FIAR How to Make an Apple Pie

My FIAR pages are a work in progress. Check back often for updates.

get ready to travel!

Lapbook Resource: Homeschool Share, Apple Lapbook, another Apple Lapbook,

Social Studies:

• Movie: Apple Farming For Kids
• Apple Pie story matching game
• Travel the world to gather the ingredients for an apple pie! Use this fruits of the spirit coloring page.
• Apple orchard jobs worksheet
• Create a passport to “visit the world” on your trip.
• Mark on a map where the girl went on her trip, in what order, and what ingredients she found in each location.
• Sorting apples lapbook page

Language Arts/Character Traits:

• Character Traits: Compassion.
• Ergermeier’s Story Bible – The Good Samaritan
• Discover why the girl in the story carried the chicken along instead of the eggs. Eggs are fragile!
• Compassionate at Hubbard’s Cupboard
• Book: “3 in 1: A Picture of God.”
• Movie: Around the World in 80 Days – 1956 version, available for instant watch on Netflix.

Art/Music (Our CreativiTea Party Day!):

• Make a finger paint apple tree
• Cezanne’s Astonishing Apples – Look for the storybook on the site for a fun story about the painter
• Apple Printing projects
• Apple coloring page
• Make an apple doll
• Apple Beaded Safety Pin project
• Dried apple craft projects

Math:

• Apple Seed Toss – Give each child five apple seeds. Each one will take turns tossing their seeds on to the board. Add up the points for each seed that lands on an apple square.
• Read the book “Apple Fractions.” Cut apples into fractions and discuss.
• Apple fractions lapbook page
• Counting apples worksheet 1 and worksheet 2
• Apple graphing
• Apple seed counting by 2’s
• Counting apples mini book – kids add their own apples to the trees

Science:

• Book: “Apple Picking Time“
• Movie: Different types of hens – Martha Stewart’s hens video
• Apple Investigation sheet
• Dissect an apple with mom’s help. Cut it open and look at all the different parts. Parts of an apple
• The Apple Wise Guys booklet
• Apple Taste Test
• Use all five senses to describe several different varieties of apple.
• Printable apple cards.
• Simple apple facts list.
• Apple lapbook worksheet

Food/Snack Ideas (Have any? Please share!):

• Apple Pie
• One Bowl Apple Cake
• Applesauce
• Try tasting a SMALL amount of apple cider vinegar

Extra Resources:

• Apple Reference Chart – type, use, harvest, texture and taste.
• Apples at Enchanted Learning
• Apples at ABC Teach
• Five a Day Apple Recipe Collection
• Field Trip! Go to the grocery and pick out several different types of apples to use during the week.
• Field Trip! Visit an apple orchard or farmer’s market to buy apples.

Thanksgiving Ideas and Resources

Time to gear up and get ready for MY favorite holiday, Thanksgiving!

Thanksgiving to me is the ultimate holiday because it’s not commercialized (except for grocery store sales), so it’s easy to celebrate the true meaning of the holiday; being thankful for our many blessings.

Here are some resources around the internets to help you and your family celebrate this wonderful season. Enjoy!

(Be sure to check back often, as I will be updating this page during Nov. as I find cool new links and resources.)

Pumpkin Patch: 30 Days Of Thanks & Giving. The Pumpkin Patch as an free download for 30 days worth of crafts, games, & learning.

Thanksgiving Thankful Countdown. SugarDoodle has a cute countdown to thanksgiving printable activity.

Thanks and Giving Trees.  Chocolate on my Brain has printable trees to record your blessings and things you do to bless others.

Thanksgiving Trees can be made many different ways – on doors, walls, bulletin boards, etc. Some families add one leaf (blessing) per day per family member. Other families brainstorm and fill up their tree with leaves all at once. Either way you do it, it’s a great visual reminder of our many blessings.

Thanksgiving Lapbooks:

Jimmie has a fabulous page of resources to make your own Thanksgiving lapbook and unit study. I love Jimmie’s stuff, she rawks!

Thanksgiving Interactive Notebook by Lilliput Station.

Christian Preschool Printables has three pages of Thanksgiving ideas and crafts. I say they can be used by kids PreK – 3rd with some tweaking.

Free Thanksgiving activities and ideas from Homeschool Helper.

Thanksgiving ABC Lapbook for beginning readers

Activity and Theme Pages:

Enchanted Learning has a whole page of K – 3 Thanksgiving printables and activities

ABC Teach also has a big page of printable worksheets, coloring pages, writing prompts and more.

Family Fun magazine has lots of fun ideas, crafts, recipes, printables and more.

Audry’s Thanksgiving Page of links to lots of ideas and printables.

The First Thanksgiving activities and ideas from Hubbard’s Cupboard.

