introducing Solar Science Week, Day One posted at Homeschooling While Living the Life of Easier.

Cindy shares Candy Math and Science posted at Our Journey Westward.

I love these next two posts which are also science related but they include videos too.

Amanda (Victoria is article author) presents DenSchool: Squishy Ice Cream: A Science Experiment posted at DenSchool.  Mmmmm.... making ice cream and learning the science behind it, that's my kind of homeschool.


Shannon presents Hands On Science-Squishy Electrical Circuits posted at Mountaineer Country.  I think squishy was the science theme for vlogging this month.  But really, this is totally neat and even I could handle this science lesson.

Higgin's Armory in Worcester, MA

Jennifer shares Nutrition for Healthy Kids: You Are What You Eat!: Lesson 1: Organic Taste Test posted at Nutrition for Healthy Kids: You Are What You Eat!.

Amy presents 10 Children's Books About Food posted at Delightful Children's Books.  Amy says, "Here are 10 food-themed picture books to entertain as well as teach kids about fruits and veggies, food groups, and where food comes from. These picture books inspired us to cook vegetable soup, homemade pizza, and try some new fruits and vegetables."  

Last but certainly not least, Heather shares some very fitting Thanksgiving Learning Fun for the month of November posted at Cultivated Lives.

I hope you had lots of fun here today.  For those of you here in the U.S. have a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family and friends.

That concludes this edition. Submit your blog article to the next edition of hands on homeschool blog carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Announcing a New Home For The Hands On Carnival

Hi Everyone!
As you can see, I haven't been blogging much lately. I felt that my lack of attention to the blog world was doing the carnival a disservice.  Because the carnival has had regular entries each month, even without my attention, it seemed to be a waste to just shut it down.  Fortunately there's another blogger out there who loves hands on school as much as I do and wants to keep the carnival going!!!

Soooo, without further ado, I'd like to invite you to visit the new home of The Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival!





Please join me in giving Shannon a hearty welcome.  She is going to do an awesome job getting the best hands on activities out to you lovely bloggers.  In fact she has hosted the carnival in the past so she is already familiar with it.  The Hands On carnival was hosted at Mountaineer Country most recently in March.  It would be great if this next issue of the carnival were packed with your great ideas!  So please hop on over to the blog carnival to submit your entry!  I know Shannon will be encouraged and of course it is that time of year to get going on school again!

The Carnival is Up

Hey everyone, there is a wonderful new edition of the Hands On Blog Carnival up at Harmony Art Mom!

Enjoy!

Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival ~ June 2011

Yes, I know, I'm super late with this edition.  I'm so sorry.  But given the size of this edition, I'm thinking I'm not the only one who is tired of school and happy to be enjoying summer vacation.  For those of you who are still plugging away and perhaps need a bit of inspiration, here are a few welcome blog articles to keep you going.

Z-Dad presentsWhere the Mountain Meets the Moon posted at Bookie Woogie.

I'm going to go away from the norm for a bit here and include this lovely article from Kerry at Creek and Mesa Web Journal.  This is not an article about a hands on "project" that Kerry has done with her kids, rather it is an article about living and I thought it seemed very "hands-on" so I'm including it here for your enjoyment and encouragement: Growing Wild.

Ann presents Outdoor Hour Challenge Spring Series #4: Wildflowers-Dandelions and Playing the Harp and Piano as Part of Homeschooling posted at Harvest Moon by Hand.

Zoie looks like she's having fun in her post Kid-Dyed Silk Scarves posted at TouchstoneZ.

Susannah presentsa much easier way to make paper in her post Making Paper the Quick and Easy Way posted at The Five of Us.

Barb at Harmony Art Mom will be hosting our next carnival on July 11th.  Hope to see you there!

Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival May 2011

Welcome to this Spring edition of the Hands On Blog Carnival.  I hope you all had a wonderful and heartfelt Mother's day yesterday!  I'm so excited that spring is finally here.  Not just here on the calendar but the weather is actually beginning to act springlike.  We've been taking advantage of the beautiful weather to go outside with our homeschooling.  Our favorite thing to do every spring is to take a good book outside and read on a blanket spread out on the lawn.  My little kiddos all sprawl out alongside Mom and we get totally absorbed in the likes of Little House on the Prairie, Homer Price or Swiss Family Robinson.

Hopefully you too are getting outside for some relaxed schooling.  I picked up nature journals for my two younger kids last weekend at our local homechool convention.  This is a great tool for getting hands on with nature and practicing observation.  Today's carnival is full of examples of other ways to do some hands on homeschooling.  Enjoy!

Wendy presents The work of our hands posted at loving learning.

Shelly presents KONOS Unit #2: Stewardship - Africa posted at Count It All Joy.

"Dramatizing a play makes History come alive! (And it's a sneaky way for me to get the girls to memorize some facts!)"  I totally agree Nadene!!!  Here is how she does it: Playing the Mayflower Girls posted at Practical Pages.

Heather, a fellow KONOS mom, presents Becoming Butterflies... and Knights-in-the-Making posted at Cultivated Lives.

Denise says, "I need your help to finish my books of homeschool math games."  Here she presents Working on My "Let's Play Math!" Books posted at Let's Play Math!.

Margot shares two posts with us today including Terrariums   and Explore the Universe and Contribute to Astronomy posted at Learning Beyond The Book.

I love field trips because they are the ultimate in hands on learning.  They really put you in the midst of your subject of study.  Pamela has spent some time in Arizona and shares her trip with us in her article Saguaro and a Shoot Em Up posted at Blah, Blah, Blog.

Jane plays a sweet game of Magnetic Fishing for All Ages, a game I used to play with my kids except it was a letter version, posted at Mama Pea Pod.

Ritsumei has a fun way to Play With Your Food and she's also sharing a giveaway in her post about Owl Puke Pellets  posted at Baby Steps.

Thanks for visiting the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival.  Submit your blog article to the next edition of hands on homeschool blog carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.


If you haven't already, put the Blog Carnival Sidebar Widget for this carnival onto your blog. It provides current links for this carnival, and other recent carnivals on the web. Or you can just grab the button off of my sidebar.

Hands On Carnival is Up

Happy Pi Day!
The latest edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival is up over at Mountaineer Country.  Lots of submissions this month so you are sure to find some inspiration.  Enjoy!

Hands On Carnival is Up

Happy Valentine's Day Everybody!

The February edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival is up and running.  Head on over to check it out at Cultivated Lives and be sure to leave Heather a comment while you're there.

Carnival is Up

Hey Everybody,
The carnival is up over at Dandelion House Homeschool.  Head on over and see how you can make your homeschool more hands on!

The Carnival is Up

The December 2010 edition of The Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival is up and fully loaded over at Bugs, Knights and Turkey's In the Yard.

Egypt Night

As part of their study of ancient Egypt, my daughter and her co-op partner chose to host an Egypt Night.  Here they are wrapped in the traditional muslin (sheets) garb of  the ancient Egyptians with faces done up and everything.  Being teen girls, I think they liked this part best and they spent oodles of time figuring and refiguring their robes, accesorizing and reapplying gobs of eye makeup. 

To start out the evening, they served traditional Egyptian food such as lentils with rice with a red sauce, boiled eggs topped with beans and parsley, lentil soup, bread, beef in a brown sauce (kind of like beef stew), cucumbers in a dill sauce and delicious honey bread for dessert which probably has another name but I don't remember what it was.  Basically it was stale bread drenched with honey.  I was pleased with the younger kids who tried these not unusual foods prepared in very unusual ways.  But there were no rude sounds coming from their table so I was very happy.  Most everything was good albeit not my kind of food and I probably won't make these dishes again.  It was interesting to taste what they would have tasted all the time and considered common.  They ate a lot of lentils!

