We're All Moved In And Very Nearly Cozy

We're really excited about our brand spankin' new site, Layers of Learning. Karen has a super fun printable game for President's Day coming out tomorrow--and if you hurry you'll see all the test posts Karen put in trying to get our feedburner thing up and going . . . I have no doubt she'll be deleting them soon.

What we're not excited about is that we're having problems switching our e-mail and some other feeds to our new site.

We'd be more pleased than you can imagine if you would come over and sign up once again.

Sign up with e-mail subscribe

Sign up with reader or by any other feedish means

P.S.- Google Friend Connect is disappearing by decree from the Great Google in just another month or so. If you have GFC subscriptions to anyone you'll want to switch those over ASAP. It won't affect your e-mail or Reader subscriptions.

testing our feeds...thanks for your patience!

Under Construction

We're super excited to be completely revamping our site.  You're going to love how easy it will be to navigate and find all our posts on every topic we've written about from Roman tessellations to the Rubix Cube review. We'll have pages for reviews, lesson plans, what we do when school is out, and a brand new catalog, plus more. 

But . . . sadly, sadly we'll be down for a week or so while we're making the changes.  So see ya round the curve.

Of course it's entirely possible we'll pop back up on Blogger in our old place with our old look . .  . wish Karen luck in her HTML forays.

Happy Birthday Laura!

Today is Laura Ingalls Wilder's birthday!  She's one of our favorite authors.

If you're a fan, go join the facebook group, Remembering Laura.

Start reading one of her books out loud to your kids.  Girls and boys both like all of her books, but boys will be especially drawn to Farmer Boy, also one of my favorites.

And eat corn bread and bean soup by candlelight tonight!

Mini Castle Craft

You can easily make these mini castles with your kids while studying the middle ages.

Printable Castle Craft

Just print the castles out onto card stock, color, cut along the dotted line over the castle and around the heavy line on the base, then fasten the base together in a circle behind.  Your castle can stand up on its own.

Here are some books to read to go along with your castle studies:

Medieval Castle Sticker Picture Book by A.G. Smith
Knights and Castles by Seymour Simon
Castle by David MacAulay
Days of the Knights by Christopher Maynard



ADDITIONAL LAYERS:

• Find some real castles online.  
• Compare Japanese medieval castles to European ones.  
• What do we use today for defense and how is this the same and different from the castles of the middle ages?
• Castles are a marvel of engineering and design, but they were made obsolete by new technology in the form of gunpowder.  Learn more about how gunpowder changed the world.  
• The world is constantly being changed by technology.  What technologies are changing your world right now?  How do you feel about it?