Training Up A Child

Weekly Wrap Up

2012-01-27T16:43:00.001-06:00

Wow! What a week this has been! We have had record breaking rainfall this week, along with having a sweet little dog show up that we have decided to keep as our new pet. Thankfully through the midst of all of this we have managed to get a lot of school work done as well! WHOO!!

And today was our first day of the Spring co-op semester! :-) The kids were so excited to see all of their friends again. I am really excited about Seth's classes. He is taking an introduction to biology class, wood kits class and reading club. I was told that in his wood kits class he put his whole kit together with no help! :-)

READING
We finished our first Pathways reader this week!! :-) For those who did not see the video posted on Wednesday I thought I would share it again. (remember to click here if you are viewing this through email so that you can see the video on the blog.)

Seth obviously was sharing about his Pathways readers in his reading club class today because his teacher came up to me afterwards and asked if we used Pathway readers! She said her family uses that as well and loves it!

Seth also finished the Explode the Code 1 1/2 workbook this week and started workbook 2!! :-) He is moving right along nicely with it!

We have also discovered that it is a good workbook to take for trips in the car! It keeps him occupied so that he is not pestering his sister! :-)

Math
Ok so math wasn't so exciting this week..and to be honest it was one of teh subjects that was set aside when all the excitement of the dog happened. The subject this week was suppose to be about graphing. We were able to read a couple of books explaining the different types of graph and did manage to make a graph of the items in his pencil box...so I guess that was good enough. :-) He is picking math up so easily I am really not concerned.

Next week we will focus on math a lot more because we will be learning how to tell time. :-)

Bible
We are still treking right along with our bible stories using our stick figures. Seth told me this week that he LOVES doing the bible stories! He said that he is learning cool ways of drawing stick figures! :-) (but apparently he is really listening to the story as well though because he does a good job telling me the next day what the story was about!)

We have made a bit of a change to his memory verses. I recently found out that they are doing memory verses in Sunday School and they get prizes the next week if they can recite their verse. So I have decided to just use those verses for our memory verse now :-) They have just started memorizing the Lord's Prayer (Matt 6:9-13). They are not going to do a prize though until they have the whole passage learned and they are doing a verse a week. So this week we learned Matt 6:9. Each week we will attach the next verse on.

Here is the video of him reciting Matt 6:9 (he was having trouble with the word Hallowed)...

SCIENCE
We talked about rainbows this week and read some fun books about Rainbows. The kids also watched a Magic School Bus episode about rainbows!

OTHER
Oh - here are our desks!!! We are so excited and the kids love them!!

And here are some pics of Daisy! We have an appointment set for Monday afternoon at the vet to get her checked out and shots and everything. We will have to also schedule when to have her fixed.

She is such a sweet little dog though and has already won our hearts!

Well I think that is all I have for this week!

We are ready for a fun week next week! We have the vet appointment on Monday and then we have a play date on Tuesday! :-)!!!

Until next time!
Kellie

A fun day!!

2012-01-25T12:28:00.002-06:00

I just had to share a bit of our day with you today!! There has been a lot of excitement going on around here!

First off - Seth read the last story in the Pathways red book today!! He was so excited. There are a few more concluding worksheets in the workbook that we will do tomorrow and then on Monday we start the blue book!

I thought y'all might like this little video :-)

(Click here if you are not seeing the video in the email so that you can view it on the blog.)

The other thing I would like to share is that we had a new friend show up at our house yesterday. (Most of you probably remember me telling you that Rocky disappeared over a month ago now). This sweet little dog was cuddled up on our gazebo yesterday morning when I went out to turn the heater on in the schoolhouse. She had no collar. (Our area seems to be a popular dump spot - the animal control officer knows us well). At first we tried to ignore her but she made it impossible with her very gentle and very sweet disposition. Then last night it started raining and raining BAD. (in fact I heard a bit ago that this is officially the wettest January day in DFW history - with more rain to come!!!). So we brought her in and put her in Rocky's old kennel. She did not make a sound all night long!! She also did not pee or poop in there either :-)

Today we gave her a bath (because she smelled like cows) and let here spend some time with us in the school house (so as you can imagine we didn't get all our schooling done today - just the bare necessities.)

Since we have been back in the house she has been content being in the kennel (I think she is just grateful she doesn't have to be out in this cold wet weather!)

We are trying to think of a name for her. Yesterday our story in the Pathway reader was about the family finding a name for the colt and they came up with Little Lady. So Seth thinks that would be cool. We are thinking on it. Alyssa is calling her sissy - but I don't know about that... LOL!!

Anyways - here are some pics we got this morning.

They are spoiling her already!

If she is a puppy she is not a very young one because her teeth look like adult teeth. I guess we will find out about that better when I get her to the vet to get checked out.

Fun fun!! Of course I have been planning on starting with potty training for Alyssa next week and now it looks like we will be housebreaking a dog as well. Oh Lord let this go smooth and easy!!

Until next time,
Kellie

Weekly Wrap up

2012-01-22T14:23:00.000-06:00

Please excuse me for being a bit late on my weekly wrap up post. At least I am finishing it before the next week, right? We have just been super busy this weekend. I am also trying to figure out a new blog post app for my ipad (so if you are one who gets an email of this post and things seem a bit weird I apologize. Hopefully you can go to the blog and everything will be fixed :-) )

Anyways, we had a good busy week of school this week. We are still working on getting back into our normal routine, but I think we did much better this week. :-)

READING
Seth read 4 stories in his Pathways reader this week!!! I was very pleased at how well he did as well! If we keep on track we will finish the red book this Wednesday!! YEAH!!!

We discovered this week that it is a lot funner to read the stories if you are sitting in the bean bags. :-) We got Aaron to get a picture of us one day (I'm sorry that it is a bit blurry)

I also had to throw this picture in. One day this week Seth had a sight word test in his Pathways workbook. I had the teacher's manual calling out the words and when he would find the word and circle it he would give me a "thumbs up" to let me know he was done and ready for the next word. (he made a 100 on that test by the way!)

MATH
This week in math we were focusing on measurements and Seth had a lot of fun with this! We were measuring all different things in the room by all different means. We measured the table using a paper clip, a chair using a q-tip, and so on. The picture below is of Seth measuring the bookcase with a piece of ribbon.

We have been looking at getting new school desks so I worked that into our lessons this week. For instance, I would ask Seth if we could tell Daddy that we needed a desk that was 5 hands wide? Of course he totally got it and answered "no because Daddy's hands are bigger!" :-)

BIBLE
The boys are still very much enjoying using the Grapevine Studies stick figuring to help tell our bible stories! They really have a good attention span with this and seem to retain a lot. One of our stories this week was about the tower of Babel. After the bible story the boys had fun building a tower using their tower blocks.

And we managed to get our bible verse memorized this week!! Yeah! Here is a video of Seth reciting Proverbs 30:5. (remember if you are viewing this on email you need to go to click here to view the video.

YouTube Video

We also got back on track with our memorizing the books of the bible. Seth has now memorized the old testament through Hosea. Here is a video of him reciting Genesis to Hosea. (email viewers remember to click the above link to go view the video on the blog)

SCIENCE
Our science topic this week was about the stars and planets. I had some experiments planned but we just didn't get to them (I said we were working on getting back in routine...as you can see we haven't quite accomplished it yet). But we did enjoy watching Magic School Bus videos and reading lots of fun library books on the subject!

