Mother's Day and Homeschooling Gifts & Books

Disclosure: I was sent these products to review free of charge in exchange for an honest review. All opinions in this post are my own. I did not receive any other compensation for this review.

Can you believe tomorrow is Mother's Day? Where has the time gone? I suppose with all the recent changes in our lives time is really flying. A few weeks ago we pulled Hazel from her school and I began homeschooling her until the end of this school year. We will be sending her to a new school in the fall. However I have to say I have a lot of respect for anyone who chooses to homeschool. It is a lot of work and this is with the workbooks and such that she was already using this year. Go Teach offered me some supplies for Teacher Appreciation Week to make gifts and I explained I was now homeschooling, but thought they would make nice Mother's Day gifts for the homeschooler (or for end of the year gifts for a teacher). (Now I know most moms probably want something for themselves and not their classroom, but some of the supplies could be used for their own crafts as well.) Plus I have some fun books about moms and spending time with your mom for younger kids from MacMillan Publishers. We will start with some gift ideas. I was sent white board markers, glue sticks and scented twistable crayons.

Now when I taught I used white boards because chalk really dried my already dry skin and irritated it worse. I love that you can see the ink levels in these new Expo markers. Hazel commented on how we don't have a good white board do use them on, so we picked up a white board paddle at The Dollar Tree. (For ideas on how to use a white board paddle in a classroom check out here.) The first thing I thought of was to make a stop and go sign.

They also would work well for writing answers or practicing and writing. I could also see a math lesson on less than and greater than with the symbols on each side. Give the students two numbers and have them choose which symbol goes between them. We however decorated ours for Mother's Day or rather Hazel did. Then we made flower tops for the markers out of cupcake liners. I did this by folding the liners like you would to make a paper snowflake and rounded the edges to make the petals. I trimmed a small piece of the point at the bottom so the flower would sit on the cap. Then we glued a mini cupcake liner over the hole to hide it.

We put them all on the markers and in a vase and have a beautiful and useful bouquet for Mother's Day.

With the scented crayons I drew some random flowers and had Hazel color them. We cut them out and taped them onto the crayons. We tried to glue pom poms to the flower centers but the glue sticks did not work well with the pom poms. 

I love that the flowers are scented from the crayons and that these were really child made. Hazel LOVES the scented crayons by the way. So these are two easy crafts to make for the homeschool mom or for a classroom teacher for the end of the year. 

Now the first book to share goes along with our spring flower theme. It is Bloom by Deborah Diesen and illustrated by Mary Lundquist. This book follows a mother and daughter through a fall day of planting bulbs and then the winter and possibly spring days where the forget about the garden until it is in full bloom.

I love this book because it is always fun to include children in the gardening and teaching them about plants. (Plus one of the science units we are focusing on is plants.) The book shares the fun the mother and daughter have while planting and playing as well. Then they get through the long winter and are busy. The flowers are a nice spring reward which is how I feel every spring.

Our last book for today is Mommies Are Amazing by Meredith Costain and illustrated by Polona Lovsin. 

This book uses cats to remind young children about the qualities of mothers. There are things like how mommies know when you are sad, stay beside you when you are scared, kiss troubles away, play and so much more. The words are very simple and the pictures are fun and cute.

I hope you will check out these books and fun products and for more Mother's Day ideas check out our past Mother's Day posts. I hope you have a very Happy Mother's Day!!