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Fatigue

Is it over yet? ¡Oy Ve! Now don’t get me wrong, we are still enjoying our homeschool adventure and we have no plans of quiting or returning back to public school. We have just done so much creative learning that we may have reached the we need a break point of things. And you know what? That’s the beauty of homeschooling! We can take a break whenever we need to! Yay! Here is my dilema on the…

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The Music Machine

A few weeks ago, I made an amazing discovery, while helping my S.O. go through his mom’s belongings. Okay, technically, I didn’t ‘discover’ anything. Everyone knew it was there, except for me… I can’t even really say I found it, because, again- everyone knew it was there, collecting dust- except for me. Hmmm. At any rate, I was estatic over this piece of history.

It was an 8 track player and a…

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Many Benefits in Home Schooling

Many Benefits in Home Schooling

Is the school year over with yet? Whoo. I am worn out. This homeschooling thing continues to be a lot more than what I thought it would be. Don’t get me wrong, I am enjoying every minute of it and wouldn’t change it for the world. Yep. given the choice, I would keep on dealing with the life and frustrations of a two-year old and two of his friends. I would suffer my daughter’s eye rolls and other…

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The Speaker

   Thanks to a 4 H presentation contest last week, we didn’t do a whole lot of curriculum schooling. Choosing instead to focus on Kaira’s speech. The presentation contest topic was left up to the participants, the only requirement being it had to be a ‘how-to’ presentation. Kaira’s topic of choice was, ‘how to peacefully defend yourself’. I let Kaira go on her own for this one. This was a great…

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It's Another Snow Day...

It’s Another Snow Day…

Yep, it’s snowing, again! Quori took one look outside and and promptly tried to close the curtains. He only tolerates the snow and just barely at that! We will be schooling today, but just a bit differently than normal… If you’ll remember, the commercial break  from the last update, I wrote a book, so Kaira has been observing and learning all about the marketing and production of authoring and…

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The Last Pair of Shoes

Happy New Year! I hope you all have had a wonderful first few weeks of 2018. Holidays bring so much excitement into our home that it seems to take the first half of the new month to get adjusted and back into the swing of things.

Honestly, I would have happily taken another few days off, but I couldn’t.

For the last week, my uncle has been begging me to talk to him. Incessantly pestering me. Do…

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Snow Days

Last week, we experienced record lows, as did pretty much everyone else on the Eastern side of the US… Along with the below freezing temps came snow and ice… Kids everywhere celebrated because they got almost another week out from school, after only just finishing the Christmas or Winter break. Well maybe not all kids. As we were still trying to ease back into our home school routine after the…

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The trailer to my book. Hope you like it! (Credit for the music is poddington_bear; pounding on the piano keys I will be going back and putting that in the video) #booktrailer #author #writer #books #artistry #read #devotional #christian

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This book is a must have! Get it first! Get it now!

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Traditional Christmas

 From my home and family to yours, I would love to wish you a very Merry Christmas! (Just a few days after the fact) I hope the holiday has been everything you needed it to be and that you were blessed by it.

Did you put up a Christmas tree or decorate your home? I’d love to see pictures- drop them in the comments so we can all enjoy them! We put up a Christmas tree and stockings, but we didn’t…

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Torn

 Torn… that’s how I’ve been feeling these last couple of days, as a homeschool mom and teacher. Don’t get me wrong; this is not a post about me lamenting about how I am questioning our homeschool adventure decision. We have crossed that bridge and overcome those troubles and we are homeschooling with no regrets. As many of you know, I love ‘our’ curriculum. I shout its praises fairly often- if…

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     Had to break out the magnifying glass on this one, folks! I recently decided to revisit my relatives in my Jackson/Hamn tree on Ancestry, because you kow, that’s what I do. Plus, the dead really have been quite silent these last few weeks.

Anywho, there I was excited because there were a ton of NEW LEAVES!!! I love new leaves, they make it so easy for the dead to start coversations with me- or maybe, they make my ears more in tune to their chattering. Whatever the case may be, it is safe to say I was estatic and I happily began checking out the leaves, not even caring if anyone talked to me or not.