OTHER
Seth did well in his Climbing to Good English workbook this week. He likes coloring the pictures because he is very proud that he knows his color words. :-)
He continues to work on his Explode the Code workbook during his nap time. If we stay on track we will finish book 1 1/2 this week as well!! I have also discovered that I can bring along that workbook with us in the car for him to work on and it makes for a peaceful car ride because he is not pestering his sister. :-)

We got a headphone splitter so that Aaron and Alyssa can watch netflix on the big monitor while I am trying to do reading or math with Seth. This really works to keep them occupied while I am trying to work with Seth. (now if I could only figure out how to get Alyssa to leave her headphones alone so that they stay on...)

We are also having a lot of fun with the puzzles that we got for Christmas. This week I told the boys that we would work on it after we got all our school work done. This seemed to help motivate them to get their work done. We even got out there Friday morning, even though we don't do school on Friday, to work on our puzzle.

I am still contemplating bringing the puzzle box in the house and doing the puzzles there, as a boredom buster. I think I would like to get one of those puzzle mats that you can put them on and you are suppose to be able to roll it up to put it away if you are in the middle of one and it not mess up the puzzle. That would be cool!

But I have always enjoyed puzzles and the boys seem to really like them now. I think this is a great hobby for us to have to do together. :-)

I will have more info and better pictures to post this week but...we got new school desks and chairs!! YAY!! Here is a picture of the desk. We picked them up Thursday afternoon and then got the chairs on Saturday. I will get pictures this week of the room set up with the new desks and chairs! So exciting! We even went Friday afternoon and the kids got to pick out pencil boxes and stickers to decorate them with and even got new boxes of crayons and colored pencils and stuff!

Well I think that is all I have to report for our week!

Until next time,
Kellie

Weekly Wrap Up

2012-01-13T08:26:00.001-06:00

Well we finished our first week back after the holidays!! Yay!!! All in all things went well. Of course it will always take adjustment getting back into a routine...but, for me, it sure was nice to get back into a routine.

As I have mentioned, I have changed some things. I have to be honest and say I just decided that I have not liked the reading/phonics portion of My Father's World 1st Grade, and neither did Seth. I finally came to the realization that it just was not working for us and decided to stop fighting it and just set it aside. Thankfully I have found Pathways and LOVE Pathways so that made sitting MFW aside easier. :-)

So for our Reading/Phonics we are mainly concentrating on the Pathways readers. We have stepped it up a notch and Seth is now reading a new story every day (we will of course take breaks as needed). He read four stories this week and did very well! I also ordered the Climbing to Good English workbook that goes along with the Pathway readers and we started that this week as well. Seth is still doing Explode the Code for his "napwork" and I have a couple of other workbooks that I am using as fillers as I see fit. I am really excited about these changes helping his reading really take off!

We are still using MFW for the bible stories, doing like I have been doing and combining them with the Grapevine Studies Stick Figuring Through the Bible. That has worked for us and I believe will continue to work for us. I am having Seth read the bible story in the bible reader as we do that bible lesson. I was very pleased at how well he was reading those this week. I have to help him some, but not as much as I thought I would have.

For Math we are still working on the Complete Book of Math but I decided that it wasn't challenging enough for him. I think Seth is going to be a math wizard so I wanted to turn it up a notch. My mom, being a public school teacher, has given me many resources. One of the things she gave me this summer was a teacher's edition and student book for Scott Foresman Math. We are adding those lessons. I will be honest, it is not my favorite layout, but I think with some tweaking I think I can make it work for us for the rest of the 1st grade year and then I will do research and hopefully find a math curriculum for 2nd grade that I like (and will probably try to find another one for 1st grade when it comes time for Aaron and Alyssa to get there...but for now it works and saves me some money in the present time).

For science we are sticking with MFW as well but I am doing research online to try to add in some other experiments and stuff to add to it.

Handwriting is another area that I am in an "I don't know" stage right now. Seth hates handwriting, it is a struggle to get him to write anything, and I feel his handwriting needs MUCH improvement. I have tried Handwriting without tears, and he will handle it sometimes...but not always. I am going to try the Draw Write Now books and see if that works with him doing some copy work of the sentences that accompany the drawings. We shall see...

Anyways - sorry that was a small book - but those are the changes.

Here are some pictures from our week :-)

I found a neat app on the ipad - it is a spelling app where you can make your own lists. So this week when we discussed the new words presented in our Pathways story I would put those words in a list and then let Seth have fun spelling them out.

Here's a cute shot of Seth reading while Aaron is on the ipad playing his games.

We had an activity this week with our bible lessons of making a map of the bible lands. For ours I drew out the bodies of water on posterboard that we colored blue and then we used the Crayola air dry clay to make the land masses. (I have a plastic lid for a container that has not had a container for some time that I am using to keep the map on). I wanted to make sure that the clay is able to dry well - next week we will label the map. I want to make some little figures out of game pieces so that we can use this map to show areas where people are as we go through our bible stories.

Seth wanted me to get a picture of the map they made with the map we used as our guide. :-)

PUZZLE TIME!! The boys got 24 new puzzles for Christmas!! So we will be adding lots of puzzle time in our school time LOL! (of course if you ask me I like puzzles SO MUCH BETTER than any video game!)

Seth discovered his reader bookmark this week (I forgot I had it). It is a book mark that he can move along the page and it shows one line at a time through the window. He really enjoyed using this to read his stories. Hey! Anything to help him want to read is fine by me!

I had to throw this picture in of Alyssa. She decided to throw a dinner party for her dolls and animals on the couch one day.

Ok - I have to admit - we did not do a good job of getting our Proverb memorized or working on our books of the bible this week...I am hoping we can do a better job of that next week :-).

But that's our week!

Until next time,
Kellie

We are back in school!!

2012-01-09T12:07:00.001-06:00

Well, after a long Christmas break we got back after it today! I have to admit things went pretty well and I really think Seth and I both are going to be happy with the changes I made! (at least our first day was a success)I will post more about the changes in my weekly wrap up! Just wanted to shout out that we are back at it. :-)Until next time,Kellie

Advent Calendar Days 20-24 & A Little Catch Up

2012-01-03T14:27:00.000-06:00

Ok, so we kind of fell off the wagon at the end of our advent calendar :-( Remember last post I said I ended up sick on Day 19 :-( Well, it kind of just threw my whole week off...

And I just realized that I didn't even get a finished picture of our puzzle or our nativity scene before I took Christmas down - good grief!!

Oh well... what can you do.

On Day 20 we did do our Snowman pancake dinner that I planned :-) I still wasn't feeling too good but pancakes sounded really good so I did accomplish it.

(they were blueberry pancakes - YUM! - I used blueberries for the eyes and buttons and scrambled eggs for the snow and bacon for the scarf)

Day 21 we had a wedding at church and then church service afterwards and the kids went on stage and heard Bro Waymond tell the Christmas story - so I guess our activity for that day was 'Listening to the Christmas Story'. :-)

Day 22 was a fun day for ME! I got to go get my nails and toes done, hair trimmed, lunch and shopping with a dear friend, NO KIDS :-)... oh...wait..am I hearing you right?? You say this whole advent thing is suppose to be about the kids?? Oh...well they had a super fun day too :-)!! They got to spend the day with Granny! :-)

Day 23 - the boys got to go running errands with Daddy and Papa while Alyssa and I cleaned out her room to make room for her Christmas presents that would soon be coming :-) Then the kids then went and spent the night with Granny and PaPa - a real treat for them!

