Review: The Captain Sun Adventures

My girls both love comic books, so it was a nice change of pace when we reviewed Rescue Me! What Superheroes Can Teach Us About the Power of Faith. This is Book 1 of the Captain Sun Adventures, and we received a digital copy.   Breeze, who is 8, read Rescue Me! on the iPad. It was a quick […]

Review: Carole P. Roman Storybooks

We all love reading in HP Household, and the opportunity to review children’s books from Carole P. Roman was too good to pass up. Besides, some of her books coincided with our lessons. We chose two books from her If You Were Me and Lived in… series: Renaissance Italy and The American West. We also […]

DIY Science-Themed Party

I had such a great time reminiscing about Raine’s last Japanese-themed birthday party, I dug up photos from her 7th birthday, when we had a Science-themed party here at home. This one was really a family affair, with my mom, sister, sister-in-law, The Hubby, uncle in the US, a good friend, and the sister’s boyfriend […]

Mathematize Your Home: Shopping Math

  I’ve always maintained that shopping and making change are the most useful (and sneakiest) ways of practicing Math skills.   On a recent trip to Monterey, our local meat shop, we had a few challenges other than what to have for dinner. For example, lean ground pork costs P205 a kilo, while regular ground […]

Mathematize Your Home: Board Games

    One of the sneaky ways we use to work in some Math skills into our regular, non-formal-studying lives is play board games. The girls love board games. We started with the beginner ones like Snakes and Ladders and Candyland, to Richard Scarry games to the girls’ current favorite, Monopoly.   Aside from the […]

A Walk in the Clouds

A few weeks ago, we were invited by my sister-in-law, Rose, to visit Camp N to join a mountain bike clinic and try out the rest of their outdoor adventure facilities. We planned to get in before 9AM, zip through the activities, then leave by 1PM so we could still make it back in time […]

Mathematize Your Home: Jellybeans—[Math] Tricks for Treats

In the HP household (that’s ours), we usually ration out desserts, treats, and other sweets. We once received a huge jar of jellybeans as a gift—and it lasted for months! After a proper meal, the kids would get, at most, only 10 jellybeans. Since our jar had 49 flavors and then some, each bean had […]

Mathemize Your Home: Teaching Shapes and Colors (Part 1 of a Series)

    Parents worry about their kids’ reading skills, but I rarely hear them worry about number skills (I admit to that). But our children’s success is as dependent on numeracy as it is on literacy. Numeracy, which involves our ability to make sense of numbers, time, and patterns, to think logically, and to create […]

Child’s Play

There used to be an ad (Milo, I think) that said something like, “A child playing is a child at work.” And true enough; Maria Montessori says that play is the work of a child. Play is how kids learn to deal with the world around them, how they practice skills—from motor to social to […]

Rainy Day Activity #1: Fizzing Fun

Raine is on sem break this week (a preschooler with a sem break!) the weather has been rather dismal, and the girls have been antsy. So I decided to try out the most fun of kiddie science experiments: the magic mix of baking soda and vinegar. And what can be more fun than baking soda […]