Doctor Who Paper Models

A friend of mine found these free printable templates for paper models and shared them with me because she knew I had Doctor Who fans in the house.  Aren't they cute?  They have several different Tardis models, all of the Doctors, many of the supporting characters/companions, and lots of enemies.

My biggest Doctor Who fan is currently camping with dad.  So, I went out and bought cardstock and ink so I could print up a bunch and make them for him to find when he gets home.  He'll be thrilled.

These three are for my other son, and he's having a ball playing with them.  So, if you hear tardis noises, it's only Josh.


*Warning*  These take forever to cut, fold, and assemble.  You are looking at about two hours of work!

Blissfully Domestic

I received a nice surprise in my inbox recently...

Blissfully Domestic, an online magazine for women, asked me to be a contributor for their homeschool channel. It's pretty exciting! I never really expected my blogging to amount to anything but me journaling our activities for myself and a few readers. And here I am now with a nice base of subscribers, more hits than I imagined, and an invite to write for an online publication. You all make my day! Thanks for reading and commenting.

So, what should you do now? Well, you should check out this great e-zine! There are "channels" to interest anyone...food, family, home, health, photo, and of course, homeschool, to name a few. Who knows, maybe you'll find an answer you've been looking for or new inspiration for a project you've been wanting to take on. So... Go. Read. And come back here and tell me what you think.

Alltop Finds the Top Stories

Have you seen or heard of Alltop yet? It's this cool website that finds all of the top stories in a topic and posts them all in one page as a series of links for you to peruse. It looks like a great resource.

The homeschool page at Alltop has a ton of great blogs and websites listed. There's many links that I have yet to discover. I'll be spending some time there, looking around and finding some new reading. You should check it out. Maybe you'll find something interesting, exciting, useful, and those other great adjectives.

Calling All Writers

I just discovered something really cool...if you are a writer, that is. NaNoWriMo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month, is a web-based group challanging writers of all ages to write a novel in a month. Each November 1st, writers all over the world, sit down at their computers and start writing with the intention of finishing on or before November 30th.

There are a few rules that go with that challenge. First, if you are an adult, your novel needs to be at least 50,000 words long. Those under 17 have their own NaNoWriMo Young Writers Program and can choose their own word count challenge as they know that the student's age, ability, and school workload affect how much they can accomplish. Second, you cannot being writing your novel until November 1st. Prior to that time, you can work on prewriting exercises such as figuring out your characters, setting, and plot line. Third, you submit your novel online so that their robots can determine your word count.

So, what's in it for the participants? The primary reward of the challenge is the knowledge that you did it. You sat down to write a novel and completed it. It doesn't matter that it may not be publish-worthy. It only matters that you sat down and did something that few people accomplish. If you meet your word-count goal, you also get a printable certificate and a web badge for your website/blog.

Not only does this sound like a lot of work, but it also sounds like it could be a lot of fun. Will I write a novel next month? I seriously doubt it as I am not a creative writer. However, my daughter who loves to write stories is embracing this challenge with gusto. Her word count goal is 10,000 words. To assist her in meeting her goal, I'm suspending all of her regular language arts work until December. Rather than worrying about spelling, grammar, writing, poetry, vocabulary, and penmanship, she gets to spend that time on her novel. I'm only asking her to complete history, science, and a minimum amount of math.

Whether or not you, or your children, wish to participate in NaNoWriMo there's something there that will benefit anyone who is teaching a child to write creatively. To assist their writers, they have writing workbooks available for elementary, middle school, and high school levels on their young writers website. The workbooks provide both instruction and questions to answer for developing your protagonist, supporting characters, antagonist, setting, and plot line. They are great, and free, resources.