Day 24 we had Christmas with Granny and PaPa and came home and finished adding our puzzle pieces and manger pieces!

So I guess we didn't do too bad these last days...even though it wasn't what I originally had planned - we did have a focus of Christmas every day - and that is what counts, right?!?! :-)

I thought I would throw in a few pictures from Christmas Day - Daddy and the boys had a lot of fun at the kitchen table playing with the Legos that Seth got for Christmas!

Well - we had a very good Christmas!! Definitely made memories this year!

This week we are not back in school quite yet. I am doing some reorganizing and changing around of some of our curriculum and stuff. I have made a decision to not continue with the reading portion of My Father's World...after much praying and debating and agonizing I realize it is just not working for us. But I feel very good with my decision and feel very good about continuing on using Pathways. I am also making some math changes and some others as well. I will explain all my changes next week! But for now I need to get back to my planning!

It's nice to start a new year! I pray that 2012 is a GREAT year for all my friends and family!! I am excited to think of all the memories there are to be made this year :-)!

Until next time,

Kellie

Advent Calendar Days 13-19 & December School Wrap Up

2011-12-20T10:07:00.000-06:00

Ok - I have gotten a little behind - sorry - things have been hectic. I thought though that I would update you on our advent calendar and do a final December School wrap up all in the same post...if that's ok with yall :-)

Advent Calendar Days 13-19
I think the theme of our Advent activities has been "flexability". I have made so many changes LOL but I guess the important thing is that we have kept up with it and kids are really enjoying it.

Look - that puzzle is almost completed!!

We are only missing 5 pieces from the nativity!!

Christmas is almost here!!

So last week was a bit of a rough week :-(. Alyssa had a fever Monday and Tuesday so that threw plans off a bit. She got better on Wednesday and Thursday, but then woke up Thursday night with croup!!

And if that wasn't bad enough...we haven't seen Rocky, our dog, since we got home from Huntsville last Sunday :-(... We held up hope as long as we could...but it's been over a week now...I don't see any hope of him coming home now...

so with all that going on - doing Advent activities was a little on the difficult side...and weren't quite what I had originally planned...but I think we still pulled it off ok.

Day 13

Tuesday Alyssa was still not feeling well and we were a bit bummed over Rocky not being home...but Daddy came in to the rescue on Tuesday night! He let the boys stay up a bit later and we watched a Christmas movie - The Santa Clause 2! (I find it kind of weird that Netflix has The Santa Clause 2 but not the first one...oh well).

Day 14

On Wednesday we actually made it to the classroom for a bit. Alyssa was feeling better. And I found a couple of Christmas crafts at the store on Tuesday when Aaron and I were out for speech therapy. So our activity for Wednesday was to complete these two crafts. One was decorating a glitter foam tree with foam stickers and the other one was coloring wooden stand up Christmas figures.

We displayed them on the mantle when we were done.

Day 15
On Thursday we had Christmas pizza for supper! I was going to make snowmen on them with pepperonis, but my pepperonis were bad :-( So I just cut up red and green peppers and put all around the pizza. It was super yummy!!

Day 16
Our activity on Friday was going to Christmas party - our homeschool group Christmas party :-) Of course Alyssa didn't make it because of the croup...but the boys had a blast!

Aaron had fun trying to open a Christmas gift with oven mitts on! LOL! This was very funny for the parents to watch!

We also had fun making gingerbread houses.

Day 17
On Saturday we made hot chocolate and watched A Charlie Brown Christmas.

Day 18
On Sunday our activity was to attend a Christmas play - well actually Alyssa just attended, the boys actually performed in the Christmas play at church :-)

Day 19
Well yesterday, Monday, I was sick... :-( Still battling it some but am doing better today. Yesterday I spent most of the day either sleeping, or in my chair. Just really had no energy for anything else. But my hubby was home all day and took the boys with him and his dad to go finish up some Christmas shopping - so I guess their Christmas activity for the day was Christmas shopping :-) Alyssa just spent the day with Mommy. We even took a nap together in my bed. So hopefully that is not too big of a stretch for Christmas advent activities yesterday.

December School Wrap Up
Well we are officially done with December School. Last week we only made it to the classroom one day due to Alyssa being sick and all. But even on the days we didn't make it to the classroom we still watched our daily Christmas movie and every day the boys would all pile in the chair with me and we would play some of our school games on the ipad.

The day that we did make it to the classroom we had fun playing a scrabble game (one of the Scholastic games from my mom). I used the bananagram tiles though and am hoping to, soon, introduce Seth to the game bananagrams :-) He really enjoyed the scrabble game.

And we won't be having school this week or next - so that we can have our Christmas break :-) I have to admit though that I am looking forward to getting back at it in January (probably more excited than Seth - LOL!!!)

But it will be very sad that we won't have our lazy mascot joining us anymore. I really wish I knew what happened to Rocky :-( It is very sad. He will be very much missed in our family.

Until next time,
Kellie

Advent Calendar Days 6 - 12

2011-12-13T11:19:00.000-06:00

Well, the calendar is starting to look bare...

The puzzle has been completed halfway...

And half of the nativity cast have taken their position...

It's hard to believe we are halfway through the month - almost to Christmas! This month is FLYING by!!

Here is what we have done days 6 - 12.

Day 6
On Day 6 (last Tuesday) our activity was to make ornaments. I found a cute little foam ornament kit at Dollar Tree...the kit makes 3 ornaments - one for each kid.

Aaron did the Snowman one, Seth made the stocking and Alyssa made the wreath.

Day 7

Our activity for Day 7 was to make our Christmas cards. We had a lot of fun with this one!

Day 8
My original Day 8 activity was to make star ornaments...but we didn't finish our Christmas cards from the day before so we changed the activity to finish the Christmas Cards :-)

For the rest of the days I don't have pictures :-( sorry...

Day 9
The activity for Day 9 was to "Do something special with Daddy and PaPa". I scheduled this activity on this day because I was having a Christmas party for my Ladies Bible Study at my house so the kids were spending the evening with them :-) They enjoyed a big pizza at PaPa's house.

Day 10
Our activity for day 10 was to "attend a Christmas Concert". This was planned specifically because we went down to my parents and went and saw Denver and the Mile High Orchestra, who were performing at their church that night! We love this group and have seen a Christmas concert of theirs almost every year for the last 7 years!

Day 11
Our activity for Day 11 was "Go to church with Mimi and Poppy" - this was another one that was specifically planned because we were at my parents and since we had to leave straight from there to get back up here to go to church for Christmas play practice that night there really wasn't much time for any other activity.

Day 12
Well yesterday our activity was "bake cookies"... I had an upset stomach all day and Alyssa was running a fever... so we didn't get to that... we had a lazy day in the house, we watched a Christmas movie, the boys played the Wii, and we started reading our Christmas novel "The Dog Who Thought He Was Santa" by Bill Wallace. So, any those would be a worthy advent activity for the day, don't you think?!? (plus I have next week us decorating Christmas cookies...so they really aren't missing anything anyways...)

I'm excited about today's activity...but it won't happen until tonight...and I hope to get pictures...so I will just wait and include it on the next update :-)

I thought I would end this post by sharing some pictures of my "prettys" I did for my Ladies Bible Study party... (just so I don't have to write another post - HA!)

Here are my cute holly and berry cupcakes - got the idea from Pinterest - of course!

And here is my Chistmas tree - it's cream cheese with jalapeno jelly on top...then I made a star, ornaments and the trunk of the tree from bell peppers - another idea from pinterest.

