We couldn’t either.

There was an area-wide service outage and we wound up having to record a giggle-filled Chatcast instead.

CJ started getting choked up as we reminisced about our belly bump misadventures, oversized yoga balls, indoor trains, our obsession with all things Scooby Doo and a lot more!

So, what did you think of our singing?

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

“Welcome to WeatherED – short for Weather Education. WeatherED is like your very own online weather classroom. This is where you’ll learn everything you’ve ever wanted to know about the weather.”

WeatherEd is part of the Weather Channel’s ever-growing list of awesome weather resources. There is a really well documented Weather Encyclopedia, a Glossary, an Online Resource Guide and a section for Teacher Resources.

The Weather Channel’s Kids section also has a Weather Center, Weather Games, Climate Code, Cool Clips and the WeatherREADY planning center.

How do you think you could use WeatherEd? Let us know in the Comments below!

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

KidAstronomy.com’s Online Astronomy Academy is a free, online class recommended for kids 7-18 years old.

This is a real class!

So what do you think? Are you going to try KidAstronomy.com’s Online Astronomy Academy?

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

Deadline: Saturday, December 31st

We just found out that the Weekly Homeschool Planner is going to be on sale for 3 days only, starting tomorrow!

From Thursday, December 29th through Saturday, December 31st, you can use discount code ORGANIZE12 to get it for just $12.

What an awesome deal!

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

Since we can’t always be with your kids, it’s important to teach them how to find help and keep themselves safe.

Most importantly, we need to do this in a way that doesn’t scare us or our children. Instead, we want to build their self-confidence. Our kids will feel safer when they can confidently recognize dangerous situations and respond immediately.

The free Child Safety Kit can help us keep your children safe, even when we are not with them. With special no-scare methods for each age group, the Child Safety Kit includes:

• Asking for help when no trusted adult is nearby.
• Unacceptable adult behaviors that can threaten children.
• Recognizing dangerous situations.
• Ways to respond to dangerous situations and keep safe.

Additionally, parents are introduced to the “What If” game, an engaging way to teach safety to their kids, which can be fun and build self-esteem.

This free Child Safety Kit tells parents what they need to know, and how to say it to our children.

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

If you are feeling like you are in need of rescue, you just have to check out Word Dynamo!

Getting Started

Signing up for Word Dynamo couldn’t be easier. Email address and password. You’ll fill in your name and group (Teacher, Student, etc.) on the next page.

Once you’ve signed up, your Home page will be customized for you. It will have a list of options, games you’ve already played and games that are recommended for you.

Features

Word Dynamo is loaded with features. You can keep track of your progress, add your own lists and just check out all of your learning choices:

Each category has several lists and you can choose from 5 different types of games to play. You can even choose a different game each time you play, if you want.

Oh yeah, we forgot to mention. You aren’t stuck with your first score because you can repeat a list/game as many times as you want!

How We Are Using It

Well, to be honest, Penny has been using Word Dynamo more than everyone else because she’s a word nerd. This is like Pokemon to her. She’s got to catch master them all!

However, CJ has been using it to practice his 4th grade skills and even sneak in some upper-level learning. (It’s easy to do. Just click on a link to the next grade level!)

It’s super simple to keep track of CJ’s progress because, after you sign up, you get a custom home page with your progress and stuff that’s recommended for you.

You get instant feedback, with green check and highlight for the right answers and a red “x” and highlight for the wrong answers.

You aren’t stuck with “just” their lists either. You can even make your own to help you study pretty much anything you want to learn.

The Downside

We haven’t found a downside yet, so we’ll just use this space to remind you to get your starting Word Score in order to enable the tracking feature on the top of the page.

If we find something to complain about later, we’ll update this section.

Conclusion

At some point, we’ve all have to memorize something. At some point, we’ve all have to remember a word or language skill we mastered before. At some point we might even freak out, thinking about how we wished we were a little better at this language arts thing.

Now we don’t have to worry because there’s an easy, fun and free way to turn into the brainiac of our dreams!

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

Before that frustration happens again, you may want to take a look at “JoinMe: Instant screen sharing. Instant Aha!“.

Getting Started

Getting started with is so easy even a caveman could do it. Since registration isn’t required, all you do is go to their website and click on the orange arrow to share.

It will download an .exe that you click on to launch the service. Your screen will go dark for just a bit and voila! You are ready to share your screen.

That’s it?

Well, you do have to copy your “room” URL to share with someone and somehow get that link to them but otherwise, yeah, that’s it!

Features

Sometimes the free stuff is so watered down that it’s not worth the effort to actually use it. Not with JoinMe.

After trying their service, we signed up for the free trial of the Pro version (which requires registration) because we wanted to see if it really worked like they say it does.

How We Are Using It

JoinMe is powered by the folks at LogMeIn, another service we totally love and highly recommend, so we knew it would be awesome right off the bat.

We just didn’t realize how many ways we could think of using it.

We’re sure there are a lot more ways JoinMe can help make life easier but these are the biggies for us:

• Homeschool
• Home Office
• Training and Support

It’s so much easier now to show someone how to use software, troubleshoot their computer system, brainstorm a project and even teach a class!

The Downside

Nothing is ever perfect right? In this case, we only have two somewhat minor complaints:

1. You can’t limit what part of your screen you share.
   Make sure that you don’t have anything loaded that you don’t want to share because you’ll be sharing your entire desktop. Literally everything you see on your screen, the other person will see too.
    
2. You can’t record the session.
   This isn’t as much of a big deal to us because we can use our screen-to-video capture software.

Conclusion

Sometimes life would just be a whole lot easier if you could just show someone what you were doing. Or have them show you what they are doing. Now you can. Quickly, easily, reliably and even free!

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

One group of Awesome Kids are kids we like to call “Kidpreneurs”. Kids who became successful entrepreneurs (or kids who want to be!).

Of course, when we ran across a list of “Top 10 Teenagers Who Made Their First Million Online”, you know we just had to share!

Read this: Top 10 Teenagers Who Made Their First Million Online

While this article doesn’t go into much depth on the teens they are spotlighting, it does give a nice general overview and links to their sites.

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,

Kitana, our 14-year-old, was the original Queen of the Eh Eh until the other cats discovered it has magical powers. Now they ALL use it. Except for Stardust (former wild ranch cat). She turned it into the Croaking Whisper. Sometimes you see her mouth move and no sound comes out!

Yes, we’ve learned our lesson. It’s a scam! Our visitors on the other hand, well …

A friend of CJ’s recently came over and said we should “buy big bags of cat food” because the poor, pregnant cats were really hungry.

Um, none of them are pregnant. We spay/neuter our cats. That chunky black one? He’s CJ’s male kitten, Shadow. =)

What does your cat do to try to get more treats?

Have fun, stay safe and God bless,