Lemonade anyone? National lemonade day coming

I subscribe to a newsletter geared for homeschoolers called "clickschooling" but some of the sites she sends us to are pretty cool. I had to share this with you all since it sounds like a fun and interesting way to get your kids involved in the community and make a little bit of money.


Now, you may ask, "What's Lemonade Day?"

It's a real nation-wide event that trains the next generation of entrepreneurs through a fun and experiential activity that teaches kids skills such as:

- Goal Setting
- Developing a Business Plan
- Establishing a Budget
- Seeking Investors
- Providing Customer Service
- Giving Back to the Community

On May 2nd, 2010 in a handful of cities across America (with the exception of the festivities in Durham, North Carolina on May 1st, and the celebration in the San Francisco Bay Area on May 15th), young entrepreneurs of all ages can participate by setting up a lemonade stand and selling lemonade in their community.

Kids pick the time and location of their choice to set up and run their lemonade stand - and they keep what they earn!

And in the spirit of a true business, they are encouraged to open a savings account, pay back investors, and make a further investment in their community by donating a portion of their profits to a charity of their choice.

Of course, kids will need adult supervision, sponsors, investors, employees, and customers!

To help kids get started, Lemonade Day provides registered participants (in the sponsoring cities) with a free how-to "Entrepreneur's Workbook" containing instructions and lesson plans that combine academics and life skills to help students accomplish their goal. Details on how to register are at LemonadeDay.org.

Now, while "Lemonade Day" may not be "officially" celebrated in your city, you can still play the free online games and put what you learn into practice by setting up your own independent lemonade stand on May 2nd - or any time of year!

Check out the Lemonade day link for more information on how to register as well as "official cities" but some fun games as well.






If you homeschool, you may want to subscribe to Diane's Clickschooling newsletter and get daily curriculum ideas. She has it set up so that Monday is math, Tuesday is science, Wednesday is language arts, Thursday is social sciences, Friday is virtual field trip day (I think these are pretty cool), and Saturday is music/art/foreign language day. She had an interesting site for one of the Thursdays and I'm still trying to figure out how to turn one of my clues in book #5 into a historical investigator type activity. I'm working on it but if interested in the "cases" they have available right now, you can check out this website and maybe do some historical invesstigating of your own.

Hope you all participate and that your lemonade is not too sour nor too sweet, but just right - Let's make some lemonade - Mrs. E :)

Basket making? State #5 has it

I finally finished writing state #5 (yay me and I'm sure Vivian is happy about it). So it's off to my editor friend before I can send to Vivian for the 4RV editors to work on. I have to sort of print out a version to decide which clues to use as discussion questions in the back of the book and which to use for the study guide. I was marking which would make quick discussion questions and forgot about the basket making clue. So I decided to use that as an extra activity in the study guide. I have had fun making my two different sized baskets thanks to a pattern from MakingFriends. The pattern is actually for a Girl Scout Thinking Day swap. I've enlarged the basic pattern to use with a large foam circle that I had purchased from Walmart. The circles came like 40 in a pack and were all colors. All I have left are a couple of pink ones and one orange one. So I took the smaller pattern and cut a small circle from the orange large circle to make the original sized basket.

The directions call for raffia which I don't have any on hand, so I found some ribbon (like the ribbon that is not cloth) and tried it first on the larger basket but it wasn't working too well. So I picked up a yellow plastic grocery bag and cut a couple of strips off the sides where the handles were and used that for my weaving material. Turned out pretty good on both the small and large one.

If you want to know how to make baskets, you'll have to wait until the fall of this year to get State #5 and the accompanying study guide. Pictures below.






From this large circle (as you can see that is on a standard piece of paper, so the circle is pretty large).












To this. (Notice the first top view is not as neat as the second top view because I decided the first time doing this was sloppy. I undid the basket and decded to start twisting the strips of plastic bag to make it tighter so it was a bit easier to work around. It took me the original two strips and two more to do the final version. The strips were cut from the sides where the handles are and cutting open the handle once the strips were cut, so I actually had a pretty long strip and as I ended with one strip, I tied another to it and trimmed the ends so it doesn't look too bad. This is a good recycled project. I'm also going to pick up some raffia from Dollar Tree and/or Walmart (because I know they have it in different colors and then I'll pick up some foam packs with multicolors and perhaps make the baskets in varying colors. I think the raffia should work like the bags did in that I can make it tight and there will be more layers of weaving. When I accomplish this, I'll post the finished projects.)












From the large circle and the small basket pattern, I cut the circle and this is what we ended up with.










Comparison views of the baskets side by side (as best as I could put them and take the picture since I seem to move slightly and cause blurry pictures).




Hope you all enjoy the baskets and come back in the summer when state #5 will be released.


I'm also hoping that now that the book is finished I'll have a cover soon, and that #6 will not take me as long to write as this one did and I'll get it submitted and ready to go with a cover for that one. When I have covers for the next two books, I get a new bookmark with #4, 5 and 6 on it. Looking forward to sharing new covers with you all too.