Thanksgiving Activities at Kaboose – activities, printables, games and more!

To Purchase:

Amanda Bennett has a Thanksgiving Unit Study available at CurrClick. I’ve not used it, but her studies are very popular.

She also has her Thanksgiving Adventure Pack bundle available too.

Free TOS Holiday Magazine

Enjoy a fabulous free gift from The Old Schoolhouse®!

The Old Schoolhouse magazine is giving away a fabulous Digital Holiday Magazine. It’s 175 pages of planning idea, recipes, craft  and gift ideas. It even gives you directions to throw your own 1621 Thanksgiving Feast. How fun!

Simple click on the link above to download your own copy. Enjoy!

Art Trails

One nice thing about living in the North Texas DFW area is that there is always something to do. The frustrating thing is after living here almost 10 years, there are lots of neat things I’m only finding out about! It’s particularly frustrating to me because I miss so many things from home that I couldn’t find here….and yet suddenly I’m finding the same types of things I had been longing for. Um…have I been blind the last nine and a half years? Am I not hooked up with the right “cool things to do” sources? Something is obviously wrong. *lol*

For example, just this morning someone on my area homeschooling list just HAPPENED to email the group about the Huffines Art Trails in Richardson. I had NO idea that this went on every year! It’s held in a lovely park, and the weather today was absolutely perfect. I didn’t find out about it until late, so we could only stay about an hour, but I’m so glad we went.

Each vendor had their own tent, and there was a lovely combination of different arts and crafts. There were many jewelry booths, some pottery, a few fiber art (knitting, crochet and weaving), several photographers, paintings, some metal sculptures, candles, and many more I can’t even remember. It was lovely because there was no mass-marketed or imported items.

There was also live music, and a hay bale maze for the kids. There is also supposed to be a scavenger hunt for the kids too, but since we only had a short time there we didn’t give it a try. Next year we will go earlier in the day so we can savor all of it it.

walking along the art trail

one of the booths

metal dragon sculpture

the hay bale maze

Still Alive and Kicking!

Still here, although you might not be able to tell due to the lack of blog updates. Hopefully though you’ve been reading through the archives and finding all the wonderful things I’ve blogged about before. (I swear, there are interesting things in there somewhere.)

My blog is going through a bit of an identity crisis. Or maybe a midlife crisis if we go by the blog owner’s age. Either way, it’s in crisis and doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up. (Have you ever noticed that if you type the same word three times in a row it starts to look WRONG. Crisis. Crisis. Crisis. See, totally whacked.)

Is it a homeschool-only blog? A family blog? A scrapbook blog? Although seeing that my super-duper-fancy-expensive-computer-and-scrapping-programs have decided to revolt and freeze up on me every 10 minutes, there’s not much scrapping getting done.

I admire those bloggers who can weave their daily life stories with posts about their hobbies or homeschool. And the fact that they can actually find time TO blog….and be interesting to boot.

I’d love to have an interesting blog.

I’d especially like to have an interesting blog that was interesting to someone other than me, myself and I.

Although they are my biggest fans and are loyal followers, so I shouldn’t complain. Not everyone has an entourage of their very own. *snort*

Sometimes I think I’ll use the blog as a sort of online journal of our days. You know, capture those little special moments that are often forgotten. But then I worry that most days the blog would read like this:

Day one: Got dressed.

Day two: Got dressed BEFORE daddy made it home.

Day three: Got dressed WITH makeup before daddy made it home.

Day four: Got dressed, with makeup, AND even cooked dinner before daddy made it home. He ate leftovers. Note: Gotta work on that timing thing.

Day five: Stayed in our pajamas all day, but we did school! Too exhausted to cook. Pizza night!

Okay, so it’s really not THAT bad (most days). But I’ve often thought that the things that seem exciting to ME, are pretty boring to the rest of the world. Maybe it’s a mommy thing? Or a homeschool mom thing? So far there haven’t been too many of my “in real life” friends that get excited about reading a new picture book. (We’re reading Mike Mulligan this week! I’m sooooo excited!!!!!)

I just got finished teaching four years of homeschool high school. It’s a TREAT to get to read picture books.

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah….I also admire bloggers who can stay on topic within a single post. And especially ones that know clever and interesting ways to end a post that makes the reader want to come back for more.

Which I apparently don’t know how to do.

Uh….

The end.

Where’s My Mojo?

