Sensory Bins
I pulled 3 together this month. Tried to keep it seasonal, at least a little. They have a hard time doing these fun things by themselves, which is what they are designed for, at least in part, so for now I'm having to get in there with them and encourage them to involve themselves with things like these.
Gwen
Reading
She nearly made it through the first book (Book A) of "Get Ready for the Code". I knew she pretty much already had her letters and sounds down, but I wanted to make sure we laid a really solid foundation there and I think doing a few papers makes her feel very official. So far she's "learned" f, b, k, t, m, and r. I found some fun, old letter books for sale at the library a while back and snagged them up. So whenever she learns a new letter, we read that particular letter book a bunch. She does really well at tracing letters, but she has to really concentrate. Whenever she learns a new letter, we put it up on our "word wall" and she practices tracing it in cornmeal and cuts that letter out of magazines for her letter book.
Math
She's doing Saxon K math right alongside Miles. So far, she can keep up just fine. She's a little slower than Miles, but that's totally understandable. Mostly we work on calendar stuff, simple patterns, pictographs, sorting, and number recognition. She can count up to 32ish, only missing one or two numbers. She knows all shapes and can easily recognize numbers 1-10.
Miles
Reading
He worked more than half way through the first "Explode the Code" book which concentrates on short vowel sounds and cvc words. We've worked hard on short a and short i. I was surprised at how quickly he picked up sounding out those sandwich words, so I started checking out the beginning BOB books from the library and he's doing really well with that. Whatever sight words are in the BOB book are the ones we work on. Everytime he gets a new sight word, we put it up on our "word wall". We've tried lots of different ways to practice sight words. Spelling them with banana grams, scrabble cards, tracing in corn meal, matching games, and cutting those words out of magazines for his word book.
Math
He's working through Saxon K math and is doing great. I can tell it's really easy for him, but I don't want to jump ahead too much because I want to make sure the foundation there is solid. He has really loved acting out story problems with the little bears.
Peter Rabbit Party
It has taken us almost a full year, but we've read through the entire anthology of Beatrix Potter. Man I love all those stories she wrote! This was great practice for my kids to just sit and listen, because the pictures were small and few and far between. It always shocked me how much they remembered from the stories and how well their attention span lengthened. To celebrate finishing we had a Peter Rabbit Party.
I hung "herbs" and such from our kitchen ceiling just like Peter's mom. We ate foods that Peter Rabbit (or other Beatrix Potter characters) ate, such as: fish, potatoes, carrots, berries, bread and jam and peas. I even brewed some peppermint tea (in the story Peter's mom makes him chamomile tea for his upset stomach), but the kids didn't dare drink it.
I printed out coloring pages from the story which they colored. Then we had to put them in order, glue them to paper, and retell the story. When we were done, we had made our very own Peter Rabbit book!
They finished off the night by watching a Peter Rabbit movie we own. They were so sad when it was done, which I took as a compliment. Now they are looking forward to finishing "The Tale of Despereaux", which they are reading with their dad, so we can have another party.
Field Trips
Gwen's little joy school group had their monthly field trip to the big West Jordan Library and we all got to tag along. They showed us the back room and how they sort books, and the cool machines that help them do it. It was so fun! Miles even got his very own library card. We told him he could get one once he learned how to read. He earned it!
Art
Art projects are kind of an ongoing thing around our house. There are always papers hung up on the fridge, on our walls, in envelopes ready to be mailed... I just thought I'd document any out of the ordinary art projects we do.
We have homeschool group on Wednesdays. My favorite thing is seeing all the creative things these other moms come up with. Our homeschool group is focusing on values this year. I took a turn in September and we talked about creativity. We watched a mormon message from President Uchtdorf, read "Not A Box" and then made creations out of the things in our recycling .
Sorting Laundry totally counts as school related, right? :)
I love seeing this friendship bloom between Miles and Gwen. Sometimes, by quiet time they are ready to tear each other to shreds, but today they begged to stay outside longer after their picnic. They were being so cute, I allowed it. I hope they are always good friends.