Until next time,
Kellie

Advent Calendar Activities Days 1-5

Second Week of December School

2011-12-08T13:16:00.000-06:00

WOW! It is hard to believe we are finishing a second week of December school! We are still having fun...but we are becoming more and more laxed - which is ok - it is almost Christmas you know :-)

Christmas Movies!
We are still enjoying watching a Christmas movie every day! Here are the movies we have enjoyed this week:

Thomas & Friends: Ultimate Christmas (from Netflix)
The Happy Elf (from Netflix) - this movie featured the voice and music of Harry Connick Jr, very cute movie! The kids loved it!
O Christmas Tree (from Netflix)
Buster & Chauncey's Silent Night (from Netflix)

Reading Games
Here are reading games we enjoyed this week (most of them were part of that game collection I got from my Mom).

Sight Word Bingo - I actually got this one online here.

Double Trouble - This was one of the Scholastic games that uses picture/word cards and you have to find rhyming pairs.

Word! - Another Scholastic game where you have to build words using letter cards - some cards are single letters and some are blends.

Spelling Bee - this was another fun game from my mom. It's a board game that is a race to the finish by finding missing vowels to spell words.

Of course we had our games that we will play every week, Erudition being one of the favorites! (of course I have adapted it so that Seth can play using sight word cards, and Aaron can play using flashcards on his level. The boys are LOVING this game!) (other games we repeated again this week but didn't get pictures of was Roll and Read (Hooked on Phonics), Sight Word Jenga, and Snap and Spell).

Match! This was yet another Scholastic game - it's a typical concentration game - but you are having to match the picture card with the correct word card.

Word Construction - Another board game from my mom - you spin your beginning consonant blend and you can advance if the next ending blend will combine with it to make a real word.

Seth was so excited this week because I presented him with his Cars reader!! I found this at Costco - it is the Step Into Reading leveled readers. This book contained 3 step 1 and 3 step 2 Cars stories (and it was only $6.99!! At other stores each story is about $4 so it was a big savings for me!!) We read the first two stories this week and I was very pleased at how well he did!

Math Games
We enjoyed more card games to practice our math skills. All of these I got online so I have provided links for you :-) (just click on the name of the game to go to the link)

Face Cards Around the Perimeter - A game to practice adding to sums of 10. The link includes a gameboard you can print off.

Numbers In Between - A fun card to practice the more than or less than concept

Save the Ducklings - A game for practicing adding and counting skills (Aaron was able to play this one well!!) The boys loved this one so much that we played twice! They also asked if I could make a bigger game board and if we could play it often! I told them I am also thinking about making a game board to keep in the camper as well. It was that cute of a game! You will just have to go to the link to read how it works.

The first time we played our markers were too big for our board (we were using bears, pigs, and cubes). This is why they asked for a bigger board - LOL!

The second time we just used the cubes...worked better...but they said they still wanted a bigger board. LOL!

Cover Up - An addition game using dice, markers and a game board you can print off from the site.

I didn't do so well getting pictures this week... here are the rest of the math games that we played though...

Cover All - Another card game that also uses a board that you can print off on the site. Another one for good addition practice.

Seventeen - Another good addition game - shows all the ways you can get to a sum of 17, using a deck of cards.

More Or Less - basically the card game war - a good practice of determining what number is more, or less. Site has scorecards that you can print off.

Subtraction War - once again a twist on the card game war - instead of each person drawing one card to sees whose is greater, each player draws two cards and solves the the subtraction problem with them (example - a person draws a 5 and a 2 they will say 5-2=3, and the one with the larger result wins all 4 cards).

Books of the Bible

Seth continues to add a book of the bible every day - we have made it up to Jeremiah now!! Here is a video of him reciting Genesis - Jeremiah. (If you are viewing this from email click here to go view the video on the blog)

Some Fun Pictures

Here are some fun pictures I thought I would share! :-)

Alyssa LOVES her dollies and will play for HOURS with them! I found her last Sunday changing a doll's "diaper" and I had to get a picture (as you can see she wasn't so thrilled with that - LOL!)

With the temps being VERY COLD this week our dog has been spending some extra time inside - and he is becoming a LAZY dog!

He loves our new heater in the school room - LAZY dog!!

Well, that's it for now!

Until next time,

Kellie

Days 1-5 of our Advent calendar activities

2011-12-05T15:17:00.000-06:00

We have gotten off to a good start with our advent calendar activities...even though we had to make up some of the activities we missed this weekend (frankly - we just got too busy and forgot...) but we did and kids had fun and it is all good :-)

Day 1
Our Day 1 activity on Thursday was for each child to choose one toy they were willing to donate to a less fortunate kid. The kids did VERY well with this and each chose two toys on their own. Here is a picture of us dropping them off at the donation box.

Day 2
Day 2 was on Friday and our activity was to make paper snowflakes. It should have been simple enough to do on Friday - but that was our last day of co-op, and then we got to spend the afternoon with Daddy running errands and stuff, and we were just all tired that night. So we did our puzzle piece that night but decided to wait on making the paper snowflakes. We did them today.

What I did was fold the paper for the kids and took out our pattern blocks and told them to trace shapes around the square and then I cut them out for them. They really enjoyed this activity.

Of course Alyssa just scribbled and I just chose some to cut around - LOL!

But I think it made a pretty snowflake - and she was so proud of it!

Day 3

Day 3 was Saturday and it's activity was to color a Christmas picture. We were up at Granny and PaPa's most of the day decorating the Christmas tree up there...so once again we chose to wait on that activity and did it today as well. (bad me...I just don't have the motivation and discipline on weekends like I do during the week).

Aaron wanted me to draw a Christmas tree with a train around it on his pic - I thought I did an ok job :-)

Aaron's finished picture

Alyssa's finished picture

Seth's finished picture. He really took his time and put a lot of effort into his picture.

Day 4

Day 4 - Sunday - an EXTREMELY busy day at church for me (I was home for less than 2 hours after morning service before I had to be back up there again...and it was bedtime when we got back home again)...so it's activity of reading a Christmas story...well we just added an extra story to story time today.

Day 5

Today's activity was to make a new Christmas decoration! Well - we decided to hang our snowflakes in the school room... so pretty on the wall, don't you think?!?

And the kids wanted to hang their pictures that they were so proud of on their doors. So yay! We got our decoration in!! (is that cheating?? I hope not...I just hope I do better from here on out).

The boys' pictures on their door...

Alyssa's picture on her door

Here is our puzzle...slowly getting filled in.

And I am super excited because Granny gave us her advent nativity scene this weekend!! So we got caught up on that today and got our first 5 figures hung.

Other happenings to share!
Look! We got a new heater for our schoolroom! It is a propane heater and man, it does a good job making our schoolroom nice and toasty!! We got it just in time because it is COLD today and is suppose to be COLD all week long!

It was so toasty that Rocky napped pretty much the whole time we were in there, even snoring at one point!

Until next time,
Kellie

First Week of December School

2011-12-01T11:23:00.000-06:00

Hey guys! We are having so much fun in December School!! This is going to be such a fun month!!! I think the boys are having too much fun to realize how much they are actually learning :-) Alyssa is getting a chance to participate and learn right along side them!! We will definitely be continuing some of these activities when we go back to "normal" school!

So on this First week I thought I would show you what our daily schedule looks like for "December School". It is just basically an order of activities...

