Week 2

This week Anna is going to be learning about the letter D, the color green, and triangles.

Mary Helen is keeping on keeping on with her curriculum, and I'm trying to keep things interesting with the workboxes :)

Mary Helen working on fruit loop sorting:

Anna's learning space with green things words, a letter Dd poem, triangle poster, and Dd words (all of these printables came from Me and Marie Learning - be sure to enter the giveaway for Me and Marie here!)

Anna with her Doogie Dog puppet (also from Me and Marie):

Here is the sensory table. Today is the first day we pulled this out, and Mary Helen liked it just as much as Anna. The table didn't last long though, the girls got to playing and knocked it off the table. They got some good practice with their cleaning skills :) Joel plans to build a pvc frame to hold the box, but until then we will have a sensory floor! The box is filled with rice and there is a note on the top telling Anna to dig up 8 dinosaurs.

Look for more highlights through the week!

Beach Week Begins!

We kicked off our beach theme today. Mary Helen did lots of work today! I moved her from 6 boxes to 9 boxes today. She was a real trooper through it all ~ she even had a couple of extra chores today that she did without complaining! She is really maturing!


Here are some pictures from our day!

Here are our workboxes for today:

1. Math Sheet (we are using Horizons)

2. Bob books (we read book 3 today. it is challenging for her, but she is doing great!)

3. Shells and palm trees ~ she had to make two patterns for me.

4. Draw Write Now - Our book has a whole section of ocean habitats! We spread one lesson over three days. She writes two lines on each of the first two days then does the picture on the last day.

5. sign language cards ~ we are starting with the alphabet. I am adding in 5 a day until we finish, then I will introduce word cards more slowly.

6. Fishy swizzle sticks - used as pointers for our ocean words in the "beach" area.

7. Book about animals that live in the water, fun foam ocean glasses, and Nemo gummies.

8. Two worksheets: one about fish with several fish to color, and one to count different things under the ocean (www.kidssoup.com)

9. Leap Frog phonics puzzle game.

Here she is with her shell/palm tree patterns.

and doing her Draw Write Now book.
ocean words (words printed from kidssoup, pocket charts from dollar spot at Target!)

Reading at the beach!

Anna also enjoyed the Nemo gummies!

When Mary Helen finished the shell patterning, I put the shells and palm trees in the pool for Anna and my day care child to play with. They had a ball too!

We have lots more fun stuff planned for the next couple of weeks!

Springtime is in the air!

div>One last thing I got on after Easter clearance was these tulip muffin tins. I wanted to get two of them, and I sure couldn't drop $9 each for them. I snagged them for 50% off. I probably could have waited them out and may be they would have gone for less; but we do muffin tin lunches a couple times a month, and we can always bake in them. Which is what we did yesterday. Twice!


I made our muffin breakfast in them yesterday morning, then this is what we did in the afternoon:

sorry, no particular order here :) ~ this is the girls mixing the icing with food coloring in ziplock bags...

Here are the yummy cupcakes fresh out of the oven (we mixed them with food coloring right in the tin). I shaved the tops off so that they would sit flat, and I reserved the puffy tops to make a mini trifle (truffle or trifle?).

Don't worry, we aren't sending these off to anyone. . . so you don't have to worry about that finger licking!

Anna's masterpieces:

Mary Helen's masterpieces:

I also saved what was left of the icing to use on sugar cookies next week!

What a fun afternoon!

After Easter Sale Goodies!

I stopped in Walgreens on Tuesday afternoon. I was hoping to get some Peeps to put up for a couple of weeks until we start studying about nests. I have seen some great crafts and recipes, and want the little chicks to put in some yummy nests.

Anyways, of course they had all their Easter stuff marked down. Mostly 50%, some 75%. We don't "do" the Easter bunny, so I hadn't really looked at all the stuff they put out just for the holiday. I got SO much good stuff! I also hit up the Walmart clearance aisle yesterday. Take a look at what I got!

Egg Dye kits. Now it's a good enough deal to have less than half price kits for next year, but it gets better!

These are the cups that hold the dye from one of the kits (I bought 2 of each since I've got two girls). These cups can be used for sorting, painting, etc all year long!

Fun cups for drinking or for storing stuff (think how cute they could be with scrapbook paper, and used to hold art supplies on a lazy susan!)

These grow capsule things. They are cheap little things that I normally would never buy, but I am putting them in my emergency bag for the vacations we've got coming up (one with just us, and two with Joel's family that will include up to 7 children under 5!) Fifty cents is a small price to pay for 15 minutes of entertainment!