Of course, this list doesn't show all the school stuff we fit into the nooks and crannies of our day, but that would be too hard to document I think. We sing a patriotic song and say the pledge in the mornings, we play learning games, we read and read and read some more. We go to the library for story times and puppet shows, we watch a "learning show" in the mornings, we say a scripture and sing a song before dinner and have regular family home evening. Whew, I'm tired. This is not to be intended as bragging, I wish I could do so much more. Rather, I'm just trying to remember what I'm busy all day doing!
Dramatic Play
I originally wanted to teach the kids all about when bones break, you have to get a cast. There was a pin about how to make a fake cast and I was all excited and ready to go until I found out I would have to order special stuff to make the fake casts. No time for stuff like that. So instead, we just set up a Dr. office downstairs and used their baby dolls as patients. Richie snapped this one picture of Gwen being the patient. I wish I would have snapped more but this was happening on Halloween and I was busy. They really enjoyed themselves. I think their favorite part was that I put wax paper on the table just like that funky paper they have on the benches at Dr. offices. :)
Field Trips
I'll try and get some pictures later, but there were 2 field trips this month. Gwen had a joy school field trip to Olive Garden. (Miles was so sad he couldn't tag along on this one.) They got to go into the kitchen, with hair nets, and see how and where they prepare the food. They worked on a sticker sheet and then were treated to breadsticks, noodles and pink lemonade. Gwen thought it was the coolest.
Our homeschool field trip this month took us to the pumpkin patch. :) We had a farmer take us around and talk to us. He even took us on a tractor ride. Then we got to feed the animals, pick a pumpkin and play in the corn pit!
Math
Math was pretty low key this month. Lots of repetition from last month. Lots of one-to-one correspondence, patterns, ordinal position (1st, 2nd etc), and identifying shapes by one or more qualities. They've got that stuff down pretty well, it's time to move on.
Reading
Our printer ran out of ink this month, so out of necessity we didn't do a lot of worksheets. Worksheet type things make me feel like we're doing something official and I see the benefit of using them. However, it was a good experience to not have any. We did lots more hands on things and they still seemed to get what they needed. Here's some of our word activities from this past month. (Play-doh letters, tracing letters/words in pudding, "writing" our words and letters with yarn on contact paper)
Science
We are learning all about our bones this month. We'll be working on the human body all year, but I thought learning about skeletons fit nicely with Halloween. We baked bone shaped cookies, made a skeleton out of paper plates, and have learned the names and locations of almost all of the 32 most well known bones. We also did a science experiment where we put chicken bones in a jar of water and a jar of vinegar to see what would happen. The acidic vinegar stripped the bones of all their calcium and minerals, so by the end of 7 days they could bend!
Geography
This one picture represents it all I guess. :) They like working on this huge, magnetic USA puzzle. We have a small, regular USA puzzle too that they work on. Every morning we sing a patriotic song, say the pledge and sings songs/get quizzed on the states using our giant USA poster we keep on our kitchen table. So far they've learned the southern, eastern and northern states locations and capitals. The funnest thing about geography so far is getting post cards in the mail from all around the country! When we get a post card, we find the state on our map downstairs, hang the postcard next to it, and then check out a book about that state from the library. It's been super fun and the kids get such a kick out of getting mail!
Art
We've read LOTS of books about fall and Halloween. I only managed to squeeze in one art project that went along with the leaf books we checked out. I have about a million more in my head. Maybe in November? We just melted crayon shavings between wax paper leaves. They seemed to enjoy watching the colors melt together.
Reading Party
The kids and dad finished reading "The Tale of Despereaux" this month, so we celebrated with a Despereaux party. We ate soup, celery, and cheese and crackers (food from the book), I decorated (kind of) and we watched the movie. (Which wasn't anything like the book!) This lame picture is the only one I snapped. I was grumpy that night. Oh well. :) The kids enjoyed themselves and had fun telling me all the parts about the movie that were "wrong".
