I was at Staples last weekend. I found this button. If only I had found it sooner LOL!

I am happy to report it doesn’t always work, but it always redirects and often gets a laugh and sometimes it works. 🙂

I might have also hidden it from the Prez who wanted to take it to his office for use with his employees. And yes, I told him he needed to get his own EASY button.

Yes, friends, you probably need an EASY button too. Or maybe unlike our home things run smoothly and as planned most of the time in your home. I highly recommend it, kind of like those stress balls you squeeze but takes much less effort.

Like with teaching phonics, I am opting for ease. LOL! Really, it isn’t so bad, but I am reading a new book on my kindle: Understanding the Logic of English by Denise Eide. I am enjoying it, but I wouldn’t call it pleasure reading either. It has come highly recommended by a couple of homeschooling Mommas, and it promises to give me answers to the endless questions about the [lack of] logic in the English language.

But back to phonics and the easy button, I really will say I am glad I haven’t sunk a bunch of cash into an expensive program. The best tool I have found is my FREE phonics caps that are stored in repurposed parmesan cheese shakers.

Each of the colored caps represents a certain part of a word: vowels, blends, consonants, dipthongs, word endings such as -ing, -ed, -es. I even have some yellow ones with question marks, which I use to quiz them on the missing letter or sound. I use these ALL THE TIME. And they were FREE. 🙂

Back to the easy button, I (and the children) are loving my more-detailed assignment sheets. Now mind you, they took a L.O.T. of time this summer to make (and I am only through week 12 of 36 weeks), but then Mo does this without me reminding or prodding (mostly) … and the time is all worth it when he comes up to show me something like this drawing he put in his nature journal.

And one day while I was staring at my new button and admiring all of its beauty (not really), I looked outside to see this.

Do you see the plane way up there?

They flew this plane—all 6 of them—for an hour! Now this is when it is all worth it! Where’s the LOVE button?!

Today, I decided a little art/science project was in order with the jar of broken crayons I’d been saving for awhile.

*This photo looks like she was in the oven. She was NOT close, but it sure does look like it.*

And here is the final product.

I am in a summer Bible study, and we meet every Monday (days every other week with our children (14! yesterday) and alternating nights sans children. Since we spent 3 hours there, we had a shortened school day yesterday. Today, I worked with the littles on their 100 Chart and sequencing numbers. I was extremely pleased at their naming of random numbers between 1 and 100.

Li’l Bro had a harder time with the sequencing, but he is a WHIZ with our Al Abacus. And he is subtracting now with it. I don’t have pictures of him using it, but I did snap a few today while we worked on sequencing.

Here is another one for Li’l Miss to try.

She did it!

Mo and Larry had another assignment for the day. I am quite impressed as they ran with this on their own and came up with the idea to use clay instead of balloons as suggested in their book

I like the clay much better as the balloons just didn’t work for me (partly blown up and not round and a choking hazard). We plan to insert paper clips and hang them up … I’ll let y’all know how well that works.

And little brother was quite impressed too!

I have to wrap this one up because I’m out of photos (seems my iPhone is my only source these days since we started back to school), and I have some people waiting anxiously for me to observe the night sky with them. Mo has gotten out the telescope and sighted the moon and maybe a constellation or two using this book, which I highly recommend.