These stickers came in the other egg dye kit. I am going to put them in their travel play kits (I'll show them once I get them put together)

Coloring books - 75cents each!

Princess puzzles $1.74! (regular $6.99)
Disney princess sticker coloring crafts (got two at $1.74 each!)
And another $1.74 princess item - a board game! All the princess stuff will go on vacations, hidden until we need them. If my some miracle we don't have to use them, we will save them for Christmas :)
Cute little sippy cups just for the fun of it!

Notepads, stickers, and mini puzzles ~ for the travel kits!

What fun! I can't believe all the stuff I got that really isn't all that Easter"ish"! I hope there will be some good boredome busters!

Next week sometime I'll show you the other things I've collected to keep the kiddos entertained on vacation!

Our Schedule

I mentioned that our family has begun a schedule. It is a life saver! I even get a full hour of rest time without any argument! Here is ours, and I'll explain it. Make sure that your schedule works for you. Make sure there is enough flexibility that you have time to go to the grocery store and the park!



Hopefully you can just click on that to see it bigger. The green column is me, pink is older dd, and purple is younger dd (by the way everything in our house that can be pink or purple is, and the girls know who is pink and who is purple).

I start with my quiet time and computer time. My girls have been trained to know that they are to interrupt me minimally during this time. I have milk in a containter in the fridge that Mary Helen can easily work herself. She is in charge of fixing hers and Anna's milk. None of us are morning people, so it works well for us to leave each other alone for the most part. It's 8:23, and Anna's still sleeping. When she wakes up she will have her milk and park in front of the tv while she wakes up. I'm sure I'm poisoning my kids with all the Dora and Curious George.

At 9, we all have breakfast together and I read a story out of our children's Bible.

After breakfast, Mary Helen does her chores. She needs very little direction or help from me, thanks to the chore chart (see a few posts down for those).

During school, I spend about 30 minutes on lessons with Mary Helen, then she does workboxes on her own. I am in and out of the kitchen where she works to answer questions and guide her through. It rarely takes her until 12 to complete her work. When she finishes, she is allowed to have free time. Anna has activities in her own workboxes that she can do, but she usually chooses not to. She's only 2, and I'm not ready to push those things. I usually only change her activites out once a week unless it is a coloring sheet that she has completed.

During lunch, we all sit together again and I read a few stories to them.

Quiet time is the best time of the day! I set our timer for one hour and they are in different rooms. The rule is that they must stay on the bed, can only play with what's in their bag, and they must be quiet. Last week, they each napped about twice. I napped about everyday :).

Our activity time varies each day. Lots of days it is a craft, sometimes we will bake together, and other days we may go for a walk, blow bubbles, or some other outside activity. The idea is that I will be spending this time with them. This is really the trick to getting quiet time to work...they have something to look forward to.

During their free time, they can be in the playroom or outside, doing pretty much whatever they want (within our rules of course).

Now, that's a lot of words! If you have any questions, I'd be glad to try to answer them.

Our Week In Review

I have to tell y'all, I put our family on a schedule that started Monday. It has drastically cut into my computer time, but my family is thriving on it! One day next week perhaps I'll share the schedule with you. The best thing about it is I am more intentional about spending more time with the girls. The most fun thing is that every afternoon, we have an activity together after our quiet time. Some days we do a craft, some times we may go for a walk or bike ride, and other days we may play a game or go to the park.

Here are some hilights from this week:

On Monday, we made paper plate bunnies like this.

On Tuesday, we made paper bag clown puppets. I found the template here.

On Wednesday, we melted down old crayons to make new, fun crayons. We used beach themed candy molds, and plan to give some to each of the girls' cousins when we have our big family beach trip in May. Here are some pictures from that day.






Then, yesterday, I spent the day shopping in the big city with my grandma, and left a small activity with the babysitter. I had them decorate plain white bags that were going to be used for a special surprise later. Joel has started planting season, so he has some late nights for a while. I read this idea at Homespun Heart and knew my girls would love it. . .

I put them in the guest room to get their pajamas on and play with a puzzle while I got everything ready, then I took them outside to this:

That's our car with all our blankets! We had a drive in movie night. Mary Helen was beside herself with excitement! We curled up together and watch the Barbie Swan Lake movie on our portable dvd player. Their bags that they decorated were filled with popcorn and I found some adorable cow cups on clearance at Target. We had a blast!

Today we are going to try to make sidewalk chalk eggs like I found at Skip to My Lou, and tomorrow we are going to dye Easter Eggs.

