About Honey

Honey is a homeschooling mama of five amazing children. She and her husband Jonah run Sunflower Schoolhouse together. She provides the content and he provides the technical support. Please see the About for more information.

A Trip Across Canada – Quebec

Posted on May 25, 2010 by Honey

If you are just joining us now, may I suggest that you visit these pages first -->

Our next stop on our Trip Across Canada is Quebec. If you have not picked up your travel brochures for Quebec yet, you can stop and do that now.

Here are some questions to ask as you look at your detailed map. What province is to the left of Quebec? What province is to the right of Quebec? What is the capital city of Qubec? What three bays border Quebec?

You can download a detailed map of Quebec here -->

Detailed Map of Quebec

On the blank map, you can have your student color it (however you decide). You can also have the student include important information on their map.

You can download a blank map of Quebec here -->

The leader of the province is called the Premiere. Visit the official website for the government of Quebec. What is the name of the current Premiere?

You can find information about the Symbols of Quebec and here and here.

You can read more about the symbols of Quebec here -->

Quebec has its own flag. You can read about the flag here -->

Flag of Quebec

You can print out a flag to color here -->

Quebec has a provincial flower. The flower is called the Blue Flag. You can visit these websites to find out more about this flower.

Quebec has a provincial bird. The bird is called the Snowy Owl. You can visit the following websites to find out more about this bird.

Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl
Snowy Owl - without labels
Snowy Owl - with labels

Quebec has a provincial tree. The tree is called the Yellow Birch. You can visit the following website to find out more about this tree.

Yellow Birch

Quebec has a provincial motto. The motto is "I remember."

Provincial Motto (scroll down)

Quebec has a provincial coat of arms and shield. You can learn more about them by visiting these pages.

Create your own family coat of arms.

You can learn more about the weather in Quebec by visiting these websites.

Quebec has some excellent parks. Take some time to learn more about the diverse landscape of Quebec.

More information about the geography of Quebec can be found here.

Just a few of the many things in Quebec to learn more about. All of these pages are in English even though some of the titles are in French.

Quebec City is the capital of Quebec. To find out more information about Quebec, you can visit the following websites.

The Legislature buildings are located in Quebec City, Quebec.

More resources

Have a look through all of the on-line travel brochures for Quebec and see what other interesting things you can find.

What do you think of our studies so far?

Do you have anything that you would like to add?

http://www.kidzone.ws/imageschanged/canada/qb-map.gif

Planning My Menu

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Honey

Please Note: Our daughter has allergies to dairy, eggs, and nuts, so I generally will not include a recipe with those things in it (unless I plan to modify it).

I was really excited to discover that today was a holiday. Victoria Day kind of crept up on me this year, but I am very thankful for the extra day this weekend. It is nice and sunny outside and the kids are enjoying playing in the garden. My husband even planted some flower seeds this morning (during the twins morning nap).

Here is my menu plan for the week:

Monday - Sweet and Sour Chicken and Fried Rice
Tuesday -Chicken Soup and homemade rolls
Wednesday - Homemade Pizza ( topping ideas here )
Thursday - Chicken Gravy and Roasted Rosemary Potatoes
Friday - Roast Beef with potatoes, carrots, and gravy.
Saturday - Beef Stew
Sunday - Beef Soup

What is on your schedule for food this week?

I am linking up with Menu Plan Monday this week. Check out all the awesome menus that other moms have planned.

Widgets Can Kill Your Blog!

Posted on May 24, 2010 by Honey

Did you know that widgets can completely and utterly destroy your blog?

I am guessing that your answer was no. Well, neither did I. I had no idea that typing something into a widget and hitting save could render my site completely useless.

I spent some time yesterday updating the graphics for my site. I did a little bit of tweaking and rearranging. If you are not reading at the blog, come over and have a look at my new weekly line-up. So there I was, adding some simple html code to my sidebar widgets and I get an error. A big white screen popped up (where my site should have been) and said that I had a "500 internal server error". My husband restarted the server and everything was fine (or so we thought), so I went along my merry way. A few minutes later, it happens again. And I had a twinge of panic...

My husband logged in to the server to check things out. All our other sites were fine, except mine. He was able to access the server logs (like any good web administrator should be able to do) and discovered that I had some serious widget issues. Apparently, I had been entering some of my html code incorrectly into my widgets and WordPress does not like that. It freaked out and panicked.

WordPress widgets is very complicated and poorly organized. If you mess with one part of the widget code, you stand a good chance of loosing all of your widgets. That is what happened when I placed HTML code into the text widget for WordPress. One tag was written wrong. Well, if you look at my sidebars, you can see that is what happened.

I have good news though.

Before this whole "500 internal server error" thing started happening, I had a few WordPress tabs open. After my husband had fixed the mess by removing the bad code (and thus all of my widgets) I was able to still see the original code through one of the dashboard tabs that had been open (thank you Opera for caching. I was able to go in there and copy and paste and save all of the codes to an Open Office document. This will help greatly in rebuilding. Update: We actually recommend Libre Office now.

The cause of the "500 internal server error" was the simple failure to close some of my html tags. W3 Schools html reference list is an excellent resource that my husband has pointed me to before and I will be visiting on an ongoing basis from now on.

Let me just say thank you to my husband for being able to fix anything.

Let me leave you with a few suggestions:

Might I suggest that you keep a list of your widgets with the code that should go with them (including the links) in an Open Office document (and print it).