Love/Hate Relationship with the Library

I LOVE everything our library has to offer - great selection, interlibrary loans, computers, movies, etc.





I HATE how expensive it is! I know. Your books are probably free, but mine rarely are. The Dairy King cringes when he looks at our banking stuff on line and sees how much money we give the library in overdue fines. I try to tell him that I'm just doing my part in keeping the doors open up there, and it is still cheaper than buying all those books!





Here are some things I'm doing to combat that, though. . .





First of all, I let each girl pick 5 books each, so that's an easy number to remember.





I have a rule that all library books must stay in the school room. They can go in the school room anytime to read them, but no more pulling books from between walls and beds or other random places :)





The next thing is I lay all the books out and take pictures of them so if one does go missing we can figure out which one it is, and look for it with a picture in our minds of what we're looking for!





Here is the picture of our current stash (there are 12 because I got 2 books about ants for them).

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!

GIVEAWAY!!

I just noticed that my giveaway post posted on the date that I drafted it instead of when I posted it. . . clear as mud?!

Anyways, check it out here!

Good luck!

Giveaway Alert!

Me and Marie has a great Storytime Felt giveaway going on now! Go check it out!

Speaking of giveways. . . check back later this week for my first giveaway!!

Our School Room 2010-2011 year

Blogger and I are not getting along well today with rearranging pictures, so here is our school room in no particular order!

I have two closets with all of our supplies in them, and on the closet doors I keep all of our morning meeting stuff. In the red pocket chart I have our alphabet exercise cards, that I believe originated on homeschoolshare, but I found them on teachmama (click to go to post). You can get them here.
I plan to add them each week as we go through the letters, and I will mix them up and have fun with them each day.

Next to that, I have a run-down of what Anna is learning for the week. I got these from meandmarie.

On the bottom part of the wall between the closets, I have our weather and birthday graphs and our 100 days of school countdown. On the top part of the wall is a chart that reminds us, "We obey all the way, right away, with a cheerful heart." Oh how I wish it were the case all the time!

This set is mostly geared to Mary Helen, our big first grader! We are counting up the days and putting the cards in place value columns, even though we haven't formally learned this concept, she should be pretty comfortable with the concept by the time we get to it. I have her coins for the daily coin count in the little orange envelopes.

If you enlarge the picture, you can see the bottom pages better - here is where we write our date on the calendar, do our tally chart, number sentence, and coin count for the day.

Here are a couple of links where I got most of my great calendar printables!

Homeschool Creations
1+1+1=1
Here is a shot of the calendar area, Mary Helen's workspace (her workboxes are on that brown shelf next to her desk), to the left of the chalkboard are our weekly Bible verses. Mary Helen's verse is from her Sparks (Awana) book (printed from homeschool creations), and Anna's is from 1+1+1=1.

Moving down a bit, the middle of the room. My work area, storage, etc.

There you see Anna's desk and workboxes, and you can see Anna in the "Listening Center" (at least it was today!).

I will try to link to all the printables I have, but if you see something you're particularly interested in, let me know!

My First Giveaway! Me and Marie Learning

I have found a great site for printables for my preschooler! You may remember seeing on our morning meeting area that I have a place to put the letter, color, and shape that we are learning for the week. I got those from Me and Marie learning. I also have ordered a few other things from the talented Ashley who owns the store.

This week we have been learning about the color red and the shape circle. I ordered learning packs for each of these from Me and Marie, and all I had to do was print and cut for some learning fun! Here are some pictures of these in action. . .

Now, for the giveaway! Ashley is giving one of my readers a $10 gift certificate to her store. That will go a long way in her great store!

Here are all the ways you can get entered in to the drawing:
~go to Me and Marie Learning and decide what all you would get with your $10, and leave a comment here (mandatory)
~follow my blog
~follow the Me and Marie blog
~"like" Me and Marie on facebook

~put my button on your blog

~put Me and Marie's button on your blog (find it on her blog)

*Be sure to leave a separate comment for each entry!

**Right now on Me and Marie, there is a Saturday stock up sale - be sure to take advantage of some great deals!

The winner will be chosen at random on July 16. Please make sure there is a way to contact you either by your profile or providing an email address in the comments section. Good luck!

I am not receiving any compensation for this review or giveaway. I love these products, and contacted Me and Marie Learning about hosting this giveaway. All opinions are mine.

Back to School today!

We started our school year today. We took quite a while off when Daniel was born, but we had finished up with Mary Helen's kindergarten curriculum in time. Here are some pictures for us to remember their first day of school this year. Later this week I'll have some pictures of our school room and some highlight of things we're doing this week.