And wouldn’t you know it? Someone started talkig to me almost immediately! Roxanne Tyler flagged me down with her death cerificate. Roxy, as she was called while living, was born in 1859 to Gabriel and Martha Tyler and she is my third great aunt. The Tyler name may sound familiar to you because, they’ve been rather chatty this year ad her brother and nephew were featured earlier in He Was The Son of a Preacher Man…

This is all mundane information and I am sure you are wondering why I was calling the mystery squad, right? Well, here is the thing… She was 51 years old when she died in 1933.

Here’s a copy of her death certificate and a copy of the 1870 Census- I’ll wait while you do the math…

  It didn’t add up for me either. At first, I was confused as how someone could just magically drop twenty-three years off with no one noticing- I mean if that’s the case, then I would like to be 25, please and thank you.

But that isn’t how life works, is it?

I started meticulously reviewing all of the information I had on Ms. Roxy, trying to identify the point in her life when she shaved all those years off. I figured this woud be done most easily in the census records, because they were notorious for errors or jotting down whatever they felt like… No such luck. Each subsequent census shows her age with only a slight variance in her age, ranging from a year to three year difference, but not the twenty plus, I was looking for. Not to mention that the final census she is found in, has her at seventy years old.

Her marriage record indicates she was twenty-three when she married Mr. James Morton on July 25, 1883. Here, her birth year is 1860. So, again, not enough of a difference to cause any alarm or concern.

This is about the time that Roxy stopped talking to me and I was really wishing the Mystery Squad would hurry up and answer the call I had put out.

While I was waiting, I began to ponder how a body would behave if it was twenty years older than what you were telling people it was… I mean mind over matter goes a long way, but is it really possible to convince a body to act and behave as a younger body- if you just convince your mind to believe it? Again, if that’s the case, then I believe with all my might that I am twenty-five… I wonder how long it will be before everything else falls into place? 😉

This was getting me absolutely no where and my brain was starting to hurt from all the work of thinking… I decided to take one more look at the death certificate. Naturally, Roxxy started whispering sweet nothings in my ear, again. I looked over and over the death certification looking for clues and I was continuously drawn to the informant; Ada Morton Mercer, aka, the daughter of Roxy Tyler Morton. How in he world does an adult child not know how old her parent is? This was difficult to fathom, because my own children, excepting the toddler, know how old I am and have known this information since they were in elementary school. Am I the lone parent that encourages her children to know things about her other than ‘I am called mom’? I hardly think I am.

Ada Mercer. Why did Roxy keep directing me to her? I could not figure it out. I guess Roxy was getting frustrated with me, because the next thing I know, she was seemingly screaming at me, “do the math dummy!” (Yeah, my dead people can be a bit harsh when you aren’t moving fast enough to their liking…)

I can imagine that Ada was very distraught over loosing her mother and may have even been a bit tired, exhausted or even depressed, which is why when the form asked for the age of the deceased, she listed her own age, 51, in response.

Yep. Roxy was getting me all worked up over her daughter. I haven’t had a chance to dig in and see what’s going on over there, but when I do, I will be sure to let you all know!

Have you come across a for or other document that contained wrong information? How did you go about finding the correct info? Once you found the right stuff, did you make any effort to get the wrong things changed? Why or why not? For me, I think I will just make a note on Roxanne in my tree and leave it at that. I don’t think it would be worth it to get the information changed anywhere else.

I can’t wait to hear about how the wrong info has affected you in your searching! And like always, please share, share, share! I’m not picky, so I won’t tur away your likes and comments, either!

There’s A Mystery Afoot      Had to break out the magnifying glass on this one, folks! I recently decided to revisit my relatives in my…

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A few weeks into our adventure, Kaira ‘discovered’ Ancient Egypt… Prior to our trip to Ancient Egypt, I had only seen a literal change in Kaira’s learning briefly- when relearning some math skills. This adventure was different, though. It wasn’t just the dawn of understanding finally happening after struggling for so long to grasp a concept… This was actual interest and a desire to learn something she had not previously been exposed to.