1) Seth Reads - At the beginning of every day Seth will read a story. Most of the time it is one of the stories we have already read in our Pathways reader, or our MFW bible reader, or a BOB book or Starfall book that we have. Just something enough to keep him in the practice of his reading.
2) Play A Math Game
3) Play a Reading Game
4) review the books of the bible we have learned and add a new book (this is the only "new" thing we are doing - we are continuing with the memorizing of the books of the bible)
5) Play A Math Game
6) Play A Math Game on the IPad
7) Play A Reading Game
8) Seth Reads a story on the IPad (did you know they have leveled readers on the IPad?!?! I found out just last week! Reading on the IPad always makes it more fun!)
9) Play A Reading Game on the IPad
10) Play Our Flashcard Game (more about this game later in this post)
11) Play A Reading Game
12) Seth Reads another story (as stated before, I do want to keep him in the practice of reading...we NEVER stop reading!)
13) Story Time
14) Watch A Christmas Movie
15) Reveal our Christmas Advent Activity

Seth is also continuing working in his Explode the Code book at least twice a week. This give him handwriting practice and, of course, more phonics practice :-) He does this during his "nap" time.

So here are highlights from this week!

Flashcard Game - this was originally a math game scheduled for 1 day. It was a game I found online here. It's a simple board game that you can print off and laminate and it had ? cards and ! cards. I discovered real quick that the ? cards are nothing more than addition flash cards... so why couldn't I "adapt" it to work with any flashcards... even flashcards on Aaron's and Alyssa's levels so that they could play along as well. The ! cards are things such as "lose a turn", "move forward 6 spaces", "move back 3 spaces", etc... The kids had so much fun the first day we did this that I decided to make it a game we play every day! (And we will continue to play it come January...I love the fact that I can include all 3 kids!)

For Seth I am using addition and subtraction flash cards. There are also times that I will use our phonics flash cards as well. For Aaron I am using number and letter recognition flash cards right now, and for Alyssa we are using color recognition flash cards right now. Once she has learned those well we will move on to shape recognition!

Can you tell that I am so very excited about this game!?!?

I also decided to add more ? and ! spots because there weren't that many and the boys were wishing their were more :-)

Here are our flash cards we were using one game - Alyssa was telling me the color of the animal, Aaron was doing number recognition (middle deck...but it showing the back of the card where you can count the items - the number is on the other side), and Seth was working our Cars addition and subtraction flash cards.

Reading Games
My awesome Mom, who is a public school teacher, gave us last year the Scholastic Reading Program, which has a BUNCH of reading games!! We are using those games for most of our reading games this month. Here are highlights of some of the games we played this week.

Hooked On Phonics Roll And Read - we are playing this game every Monday. You lay out so many word cards and then you roll 7 letter dice. You try to make as many words as possible and you get to keep the cards of the words that you make and the player with the most cards at the end of the game wins. (Aaron and I are partners for this game...)

Rhyming Dominos - a domino game where you have to match rhyming words (Aaron and I were partners for this game as well)

This was a Scholastic game - a board game where you roll your die to see how many spaces to move. You land on a mouse that has a letter. To the side of the board are cards that are face down. Most of them are two letter blends. You have to see if you can combine it with the letter your marker is on the game board to see if it makes a word. If it does you keep the tile, if not you return the tile back to the spot where it was. (which adds in a concentration aspect because you can remember where that is for when you do land on a letter that will make a word with that blend). There are also mouse and cat cards mixed in - mouse card lets you move forward two spaces, cat makes you go back two spaces. First one to finish line gets 5 bonus points and then you add up your tiles that you gained to see who wins. (Aaron and I were partners...but he was an AWESOME partner because he is GOOD at memory game and remembered what tiles were where!)

Another Scholastic game we played this week was Rhyme Time Fun. Each person has picture tiles. There is a game board and they roll to see how many spaces to move. They have to see if they have a picture tile that rhymes with the picture that they land on. If so, they put that picture on that spot on the board. The first person to move all of their tiles to the board first wins. (Aaron was, of course, my partner again...but I have to say I think he is learning what rhyming words are!)

Another Scholastic game we played was Bunny Rummy. There are large cards that consist of two or three letters and there are small cards that only have one card. Each player starts out with one of each. Each turn they draw one large and one small card and see if they can blend any of their small cards with large cards to make words. Whoever makes the most words wins.

A game that we will be playing once a week is snap and spell! It consists of 50 letter tiles and a spinner. On your turn your work the spinner and choose a letter from the group of letters that it lands on. You try to make words with your tiles. (we are just concentrating on 3 letter words right now).

Seth was so excited when he made the word kid all by himself with no help from me!!

Every Wednesday we are going to be playing Erudition - a sight word game I have had for a while. I have also altered the game so that all three can play. For Seth's turn he has to read the sight words, but for Aaron and Alyssa I am using their flash cards for their turn!

We are also playing our tower reading game every Tuesday. I just didn't get any pictures of us playing it this week.

Here is a picture of Seth reading a story on the IPad.

Here is a picture of Seth playing one of his reading IPad games!

Math Games

Here are highlights of our math games - most of these are games I found online. I have provided links for you - just click on the game name to go to the link. :-)

Fish Plus One - It's Go Fish (which my boys LOVE) with a twist. Instead of asking for the same number you are asking for your number +1. For instance, if you have an 8 then you ask for an 8+1 and if your opponent has a 9 then they give it to you, if not then they say "Go Fish". Of course, you can probably see how this game can have a lot of variations! I was excited to see how well Aaron was catching on, though! He was learning his +1 facts! :-) (oh and notice the trick I figured out - I have the boys a bag clip to hold their cards in!)

Penguin Math - this was another game my mom gave me - a board game. You roll a die to see how many spaces to move. And then you work the spinner. You have to add the number you land on the spinner with the number on your spot on the board. If you are correct you get to stay where you are, but if you get it wrong you have to go back to where you were at the start of your turn.

Mathino - a game I got on the internet (click on the name of the game to go to the link). It is a fun addition card game. I will let you go to the link to read all the rules of the game...but the boys enjoyed this. I helped Aaron, but I let him do most of the counting :-)

Scan For Compatible Sums - Another game I found online - a simple addition game looking for sums of 10. You can go to the link to see all the rules!

Here are other games we played that I didn't get pictures of (but they I got them online so I wanted to give yall the links)

Compare and Pair - a card game where you are trying to remove all cards from the board, either by removing matches (ex: 2 queens) or the smaller value of two cards of the same suit (ex: if there is a 9 of diamonds and a 7 of diamonds you can remove the 7). See the link for a complete explanation of the game.

Horseshoe Race - Another simple addition card game...it has a printable game board...you move ahead when you are able to correctly add the two cards that you draw together. See the link for more information.

Lucky Number - Another card game where you are trying to clear the deck by finding sums that equal to your "lucky number". See the link for more information.

I have found a whole bunch of math games on the IPad!

On most of the IPad math games, I have Seth solve the problem and then Aaron will touch the answer. Seth is learning his addition and subtraction skills while Aaron is getting practice in number recognition :-)

Story Time

We are changing up story time a bit this month as well. Instead of doing library books, I have found books on the IPad and kindle. The kids really enjoyed the story of Peter Rabbit read from the IPad. I found a free kindle book that has 11 favorite Christmas stories such as "The Night Before Christmas" that we have enjoyed this week!

Christmas Movies

I LOVE Netflix!! We have the download-only account and there are TONS of Christmas movies!! YAY!

