Teaching boys for their delight

Check out the fun with the Schoolhousereview Crew's 5 Days of Teaching Creatively Day 1

I have talked about our eclectic style in many posts and mentioned our Montessori homemade materials, but some of the best things about teaching the boys are the hands on activities they like to do. 
Both of the boys love to build things, give a kid a hammer and a few nails and watch out. Nathan loves building anything he can, he especially loves the wooden kits he can work on it the shop. He is learning skills as well as staying focused on following directions. The skills he has gained from the kit building has led to him crating a building a shelf out of scraps (he is going to hang it on the way in his room when we are done moving things around). He also loves creating metal art and working with concrete. Working in the shop with the various materials incorporates more subjects than just fun.  Math skills including measuring , fractions, and some geometry are easy to find in the shop. Reading for directions as well as labels is as common. Cooperative skills are also key in the shop because sharing Daddy's tools with your brother and Daddy are critical.
Shop time is fun, but there are so many other fun activities related to school, Legos or similar building kits are always fun and open up the door for learning not only cooperation, following directions, spatial skills, and basic counting skills, we have also found engineering skills as well as a creative outlet when we don't have the right piece have emerged from building blocks. 
I  am adding more options for the boys, I think of them as electives , they think of them as fun, we are all happy.  Upcoming activities include a unit study on Nascar from Hands of a Child, tangram activities, sentence games including Mad Libs card game, and a couple of building projects in our mud room to store canning jars.  Both boys are also asking for more computer programming lessons thanks to a product we are currently reviewing and creative writing activities similar to our playmobil story game so we will be adding more of those activities to work on spelling, grammar, and story tell

While we will still have our core 3 (Handwriting/spelling, Math, Bible) we will continue to have the boys take the lead in many of the remaining subjects and we will still have lots of stories and amazing books available to explore history, science, and the world around us at their disposal as well as a variety of video based subjects.

DIY cigar box turned marker box

One more re-purposing project to share.

This time, an old cigar box turned into a box for my Crayola Pip Squeak markers.
I had already tried to spruce the cigar box up and was storing the little markers in the box, but really wanted it to look better.

I started out painting the box with a  warm yellow Glidden Sampler I had in my stash.  I let it dry and added a second coat to make sure the previous color did not show through.   Once the paint was dry I added some fun green sticker strips. I have a stash of my old Creative Memories stickers and love finding more uses for them.  I went with green sticker and yellow paint to mimic the Crayola color scheme.   The boys know if we want to use the Pip Squeak Markers to find the yellow box.  I love the way it turned out .