I loved every minute of seeing this exploration.

You guys already know, we are following the Easy Peasy curriculum, which I highly recommend and where our journey began. If you have visited the EP site, then you know things like science, history, Bible and Art are divided into Years… Ancient Egypt can be found in Year One. As I have said before, EP does not have to be used as a whole curriculum and can be used as individual courses, so if Ancient Egypt is on your radar, you should definitely check it out.

The only thing I did not like, as we were learning about Ancient Egypt was a video, which if memeory serves me correctly, was TWO HOURS LONG. This video was not a part of the EP curricula, but it was on one of the sites we visited for EP and because Kaira was so into learning about Ancient Egypt, she wanted to watch the video. When I got bored, about halfway through, and suggested we didn’t need to finish watching, she insisted we finish it, because she needed to know what happened.

I struggled through that video and didn’t fall asleep, because when you are the teacher and you arer invested in your child and you want to foster true learning and spend time with your kid- that’s what you do.

Ancient Egyptians are credited for being one of the first civilalizations to use a written language. Kaira had lots of fun learning about hieroglyphics. She especially liked writing ‘secret’ messages to family members via email and seeing if they could decipher them. (I can’t remember if this activity was in the EP lessons or if I added it as something extra, so if I added it as extra, now I’ve shared it with you and if I didn’t, well now you know that this activity was loads of fun!) Family memebers liked being included in Kaira’s learning process and were thrilled to learn along with her- as they had to study the hieroglyphics in order to communicate with her. Added bonus, this activity gave Kaira something to talk to older members of our family about, which fostered some always welcome communication among the generations. Yay.

Along with learning the written language, Kaira learned the process the Ancient Egyptians went through to make paper. Because obviously, you can’t have a written language with nothing to write it on, right? The paper making activity took a few days to fully make, but it was definitely worth it. I suggest you break out the newspaper and old clothes for this one. (This was when I realized that even in homeschool or maybe moreso in homeschool, an art shirt is necesasry, lol.)

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Be forewarned though- this stuff STINKS when it is drying! Also, I had to keep going back and peeling the paper off of the newspaper and paper towel so it wouldn’t stick to those things… This was a tedius process because you had to be extremely careful, otherwise you would rip the paper… I can’t even fathom the patience Ancient Egyptians had, having to do this over and over again.

After Kaira had completed EP’s unit on Ancient Egypt, I had a special project awaiting her. She mummified Barbie. I was able to expand the mummification of Barbie even further by having Kaira create Barbie’s tomb room (the inside of a pyramid), based on what she had learned and by having her come up with a story about the person in the sarcophagus. Kaira really showed how much she had learned- as opposed to the standard regirgitation of facts she had demonstrated for testing purposes during her pre home school years-  during the process of these activities. Weeks after beginning the Ancient Egypt unit and she was able to tell you ALL about Ancient Egypt and the Egyptians- without testing. In fact, for this project, the only time Kaira utilized Google or other research methods was to recall very specific details about how something looked or the specific details of a fact, but not the fact itself.

Unfortunately, our mummified Barbie began to mold after about a week of laying in her final resting place, so we had to throw her and the pyramid out. I am not sure if this is because we layed her on the sarcophagus before she was completely dry or if this is what happens in general, so take lots of pictures for memory’s sake. Also, everything purchased to use in these projects was purchased at the Dollar Tree (except for the shoebox, which we already had), so kudos to Dollar Tree, who  have quickly become my go to store when it comes to our homeschool adventure and the various projects we have completed thus far. I think I spent a total of $10, and I over bought items, due to being unsure of what exactly we would need, so this is really an affordable learning experience, as well as, a fun one!