Here are the movies we enjoyed this week:

Monday - Christmas Classics Volume 1 from Netflix - Nine merry and high-spirited holiday cartoons from the 1950s!!
Tuesday - Thomas And Friends: Holiday Express from Netflix
Wednesday - we watched our Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer DVD (the CBS cartoon classic!)
Thursday - Build-a-Bear Presents: Hal and Holly Moose, an Uplifting Christmas Adventure from Netflix

Our "school" day lasts anywhere from 3 to 4 hours - depending on how much we are enjoying the games and how many times they want to play them! LOL! But we are having so much fun!!!!

OH -and I can't forget! Here is a video of Seth reciting the books of the bible Genisis - Proverbs!
(if you are viewing this from email click here to view it on the blog)

Until next time,
Kellie

Our Christmas Paintings and our Advent Calendar

2011-11-30T08:00:00.000-06:00

I wanted to share with yall our Christmas pictures we made yesterday and the advent calendar I have put together for the kids! I am so excited about all the fun December activities I have planned!

Christmas Paintings

Remember from the Thanksgiving posts our Fall Trees that we dot painted and put on the wall above the buffet? Well I liked those pictures up on that wall so much that I have decided to make that our "child masterpiece" wall. I have been trying to figure out a way to display my children's artwork and I feel that is my solution! :-) I am going to change it out each season (or every couple of months or so) with different pictures that they have made.

Since my big nativity scene sits on the buffet at Christmas time I decided I would get them to paint pictures that went with that to display through December. So I printed off coloring pages of angels and stars and had the kids dot paint them (since they love that so much). Seth also drew a picture of the entire nativity scene - that I put in in the middle.

Here is a picture of the wall with the nativity scene on the buffet.

Here is a close up of Seth's nativity drawing - complete with 7 wise men (he has decided that there were more than 3...which he could be right...bible never said there were 3...just that they brought 3 gifts)

Here is Alyssa's beautiful angel :-)

Aaron's pretty dot painted star!

Seth also did a small star.

I was working on a small angel - and, of course, Alyssa helped. (and I removed that picture hook to the left of the picture after I took this picture - LOL!)

Yesterday afternoon we had friends over for a play date!! :-) While the kids played, Angela and I played as well :-) We made advent calendars for the month of December!

I decided to use my red pocket chart for my calendar. We won't be using it for school this month so it worked out perfect. I went to Target and got some cute cookie bags in the dollar spot, along with some cute ribbon and a 24 piece puzzle!

We cut out 24 green squares and wrote the numbers 1 to 24 on them and placed them in the chart. And then I cut the bags to smaller sizes. I took red pieces of paper and wrote activities for each day. I folded up the piece of paper and put it in the middle of the bag cut out with a piece of the puzzle. I then gathered up the bag and tied a piece of ribbon around it and stuck it next to one of the numbers in the pocket chart.

Here is a picture of the calendar on the wall with the puzzle board.

And a more close up of the advent calendar.

Here is the puzzle board. This is a Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer puzzle. When I saw that it had 24 pieces I thought how perfect! Each piece is numbered and has a numbered spot on the board (you can see that I messed up my numbering - oh well). Each day the kids will glue the next piece in place.

I have carefully planned out the activities, because I want us to actually stick to this and do it every day! I have even covered our bases for times when I know that we will be busy or out of town (like on day 10 I put "Go to a Christmas Concert" because we will be at my parents going to see Denver and the Mile High Orchestra or the activity of "Doing something special with Daddy and PaPa" on the day that I will be hosting a Christmas party for my ladies bible study group at my house So Daddy and PaPa will be babysitting :-).

I have also made a print out of what activities I have on what day because there will be a little bit of planning that will be needed for certain activities, such as making sure I have the ingredients for baking cookies, or planning the treasure hunt (the prize will be a $1 for each child to go spend at Dollar Tree the next day when we go out for a Christmas treat).

Also having a print out of the activities will be helpful if "life" happens and I need to do a bit of rearranging to make sure we can still do all the activities (for example the day I have for us to go look at Christmas lights...if something comes up and we can't go that day we can switch things around to make sure we don't miss that activity, and we are not left with a day without an activity).

It is going to be so fun!! I will keep you updated, of course, with pictures :-)

Oh and one activity that I love doing as many days as possible - reading Christmas novels with a nice cup of coffee while the kids nap! I started this tradition last year and loved it so much that I am doing it again this year! I have one "real" book I am reading and I have several on my kindle as well!

I so love December!

Until next time,

Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - The Final Wrap Up

2011-11-28T11:47:00.000-06:00

Well today we have started our "December School" -- even though December doesn't start until Thursday, we were too excited!! It was a very fun day (kids are actually still watching their Christmas movie for the day, singing along having a grand time)!! But more on that later :-) (I promise to have at least weekly updates, if not more)...

but not today...

Today I need to finish up telling you about our WONDERFUL Thanksgiving!! Actually make that TWO WONDERFUL Thanksgivings!!! This had to be the best Thanksgiving holiday ever!

So on with the details...

Remember the surprise that I said the kids were working on that I couldn't tell you about until afterwards?? Well the kids made Thank You cards for our family members!

I went to the library and got die cuts of leaves and turkeys. I glued them to rectangle pieces of cardstock and gave each child a tube of glitter glue (each one had a different color - pack of 3 from the dollar store and they worked GREAT). They sqeezed pretty squiggly lines of glitter all over the leaves or turkeys.

I then printed, using pretty font, the words "We Are Thankful For" for each card. We glued those on the middle of the picture.

I had Seth write each family member's name and then I scanned his writings into the computer so that I could decrease the size and make them fit on the card. I cut out them out using scalloped scissors.

Then I took another rectangle for each card, same size as the first, and had each kid sign their name. Aaron wrote an A for his name on each one :-), Seth of course wrote his name and Alyssa made pretty scribbles.

I stapled the second rectangle to the back of the first to finish the card!

I displayed them on the buffet around our Thankful Tree. (it of course was very pretty when they were all up there...but for our Thanksgiving with the Watson's there were only three left...so you will see in a bit that I did something else for the buffet for that Thanksgiving and just put the cards at their place at the table).

Of course all of the family loved them!! :-)

So on with the rest of the Thanksgiving highlights!

As mentioned before, my parents, sister and her two kids came up the weekend before Thanksgiving for an early Thanksgiving celebration! I decided I would spoil them for the whole weekend :-). When they got there Friday night I had pinto beans that had been cooking in the crock pot all day, with sausage, rice, fried okra and cornbread for supper - YUMMY!!

For breakfast I made a Blueberry Breakfast Cake and a Sticky Bun ring! Didn't it turn out pretty?!?! And it tasted just as good!

Here is the table all decorated and ready!! You should notice the tablecloth, napkin rings, place cards and the turkey bread basket with the turkey napkin inside it! Didn't it come together nicely?!?!

Here we are sitting at the table FULL of food!! I just noticed that no one was smiling though - gees! Look happy people!! LOL!! For food we had a grilled pork loin, sweet potatoes with streusel topping, homemade creamed corn, boiled to death green beans, creamy cranberry salad, and yeast rolls! YUMMY!! For dessert we had a spice cake pumpkin trifle (that I forgot to get a picture of!) We were all so stuffed when we were done! But it was a good good dinner!

For our Thanksgiving dinner on Thursday with Daniel's parents and brother we decided to brine our turkey! Here is a picture of our 18 lb turkey resting in it's brine! We had to get a 32 quart rubbermaid to fit it in and completely rearrange the fridge - but it fit!!

