Dispatch Life 

Look what we are building. A green house it's going to be cool. Can't wait to start to growing things.

Doughnut Day

Today is my one day off. After doing some history work and some other class work me and the girls decided to take a break and make something yummy. A few weeks a go we picked up some Doughnut pans at Goodwill and the girls have been dying to try them. We did a little searching online and found a recipe from The Pioneer Woman that sounded good. We used her Baked Crumb Cake Doughnuts. They were quick and easy to make in these fancy doughnut pans although they did not puff up as much as I expected. Next time I will fill the pans a little fuller.

This one thought they were really yummy. I think next time we will try for chocolate. 

Happy Valentines DAY!

💗

Times Tables the Fun Way Review

We are kicking off the new year with a great program called Times Tables the Fun Way by Times Alive. For this review both of my girls tried out this program. My oldest is in 4th grade and still struggling to remember those pesky times tables and my 2nd grader is just beginning to learn them.

Times Tables the Fun Way uses games, stories and songs to help make learning multiplication tables fun. The program covers times tables starting with 0's and goes all the way through the 9's. We received the online monthly subscription which is $9.95 a month.  The online version offers things like coloring pages and pictures games to help make learning them fun. It also offers quizzes and a pre and post test. The program will track your students progress and date of completion. The down side to the online version is you must have an internet connection. For us it seems to work best in google chrome. 

They say most kids can complete the program in a month. My girls how ever did every lesson more than once so  it took us a little bit longer. They both like the lessons enough to ask if they can do them more than once. As for ease of use, this one gets an A+ because its very easy to use. We are using the program on google chrome and it remembers the log in for the girls. All they have to do is go to the book marked page and put in their name and away they go. Navigation is super simple that neither one of them needed me to tell them how to work the program. If you look to the right this is what the main lesson page looks like. When they started they clicked the first on and it went on from there with a next button at the bottom of the lesson. When they logged in the next time they just found the last dot that was marked off and they knew where to start. 

To the Left you can see what one of the lessons looks like, cute right? The fun pictures seem to keep there attention and one of them is always calling me in to tell me about the lesson. My 4th grader liked the program more than I thought. It starts out with a story and moves on to a music video. She says the songs are kind of catchy and I noticed that she is remembering some of the songs a little more easily than she was remembering the just the multiplication facts from flash cards.  I am hopeful that she will really catch on to the rest of the more difficult multiplication tables and remember them long term. 

My 2nd grader is just starting with multiplication tables. I was a little more excited for her to try this than she was. She has really been intimidated by the though of memorizing all these multiplication tables.  She has started to remember a few of them but she has not yet got all of them memorized and I think its going to take some time and may be another run or two through the program.  She has reported that she likes the games the most she say they are kinda fun for a learning game and make multiplication seem less scary. I am really proud of her for putting in so much effort 

Teacher features that come with this program are nice. Times Alive has pre and post test that help me see how and where they are improving. I can also use the Progress charts for my record keeping and that makes my life easier in the long run. Here is an image of what the progress chart looks like. It's fairly simple to read and it looks nice.

We love Times Alive and we would love for you to click the banner below and see what the other Crew members are saying about it.

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Mustang project

Take a look at the progress on the mustang. We got a lot done on my day off because the weather was so nice. I am hoping to make some more progress this week and get that engine bay ready for paint so I can move on to the break up grade.

This is what happens when you let a classic car sit for 5 years. A rat decided to make my engine home.

And there she goes

The original 289 is completely seized up so here we are scavenging parts that we might need at a later date.