After dinner the girls entertained us with a short skit.  In this portion of the skit, the girl on the right is ripping her heart out to have it weighed.  If she does not have a "good enough heart" it will be thrown to the crocodile to be eaten and she will not be allowed to go to the underworld.  She will die forever.  Jake the dog played the part of the crocodile.  He did very well too and gobbled her heart right up.

During the weeks leading up to the event they each studied the region, wrote reports on pharoahs, mummies and pyramids and they also put together some great items to display for the crowd attending Egypt Night.  There were short blurbs about Egypt posted on the walls here and there and items such as this hook and flail dd made out of aluminum foil, beads and electrical tape.  She gave it sturdiness using a wooden dowel and a coat hanger.  The fan folded item in the center is a "beard" made of paper to resemble the type the pharoahs would have worn.  Interesting to learn, much of what they wore was not their own.

They also had a couple games to entertain us with.   One we all played together was actually an ancient Sumerian game but we found it to be a good choice for Egypt Night too.  It was played with a game board dd made up a few weeks prior and tokens which had to moved from one oend of the board to the other.  You could play as individuals or as teams.  Although the board looked nothing like it, the play of the game was similar to that of modern day Sorry.

And the other game was pin the pyramid on Egypt.  The kids had fun trying to get the pyramids in the right places.

All of the game ideas, reports, recipes and crafts were from our latest KONOS adventure, History of the World I their high school curriculum in which my oldest daughter is working from this year.

Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival #26

Welcome to this November edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival. 

First we're going to stop over at All Things Beautiful.  Phyllis and the family have been busy this month.  She is sharing three posts with us including The Plague Spreads in which the kids get an excellent visual in a hands on activity, In Circles filled with fabulous fun math and I enjoy watching how the kids really get to think things through in her post Separating a Mixture.

Next Amy shares a science experiment in her post Fun Science Experiment With Bubbles at Begin Homeschooling.

Eddie presents Science - Brains and Eyeballs! posted at The Usual Mayhem. She says, "This is a summary of a couple of weeks of human body science lessons I've been teaching my daughter and her cousins. We've been having so much fun!"

NerdMom presents Cosmic Mysteries in Your Kitchen posted at Nerd Family.

Too much left over candy?  Go see how you can put it to good use with Pamela who presents Sweet Science posted at Blah, Blah, Blog.

"After observing a tarantula and drawing in our nature journals, we made our own spiders!" Marcia presents SPIDERS ARE COOL posted at child in harmony.

Jimmie joins in with some history too: "This is my post over at Heart of the Matter where I show our Egyptian Cartouche Potato Stamp craft."

Melissa will be hosting the Hands On Carnival next month.  Be sure to visit and bookmark her blog now.  This month she says, "While there are lots of versions of a shaduf out there for making history come alive...here's our go at it!"  I loved this post and the video makes it all so wonderfully clear for those of us who might not know exactly what a shaduf is.   Been Shadufin' Lately? posted at Bugs, Knights, and Turkeys In the Yard.

"This is a fun way to teach cups, pints, quarts, and gallons using a fun little "gallon man" to use as a visual aid. My kids loved this!" exclaims Elle.  She shares her Weekly Tip: The Gallon Guy posted at Homeschool Rescue.

Debbie presents Day to Day, a Hands on Homeschooling day-to- day. Here's what happens when you let your hands decide how to homeschool posted at DANDELION HOUSE HOMESCHOOL.

Allison presents The Child Friendly Kitchen Cabinet (Video) posted at Modern Montessori Mama.  I love videos late at night when I want to peruse he blogs but my eyes are tired.  This is a great one, and I'm also a Montessori fan so I thought you'd all enjoy this little clip.

Thanks for hanging out with us this month!

Submit your blog article to the next edition of hands on homeschool blog carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

Clip art copyrighted by Bobbie Peachey

The Carnival is Up!

Check out the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival over at Jimmie's Collage!  It looks like it is loaded up this month!  I'm going now to read through it myself...

September Edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival

This month I am excited about the start of the new school year and it has me thinking about field trips.  I hope you don't mind that I've included photos of my recent visit to Boston, a perfect field trip location and so inspiring to those of us who love history.  Welcome to the latest edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival!

Melissa presents a Math Giveaway - Bragging about our math curriculum! posted at Bugs, Knights, and Turkeys In the Yard.

The USS Constitution at rest in the harbor at Charlestown.  Behind her is the Bunker Hill Monument. 

Lynn has some lapbooking resources to share with you in her post Lapbooks for Autumn posted at Eclectic Education.

Paul Revere's home

Angie presents Making Changes!! for our Charlotte Mason enthusiasts posted at Live, Love, Learn.

The Old North Church, still being used today and now surrounded by townhouses

Pamela presents Bricks and Brains posted at Blah, Blah, Blog.  My son enjoyed this post as much as I!

Above the entrance inside the Old North Church

Dawn presents The Art of Drawing Things Apart? posted at my4sweetums.   I think you'll enjoy the fun twists and turns this lesson took when the kids got hold of it.

The Robert Shaw Memorial sitting across the street from our state house.  This is beautiful to look at up close with the attention to detail the artist paid.  If you received the posters of artwork from Picturing America almost two years ago, this is included.

Our next contributor was kind enough to give us two submissions that are perfect for our Hands On Carnival.  Melissa presents Fresco Painting and Carolina Sphinx Moth posted at In The Sparrows Nest.

I wish I had gotten a better picture but a bus got in my way.  The first time the Declaration of Independence was read in Massachusetts it was on the balcony of this building you see behind the trees.  It is also the site of the Boston Massacre which apparently wasn't much of a massacre at all.

Finally I am going to share my camping trip which makes a great hands on field trip! 

Thanks for visiting me here at Talking to Myself.  I hope you enjoyed the carnival.  Next month we'll be over at Jimmie's Collage so be sure to stop on by or better yet, submit your blog post describing your latest hands-on adventure.

Submit your blog article to the next edition of Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival using our carnival submission form. Past posts and future hosts can be found on our blog carnival index page.

New Hands On Carnival is Up!

The latest edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival has been hosted and posted by Kris over at Science of Relations.  You have got to see Kris's introductory video clip.  It's so cool.

Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival Guidelines

I have really enjoyed the entries to the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival thus far. I have received a plethora of ideas and inspiration for my own homeschooling and I hope you have as well. The reason Kris and I started this carnival was simple. We found many resources in Blogland for the other areas of our homeschooling… book lists, nature studies, worksheets, lapbooking ideas… but very few resources and not a single carnival dedicated to actual hands-on activities.


This carnival is all about homeschoolers. All entries must be made by homeschoolers sharing their experiences with hands-on activities in their own "classrooms." It is an opportunity to step away from the books, flashcards and worksheets and dive into the unusual. We’d like to keep this carnival very specific to hands-on projects and not take away from the other wonderful carnivals that are already available.

Please consider your entry. Are you blogging about something that you have already done with your children? Does your entry reflect an activity that requires kinesthetic learning? If you answered "yes" to these questions then we want your article! I appreciate all the blogs out there that are full of valuable wisdom and advice for homeschoolers, parents and kids, I visit them often, however this is not the carnival for you if your entry comes from an advice-giving viewpoint.
A note on lapbooking. I love lapbooks! And I am so thankful that I can find lots of lapbooking examples online. If you have a lapbook you’d like to share with the Hands On Community, please make sure that it requires your children to do some hands-on work aside from the usual reading, writing, coloring or cutting in the process of making it or using it. Entries that focus on that one hands-on part of the lapbook are especially appreciated!

If you have a blog entry that you would like to submit to the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival click here to go to our carnival submissions page.

This page may be updated from time to time as needed.
Last updated:  July 31, 2010

The Latest Hands On Carnival

The newest edition of the Hands On Homeschool Blog Carnival is up over at the Holistic Homeschooler. Go enjoy some ideas for getting your new school year going.