Here it is off the grill! YUM!!! It may look burn but I assure you it was not burned at all!! (the brown sugar in the brine combined with the olive oil rub on the turkey on the grill made the skin very dark looking - but it was VERY GOOD flavor when you ate it!) This was the juiciest turkey I have ever had!

Here is a picture of my apple-raisin stuffing (VERY good) and my homemade cranberry relish!!

Remember earlier in the post I mentioned I did something different with the buffet for the 2nd celebration - it was transformed into our dessert table!! YUM!!

Here is a picture of my pumpkin bars and my caramel apple trifle!

Here is a picture of the banana pudding and pecan pie that my brother-in-law made! YUM!

And here is this family picture (Uncle James made it as well!! :-) ) At least everyone smiled in this picture!

Here is my plate stuffed full of food - ready to dig in!! YUM!! You can also see on my plate my sweet potato casserole (BEST I have ever done!!!) and the bacon wrapped green beans that my brother-in-law did! We just stuck with easy crescent rolls for this gathering. :-)

Ok I seriously need to go on a major diet now - LOL!!

But this will seriously be a Thanksgiving holiday that will be remembered for years to come!!

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus On Thanksgiving - Our Turkey Place Cards

2011-11-17T19:20:00.000-06:00

For our focus on Thanksgiving today we made our turkey place cards. Of course, I got the original idea from Pinterest, but ours ended up being a lot different than the one on there. To start with I realized I didn't have any good color ink pads to do the fingerprints. I could have done it with paint, but my kids get really finicky about their fingers getting dirty, so I just didn't want to chance it.

So we decided to do dot painting :-) Of course, Aaron was beyond thrilled!! (and actually did the best job of us all!) I cut our place cards to size and folded them. I made three curved lines with a pencil (looked like a rainbow) and gave them q-tips and orange, purple and blue paint. I told them to make dots on each line - one color per line. (for some reason Seth was the one having a problem following this direction LOL - oh well, they were still cute). Then when they were done we squirted some orange glitter glue on them to make the body and since it was glue we were able to put the google eyes and triangle beak right on top of that! :-)

I then used a fine point marker to make the feet and then a colored sharpie to right everyone's name on them.

I think they turned out really cute, even if they were a bit different than what I had envisioned!

Here are the pics!

Aaron told me the whole time how much he loved dot painting!

Alyssa was not cooperating very well and was not letting me help her so I just gave her some pain, q-tip and scrap paper and she had fun just painting :-)

Here they all are drying.

And here is our finished product!

Other Posts on our Focus on Thanksgiving:
The Mantle
Our Fall Trees
The Tablecloth
Our Pilgrim and Indian
Our Thankful Tree
Our Turkey Bread Basket
Our Napkin Rings

My family is due in sometime tomorrow late afternoon/early evening! We are so excited to show off everything we have done!!

Until next time,
Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Week 13 and 14 In Review

2011-11-17T11:06:00.001-06:00

Here I am once again having to play catch up on my reviews. But if you are a normal follower of my blog then you know that we have been busy focusing on Thanksgiving! :-)

So I am catching up with what we did last week and this week. Despite all the fun Thanksgiving stuff we have been doing we have also managed to have two full weeks of school :-) Go Us!! To reward ourselves we are taking next week, the week of Thanksgiving, off!! YAY!! On Monday and Tuesday I am planning on having us come out to the school house because I want to do some planning for school for the month of December (which will be all review of what we have already learned - no "new school" happening that month) but the kids will be able to just play puzzles or watch videos while I work on planning!

But I will post more about all that later - on to our review!

Reading
The past two weeks we have gone through days 49-58 of the teacher's manual of MFW (skipping days 50 and 55 due to the fact that there is no reading on those days - we really are not doing exploration days at all). We have finished the first story of the reader on creation and read the second story this week! Seth is doing very well in reading. He is doing better than I would have expected retaining the phonics rules. I am excited about the month of December - when we will have a chance to cement the retention without worrying about adding another rule almost every day!

I do want to make a note about day 57 when the focus was long vowel e spelled ea - I did things a bit different than the TM stated. I introduced the rule to Seth of "When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking." I even made this illustration (picture below) on the board, which Seth really liked (he loves for me to do things like that). To me I think he will retain this rule better this way than the way that they were having you explain it in the TM. :-) He is ready to see other vowels "go walking". LOL!

In Pathways we are really moving right along! We read 4 new stories in the past two weeks and he is doing REALLY REALLY WELL!! I can't say enough how much I LOVE THIS PROGRAM! I have been so impressed with it so far! He doesn't moan and groan about having to do the worksheets and he reads the stories very well! YAY!!

He is also still enjoying Explode the Code. He does his pages as his napwork (that's what we call homework).

Math
We continued our work on addition and subtraction the past two weeks. He has gotten really good with the addition and does it now using his fingers only to help him. With subtraction he is still using his counting bears or cubes but is doing well with it. He has also grasped the + and - sign and know what each one means!

We didn't read as many books on math the past two weeks but here are the books that we did read:
The Smushy Bus by Leslie Helakoski
The Action of Subtraction by Brian Cleary
Subtraction Fun by Betsy Franco
Panda Math: learning about subtraction from Hua Mei and Mei Sheng by Ann Whitehead Nagda

Science
Our focus in science the past two weeks was 'Under the Sea' and 'Sun & Moon'. As I have stated before all that we are really doing for science is just reading lots of books on the subject we are focusing on. We will talk about the subject as we read and we also watch some videos as well. But this is really been the extent of our science focus right now. Seth is just getting familiar with the subjects, learning the basics through fun stories.

Books we read over the past two weeks on these subjects:
Across the Wide Ocean by Karen Romano Young
Gentle Giant Octopus by Karen Wallace (note on this book - we LOVE this book! We read this as part of the kindergarten curriculum and were excited to read it again this year. Octopuses are FASCINATING!)
Peg and the Whale by Kenneth Oppel
Yummy, Yummy! Food for my Tummy! by Sam Lloyd (very cute silly book that the boys loved)
Big Blue by Shelley Gill
Bright Stanley by Matt Bukingham
Waiting for the Whales by Sheryl McFarlane
Follow Me! by Bethany Roberts
Baby Beluga by Raffi
Little Honey Bear and the Smiley Moon by Gillian Lobel
I'll See You When The Moon is Full by Susi Gregg Fowler
Grandpa Takes Me To the Moon by Timothy R Gaffney
I Took the Moon for a Walk by Carolyn Curtis
Catching the Moon by Myla Goldberg
Long Night Moon by Cynthia Rylant
Little Wolf and the Moon by Marjorie Dennis Murray
When the Moon Forgot by Jimmy Liao (Seth LOVED this book)
Full Moon Barnyard Dance by Carole Lexa Schaefer
Little Rabbit Couldn't Sleep by Beth Shoshan
The Moon Might Be Milk by Lisa Shulman
Little Moon Dog by Helen Ward

Videos we watched:
Happy Birthday Moon
Moon Man
A closer look at space: the moon

Bible
We got Proverbs 14:30 memorized last week. Here is the video of him reciting that. (click here if you are viewing this post from email to see the video on the blog)

We didn't get a proverb memorized this week :-( (just so much going on I just didn't do a good job getting to that). But Seth has memorized the first 16 books of the bible now!! Here is a video of him reciting them! (once again click here if you are viewing this from email to see the video on the blog)

We also finished our study on creation and we did the story of the Garden of Eden and The First Sin. I used the stories in the TM but used the stick figures from Grapevine Studies to tell the story with! Aaron participates in this with us. Both boys have a notebook to make their drawings in and then after we have completed the lesson both boys have to go up to the blackboard and retell me the story using the pictures on the board! I am happy with both boys retention but I am so impressed with Aaron's retention! He is doing so well. Below are pictures of the boys at the board retelling the story of the Garden of Eden.