Go check out Kid Friendly Friday at I Blame Mom for even more fun ideas, and link up with your own!

Chores!

Since I am homeschooling, I am going to be with my children almost everyday for at least 16 more years. I figure I shouldn't be doing all the housework on my own. Besides needing some help to keep up with things, the girls need to learn some responsibility. So begins training the children. Mary Helen is my first victim.

Actually, Mary Helen loves being helpful, so she's happy to have things to do to help Mommy each day. I try to be near her for some of her chores (I'm doing something in the kitchen while she unloads the dishwasher for example) so we are spending time together. To make the job easier and more fun, I created some charts. I have also made labels for our toy bins that I hope to get up today.

Here is her chore chart. It is laminated so I can write in a chore under afternoon, and she can mark off what she's done if she wants to. Click on the picture to make it larger. Please don't tell me if I misspelled a word. It's too late now!

So, you see she has to clean her room and get herself ready for the day. How do I define clean and ready? The same way she does? I doubt it. So come these charts that will hang in her room.





If you want to make your own,I used free digital scrapbooking kits from www.shabbyprincess.com and copy and pasted them in publisher (though I'm sure you could do the same thing in word). It was a lot of fun, actually!

Workboxes, revisited

Well, we have done our little version of workboxes for 3 days now. So far, they are a success. I have 6 boxes for each of my girls. Mary Helen, who is in Kindergarten, must do all six of her boxes in order each day. Anna, who is two, can pick and choose or go play. It's up to her.

While we mix our homeschool curriculum into our boxes, these are great for keeping your toddler busy so you can clean, cook, or relax!

Here are some pictures of our set up and the first day's activities for Mary Helen.

The boxes are on a shelf in the kitchen, right next to the table where we do school.

These were Anna's boxes the first day (Left to right, top to bottom)

1. Coloring sheet & crayons

2. Sandpaper and yarn to make pictures, shapes,etc.

3. shape tracing activity (she is far from being able to do this, but the practice is good for her)

4. Colored stickers and a sheet of paper with a triangle and square on them. She stuck the stickers around the outline of the shap.

5. m&m sorting paper (I added m&ms when she got ready to do this) the animals are from Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See?

6. wipe erase spiral pad ~ She didn't trace letters, but colored and drew on it happily none-the-less!

Mary Helen's first three boxes:

1. Color by number sheet

2. Evan Moor activity in a bag (rhyming words)

3. cutting practice

Her last three:

4. Same stickers as Anna, but she completed two patterns that I started, then made up two patterns of her own.

5. m&m sort and graph. same animals as Anna's but Mary Helen had to graph her results.

6. Same wipe erase activity as Anna, but she does the real deal :)

All of these activities are things that I had in the house before I had the idea to do this. I just pulled things out that we never have gotten to or forget about.

I am trying to put something sort of open-ended in the last box for Mary Helen, and something open-ended in at least one box for Anna.

Mary Helen enjoyed her book about learning to draw animals (picked up at Homeschool convention last year).

Anna loved her Mr. Potato Head (has been put up for a while), and she enjoys her magnetic paper doll thing (Melissa & Doug, bought at consignment sale).

Some other ideas for your boxes:

Look at http://www.childcareland.com/ for free printable activities. There are things you can use in your own way, but she has file folder games, felt board activities, etc.

Look at resources meant for lapbooks or notebooking for activities.

Playdoh

craft projects

workbooks (think dollar stores and those thick all-in-one curriculum books)

Montessori activities

Picture books

m&m patterning book (we are borrowing one from the library and it's been in her box since Tuesday)

cheerio counting book

Once you start thinking about it, you'll find lots of things to put in your boxes! you can also focus on themes for each week (we are studying the letter m and moon, so she's been doing some m&m activities, coloring moon phases for a project that will be assembled tomorrow, and using other letter M activities from online). You can also assign a theme to each box - color, number, letter, Bible, fine motor skill, etc. and look for an activity that falls under each category every day.

I've decided to keep Anna's boxes the same, except for things she finishes, for a week. So her coloring pages will get changed out, but she will keep Mr. Potato Head and her paperdoll activity all week.

I hope some of this helps someone! Please let me know if you do anything along these lines, I'd love to read and link up to more ideas!

Homeschool Workboxes

Well, there's a new fad in homeschooling, and I'm going to give it a shot.

Here's the brain behind the whole phenomenom, Sue Patrick... http://www.workboxsystem.com/

Here are some bloggers who have posted about it...
Joyful Mother of 6
Ginger-Snap-Shots
Our Life Song

So, I plan to implement this in my own way, of course...as we all do with each other's ideas ~ Make it work for our life!