THE STORY OF QUEEN EMERALD

                                        by Kaira

Queen Emerald worked on the mummies with her parents, but she they weren’t slaves, they were just really good at doing mummy things. When Emerald was a young girl, she fell in love with the Pharoah’s son. He noticed her and decided to marry her. A littel while after that, his parents died and he became Pharoah and she was Queen. Other countries wanted to control their land, so Pharoah had to go to war with them and he died in battle. Queen Emerald was still alive, so she took over ruling the land. She lived from 533 BC until her death in 300 BC.

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We had another activity to go along with this one, but we failed miserably at it. We believe learning happens all around us- in our successes and our failures, so we will include it here and encourage you to give it a try! We would also love to see pictures of your attempts on this or any of the projects we share with you!

We attempted to make a pyramid out of rice krispy treats… This did not work for us for two reasons: Kaira was gung ho and I was not in the moment. ( I think the babies needed my attention or maybe I was over mess making for the day…) Anyway, I wasn’t supervising the making of said treats and therefore directions weren’t followed as well as they should have been and we ended up with a giant mess- dry cereal all over the counters, stove and floor and a goopy, unedible something in the bowl…

Kaira had fun creating the mess, so I guess that counts for something, right?

Any way, after the treats are made, the idea is to form them into bricks- remember they don’t have to be perfect- and then begin to stack or construct them into a pyramid- much like the slaves would have done in ancient Egyptian times.

Here’s a picture of the beginning of the attempt (before it became disasterous).

We hope you have enjoyed hearing about our adventure in Ancient Egypt! What has been your favorite thing to learn so far in your school? We would love to hear all about it, so leave us a comment, so we can chat! Also, we would be so appreciative if you helped us get the homeschooling adventure word out! Hit the like button AND share, share, share! See you next time!

A Quick Trip to Ancient Egypt A few weeks into our adventure, Kaira 'discovered' Ancient Egypt... Prior to our trip to Ancient Egypt, I had only seen a literal change in Kaira's learning briefly- when relearning some math skills.

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Where will the Journey take you? Here's my BIG NEWS UPDATE!!! *I'm doing a guest blog post, which will be published in February *I have submitted everything I need to be a guest on a writer/author podcast (hopefully, I will be chosen) *if you need a host for you open mic or event, Special K (my alter ego) is available!!! *I am working on a website where I can bring everything I do together- the blogs, my poetry, you can get in touch with me (or Special K), book reviews and my book(s)- Dvnmskm Enterprises is COMING SOON!! *On Friday, I will be hosting the 1st day of the 25 Days of Authors party on Facebook (link to join is in the comments) and... MY BOOK, JOURNEY TO FORGIVENESS: a devotional WILL BE AVAILABLE FOR PRE-ORDER!!!!

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I am so excited about the things happening to me right now as a professional (I use that term as loosely as humanly possible) writer! I can't wait to share them all with you! You'll hear it first if you follow me on Facebook, Kimberly Johnson- I will be going live sometime this afternoon (nap time) to tell everyone everything! If you don't follow me on Facebook, that's okay! I will be updating you guys shortly afterwards! And by the way, I love connecting with you guys!!! #author #writer #blogger #ilovewords #books #dreambig #youareassuccessfulasyouwanttobe #dreamscometrue talk you guys soon!!! 😗

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Who's Sitting at Your Table?

Who’s Sitting at Your Table?

Well, we’ve wrapped up yet another Thanksgiving… 

 and   some of us may be already moving with warp speed into Christmas festivities. Admittedly, I will be joining the Christmas-ers in just a few short hours, but first, an important question- who has been lucky enough to have been given a seat at your table? 

Understand I don’t mean your literal table, though… I’m wanting to know about your…

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When Death Comes Knocking...

When Death Comes Knocking…

I have to apologize to those of you who have become accustomed to my snarky and somewhat sarcastic writing style, because this won’t be like that… I can’t even bring myself to apologize for not writing for so long, can’t bring myself to say things like life got in the way, because that isn’t what happened… Yes, my family and I were living life, but we were doing so much more than that… We were…