About two weeks ago our family started gathering information together to take part of a geographical box swap. This is basically were you gather information about your state that you find interesting and send it to another family, in a different state. The kids gathered all sorts of things from post cards, brochures, maps, travel guides, menues from our favorite restaurants, coloring books etc. I put together a unit study of Texas to send along as well as some coloring pages of our state flag, bird, insect, etc. We cant wait to get our boxes from other states and countries to learn about them and the influence they each have on America and the World as we know it today. We have started using this to also study geography, do mapping projects and creative art projects as well. My daughter found a large US map and a world map so we can use push pins to track every place we send and receive the geo boxes. This has really helped prick her interest in other places and made learning about different places, states, cultures etc so much easier and alot more fun! I am so thankful we signed up for the homeschooling swap on facebook. Now every month my kids get to look forward to receiving a package in the mail and learning about someplace new and mystical to them!
To top it off, and make it that much more exciting, we are also doing a birthday card swap as well each month. We are having a blast with this one too. This is the first month, so the kids kinda went traditional and each got to pick out a card from the store to mail to each child. Next month, though, they plan to create their own (since they now feel this will be more exciting to the child receiving the card). They really seem to be enjoying spreading Christ's love through something so simple as a birthday card and it has been nice to see them laugh together and share in this experience, without arguing and complaining. Music to my ears!!
There in just one more great thing happening in our family right now and that is the Flat Stanley exchange. Our family did this once before, and the results were bad! :( We didnt get any of our flats returned to us and spent so much time with the other families flats. The kids were disappointed and let down and I was frustrated and a little angry. Needless to say, they wanted to give it another Irish shot, so why not. We made the travelers books, visa's and of course the Traveler it self. All together we ended up with 5. Eli, the elephant; Bones, a skeleton; a gold coin with Sacajawea on it(since we are studying Lewis and Clark and Sacajawea); a girl named Princess (of course) and a boy named Drizzle Fizzle(since his sister got to name hers after her, he felt it was only fair to name his after him-go figure). That way we covered one for each child and a stow away in case one gets lost and ends up MIA! When you go travel the world, sometimes its hard to return! We are also tracking all these little guys travels using a different color push pin and doing compare and contrast charts between our state and the state we send a traveler to.
We plan to use this blog to add pictures of the materials we receive from all these wonderful adventures and also post our pics up as we are hosting new travelers every month. Obviously, I am pretty new to the blogging thing and my site is relatively empty (ok it is empty, who are we kidding) but I soon hope to change that. Besides, give a girl a break, I am a single mother of 3 and I work FT, HS and do volunteer work. I dont have a lot of blogging down time ;)
I am so looking forward to getting our first package in the mail...until then
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