I’ve been in a digiscrapping slump for years. I really, really want to get back into the hobby but am having trouble. It’s been so long that I’ve actually scrapped any pages that I’ve forgotten how to use my Paint Shop Pro program! *yuck*

However, while fiddling around with it today, I realized *why* I’ve been having such a hard time getting my mojo back….I’m having some kind of weird problem with PSP and PSCS4. For whatever strange and frustrating reason, both programs have quit working. Specifically, the Pick Tool (I forget what that’s called in PS). It’s the tool that lets you move and resize your elements. It usually cr*ps out on my about 10-15 minutes after the program (either PS or PSP) has been opened. To make it even MORE frustrating, DD has both programs loaded on her laptop and NEVER has this problem. ARGH!

I though that if I deleted PS, maybe that would help solve the issue, but it didn’t. Then I reinstalled PSPX, and that didn’t help either. I’m incredibly frustrated! *bangs head on desk*  So my mojo might come back if I could ACTUALLY SCRAP SOMETHING.

The (Almost) Ultimate PSP Script Ever!

<insert infomercial voice here>

Digiscrapping PSP users, now YOU can have the (Almost) Ultimate PSP Script EVER!

Using templates has never been SO EASY!

(Almost) Never again will you envy PS users and their CNTL+G function!

Simply run Photojenic’s “Clip to Template” script and you’ll be finishing layouts in (almost) a fraction of the time it used to take!

But wait, there’s MORE!

Not only will this handy little script help you with (almost) any typical layout template, it will ALSO help you with (almost) any template that has a tricky element feature such as brush strokes or transparencies.

This all natural product is (almost) guaranteed to be the most Ultimate PSP Script in your collection!

How much do you think a script like this is worth?

$200?

$300?

$500?

No! This price is so ridiculously low, you have to download your own copy RIGHT NOW!

You won’t be paying $100…or even $50. In fact, you’ll only be paying….

*drum roll*

Nada! That’s right folks! This script is SO AMAZING we’re actually GIVING IT AWAY!

DOWNLOAD HERE – PSPX, X2 and up

DOWNLOAD HERE – PSP 9

Simply place the script in your MyPSP>ScriptsRestricted folder and Unleash the Power of the (Almost) Ultimate PSP Script ever! Note: See post #17 for a mini tutorial.

<end infomercial>

Note: I need to give a huge thanks to Tracey (Haley64 at DST) for all her help. Not only did she fix the script for PSP9 users (and tell me I had a hiccup in the first version), it was also her tip about keeping the transparency of an template layer that made this script the (almost) ultimate psp script ever. Thank you so much Tracey, you rock!:)

Mini Tutorial:

After you download the script, place it in your MyDocuments>MyPSP>ScriptsRestricted file. It should then be available under your scripts toolbar.

Using the script:

Let’s pretend you have a template with a singe spot for a photo. First you would open both your template and the photo in PSP. Copy the photo to your clipboard (cntl+c) then paste it (cntl+v) into the template ABOVE where the photo needs to go.

At this point you will be able to move, resize, etc. the photo all you want to make sure it’s positioned exactly how you need it to be. With the PHOTO layer still highlighted, run the script. In just a few seconds your photo should be cropped exactly to the template shape below. Repeat as needed.

This script will also work for papers and other elements. The best part is that it works with many template layers that have a transparency effect. For example, several of Katie Pertiet’s templates have layers that look like brush strokes. This script will fit the photo/paper into that layer and preserves the brush-like appearance.

Sometimes I can get it to work with masks or “mats.” It depends on if, and what kind, of layer style the designer has added to the PSD file. That’s why the script is “almost” the ultimate because it doesn’t work on everything. I suggest you experiment and see how it works with different elements you have in your stash. Hopefully it will be an asset to your scrapping arsenal.

Final Tip:
I’ve mapped the script to my keyboard so that I only have to hit cntl+3 to run the script. In PSPX you’ll need to go View>Customize>Scripts . Select the script name and an Icon, then click on the Keyboard tab. Choose Bound Scripts from the dropdown menu. Click on the name of the script, hit the key(s) you want to map it to and click “assign.” You should be good to go!

Free Full-sized Bioron Homeopathics for Mom Bloggers

Here is a great freebie just in time for the cold and flu season.

Boiron is offering full sized freebies of their homeopathic children products.

Children’s Oscillococcinum®
Children’s Coldcalm Pellets®
Children’s Chestal®

The only requirement for this freebie is that you are a mom with an active blog who lives in the United States. That’s it! So if that describes you, head on over and enter your email. They will send you your own unique redemption link to send for your free products. Allow 2-4 weeks for delivery.

What’s so great about homeopathic medicines? Here’s what Boiron has to say for themselves.

“Homeopathic medicines are one of the safest choices for self-treatment. They have no known side effects including drowsiness. Nor do they interact with other medication or contraindicate pre-existing conditions.”

To receive your full sized free samples sign up here.

You can also download a coupon for $1.00 off any of these childrens products that doesn’t expire until December 2010!