Life on Planet Caddick

Today I'm linking up with the Hip Homeschool Hop . This week we tried our hand at making soap. I've been wanting to try making soap for a while, but while reading our latest book about Ben Franklin they have soap and candle making activities. Doing a "requirement" for school is definitely a reason to make it happen! We are going to tackle candle making later this week - but for now it's soap making. I know young Ben didn't make soap with a melt and pour goats milk base, and I know they didn't add color (or probably fragrance), but that's how we did ours. Bonus points - I'm counting it as this week's art project too. Little man did all the coloring and swirling so he gets credit for that. He really did all of it - I just supervised and gave him direction. That's the good thing about melt and pour instead of cold process - no lye. Poor young Ben, what a nasty job that must have been! Putting colors in the molds He made them very colorful All ...

I'm trying to make a concerted effort to include art this year in our homeschool. I'm not very artsy and I find teaching art - well, boring. But doing art, well even making bad art is fun! My son feels the same way, so we're going to do some fly by the seat of our pants painting and other projects this year. I pulled our first project off Pinterest (of course!). I'm not as addicted to that site as a lot of my friends, actually I rarely use it - but sometimes I find cool stuff I'd like to try and this idea was one of them The idea seemed super simple and I thought, why not - some cool artwork on the wall will be nice when we're done. So I drug the boy to Michaels, had him pick out some colors (along with the rest of the supplies), and we dove right in. He picked shades of blue and purple (which matches nothing in my house!) but again - it's more about the doing here... Hubby didn't paint - he was our photographer Hi Honey! All dry and waiting for our sw...

I follow Hip Homeschool Moms, both in blog form and on Facebook. I love them. A group of homeschoolers helping out other homeschoolers. Let's face it, we all need that sometimes! If you don't follow them you should! I love how on their FB page they will throw out random questions that make you think, laugh, or whatever. I also love that people message them (I'm just guessing here) and ask questions which get put out there for all the other page fans to see and hopefully help the stressed out, stumped homeschooling parent. I wish I had a chance to follow all the updates, but if I get on FB then lets face it - my schoolwork doesn't get done! My son's always gets done (um well, usually always). So when I saw an update the other day that said something to the effect of "play nice" it made me upset. I don't usually offer any tips if I have no experience. Sometimes I say 'we tried such and such, but it wasn't a good fit for our family' or whateve...