Mary Helen is currently doing My Father's World Kindergarten. The wonderful thing about the curriculum is that it only takes 30-45 minutes most days. The bad thing about it is that it only takes 30-45 minutes most days! Very often she asks for more! So, she will be getting six boxes each day that will be completed after we do what we need to do together. Some days she will have MFW sheets in her box, sometimes not.

Some of the things I plan to put in her box are Bible crafts/coloring pages (we will do mostly Easter stuff for the next couple of weeks), things to extend our current letter and theme (right now we are on letter M and moon), math skills, and other misc. skills.

Here is a list of some ideas:
~piggy bank/penny counting game (I found it somewhere in blogland, if I find it again, I will post links. I'm quite sure it came from a yahoo!group) She will roll a die and put the corresponding number of pennies on the counting mat until she fills the mat.
~Next week, since we will be working on the letter M, we will have several M&M activities. See www.thevirutualvine.com under themes, then m&m for lots of ideas and printables. Also look here.
~Play doh
~dry erase books and placemats to practice handwriting (she loves these!)
~collage making - magazine, scissors, glue


For Anna, our 2 1/2 year old, I will also have 6 boxes each day. She likes to have her own things to do during school time. Her activities will also include Bible coloring and crafts. She will also have some of the ziplock activities in her boxes (See last Thursday's post).

Other things she will have:
~tearing and glueing construction paper
~cutting practice
~lacing cards
~sorting
~matching
~tong transferring (pom poms, plastic ice cube things from $ Tree)
~m&m activities
~stickers

I also have a book from Evan Moore (I think) of take it to your seat type center activities that I have for the boxes. I have a box with files for categories to pull ideas and activities from. It takes initial plannins, but I will be able to re-use many ideas and pull out stuff that we've long forgotten about or never get to. I *hope* to make a spreadsheet or some kind of system to keep up with what I've used to keep things rotated through.

*Montessori type activities are good for this as well. Here are a lot of ideas.

I am hoping this will be a good thing for us. I will take pictures of all the action next week, and make a post of how it's going for us.

Keeping the Preschooler busy during school time

Note: I am planning to continue my hospitality series, but I keep thinking of so much stuff I want to say and ideas I want to pass along, so I am going to start blogging about hospitality every Tuesday until I run out of stuff to say!

You may remember me talking about doing a preschool activity swap recently. . . Well, we ended up with three ladies participating, and we did about 3 activities each for each other. I am going to share some of them with you, along with a few other things I have for my 2 year old (3 in July) to do during school time.

The first picture shows the goodies from the swap and the bucket I keep them corralled in.

This picture shows a wipe off alphabet practice activity. I downloaded the free font and put a clipart train on it, used a business card template, printed on cardstock and laminated. I put a wet erase marker with it, and a wet paper towel will wipe it right off. I made a set for my older daughter also.

The second activity in this picture is a counting game. One set of cards has numbers and you match each one to the card with the correct number of stickers.

Next up is a beading activity. She simply puts the beads on the pipe cleaners to make bracelets. She loves it! (My older daughter got in on this one too!)

This picture shows a fishing game. FUN! There are 26 paper fish, each with a letter of the alphabet on it. There are paper clips on each tail. The fishing pole is a dowel with a magnet on a string. The magnet makes it possible to catch the fish. I will let her play like this for a while, then we may add some flash cards for her to look at the flash card and catch the fish that matches the letter.

This bag has two sets of beads and two sets of medicine cups. Each cup has a bead glued in the bottom of it, and she sorts the loose beads into the appropriate cup. My daughter loved this one! As her skill progresses, I will add more beads so that she eventually is doing all 10 colors at one time.

Here are the girls during school time. Mary Helen is sorting her pictures by sound and anna is sorting her beads by color!

This is a patterning activity - she is to copy the pattern from a yellow pipe cleaner onto a blue pipe cleaner.

This is another one we've already been able to use ~ sandpaper and yarn. Anna enjoyed doing this one - she made designs and such on the sandpaper, and it stuck right to it!

The other activity in this picture is a playdouh letter and number activity. I have to work with her on this one, but she will roll the playdoh into "snakes" and then use short and long pieces to form the letters and numbers. This will be a great learning activity for her!

I have been adding some other things to our school area to entertain Anna and to help Mary Helen and me be more organized with all of our things. I will give a tour of our homeschool area next week!

I am linking this post up to Kid Friendly Friday at I Blame My Mother. Head on over for more great ideas to keep the kids entertained and busy!