And here is a shot of my teacher's manual with my little stick figures drawn in where I want to put them in the story!

Aaron And Alyssa
They are doing better and better about learning how to quietly play during school time. Aaron loves playing his games on the ipad or playing computer cool school. And of course having him more involved with Seth now that the bible lessons are more involved has been a good thing as well :-)

Aaron is doing well at his speech therapy sessions. This week his therapist gave us a homework page of three syllable words to work on saying (working on getting all the sounds in). Since Seth has recently been introduced to learning syllables I figured out a way to do an exercise that would help both! I put all the words on a paper (with pictures) and then put three circles beside them. Aaron has to dot paint or stamp each circle as he says each part of the word (like he did in his session and LOVED) and Seth has to dot paint or stamp each circle when he says each syllable! They enjoyed doing this! I think Aaron really liked the fact that he Seth was the doing the same thing he was :-). Aaron's therapist wants him to be fluent in the words by next week and I think by doing this we will be able to accomplish that!

Of course Seth had to stamp his hand - LOL!

Of course Alyssa and Aaron also love story time and love watching the videos as well.

And our mascot loves to come in and snuggle during video time as well :-) Such a spoiled little puppy!

I think Seth is excited about his week off next week! :-) He has worked so hard - he deserves it!!

We will have one more "normal" week after next week and then we are going to be in our FUN December school!!!

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - Our Napkin Rings

2011-11-16T13:30:00.000-06:00

We had another FUN FUN project for our focus on Thanksgiving today - our napkin rings. Guess where I got the idea??? Of course if you answered PINTEREST you were right! LOL!! I just love that site!!

Anyways - I cut out all the pieces ahead of time so all we had to do today is glue our pieces together - like little puzzles. The kids had a ball doing this, of course, because they always love working with glue :-) Even Alyssa was doing her own glue!

Here are the pictures! I think they turned out adorable!

We had to give them time to dry

And here is a napkin ring holding a napkin sitting on our cute plates that I found (they are heavy duty paper plates but aren't they cute?!?!) on the tablecloth! I think it all looks so pretty together! So excited!!

Other Posts on our Focus on Thanksgiving:
The Mantle
Our Fall Trees
The Tablecloth
Our Pilgrim and Indian
Our Thankful Tree
Our Turkey Bread Basket

Until next time,
Kellie

Loving our Bible Studies

2011-11-15T11:40:00.001-06:00

No Focus on Thanksgiving post to put up today :-( We finished working on our secret project that I can't share on here until after Thanksgiving so I don't ruin the surprise for our family members. Aaron and I are headed to speech therapy today and then the two of us are going grocery shopping to get the stuff to make all the yummy food for our celebrations!! :-)

I do want to share today about how well our bible lessons are going! If you have followed us then you know that we are using Grapevine Studies and it is fitting really well with MFW. The first lesson of Grapevine Studies was creation. Since MFW spread out creation into a couple of weeks we were only doing one box of stick figures at a time for the creation lesson.

Well - that has all changed now. Today was our first day to do a full Grapevine Studies lesson - the story God forming Adam and Eve and Adam's job in the garden. Actually it was two lessons for Grapevine Studies - God forming Adam and putting him in the garden, and then God forming Eve and putting her in the garden. But since MFW had them as one lesson we combined them as one lesson.

I actually used the story from the MFW teacher's manual to tell the story - using the stick figure drawings from Grapevine Studies. Here is a picture of my teacher's manual - I made small drawings at the points where I wanted the drawings to go into the story.

After we finished the story (the boys drew the pics in their notebook as I was drawing them on the board) I had each boy go to the whiteboard, and retell the story back to me, using the pictures. They both did a very good job of retelling the story!

I think they really liked getting up there and "playing teacher", telling me the story.

I really think this method is going to work well for us! And I love how well the two programs work together! :-) I think using the Grapevine Studies to supplement the MFW just helps in comprehension and retention of the stories for the boys! (and it is a good way to get Aaron involved :-) )

Ok - got to go get ready for the afternoon!

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - Our Turkey Bread Basket

2011-11-14T12:08:00.001-06:00

Hey everybody!!

We got back at our focus on Thanksgiving today! We have a lot to get done this week because our first Thanksgiving celebration begins THIS Friday night (with my family)!!! Yay! So excited!!

(side note - we are also trying to do a full week of school as well so that we can take next week off! I will hopefully combine my week in review of last week with this week's on Thursday...if I have time! LOL!)

We worked on two projects today. One of the projects I cannot share with you quite yet because it is a surprise for the family members - and I don't want to ruin the surprise since most of them read this blog :-) I will share it with you after Thanksgiving though - I promise!

The other project we worked on was our Turkey Bread Basket. Of course once I again I got the idea off of Pinterest. We made our face on the wooden spoon. I cut out the feathers and Alyssa added some color to them and then Aaron taped them to the skewers. (Seth was busy working on the other secret project while Aaron and Alyssa and I did the bread basket).

This bread basket of course is going to hold the bread for dinner - but it will also serve as the centerpiece for the table! I think he turned out looking adorable! Look at the pictures and let me know if you agree. :-)

Alyssa loved coloring on the leaves.

Aaron did a good job taping the feathers to the skewer!

I had to get another shot of Alyssa - she was REALLY into coloring those feathers - and she made sure her scribbles were just right! She was too funny! (and yes, she is in dinosaur pjs - LOL!)

Here is the end result!! (nevermind the napkins that I am storing in the basket for right now)

As you can see - the handprint napkin fits nicely in the basket :-)

Other Posts on our Focus on Thanksgiving:

The Mantle

Our Fall Trees

The Tablecloth

Our Pilgrim and Indian

Our Thankful Tree

Oh! On another note - I realized this weekend that I have been nominated for a homeschool blog award at The Homeschool Post through seeing a post from another blog that I follow and love and found out she voted for me in the category I was nominated in!! Of course she is Tina over at Being Made New and the category that I have been nominated in is Best Homeschooling Methods blog! I don't know how in the world I got nominated but it is kind of exciting to know that I have been nominated!

So if you love me and love my blog will you go vote fore me? You can click here to go vote (you don't have to have a blog to be able to vote).

While you are at it - go vote for blogs in other categories as well. This post has all of the categories listed. I got my votes in, including my vote for Being Made New as best encourager! She has been an AWESOME encourager for me!

So if you have time and would like to - go vote! :-)

Until next time,

Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - Our Thankful Tree and Bread Basket Napkin

2011-11-09T11:23:00.001-06:00

Today was a fun day for our focus on Thanksgiving! I really made the children think about things they were thankful for!!

Our Thankful Tree
For our first project we completed our thankful tree. I got the idea from pinterest (of course) but ours turned out looking way different than the one on there (and in my opinion - better). I found some good branches outside that would work and found a vase in my stash that would work. I was originally going to do paper leaves that we would write what we were thankful on. Well I went by the Dollar Tree to see if they had any die cuts of leaves (because our Dollar Tree is good about carrying stuff like that) but they did not. :-( I had some cardstock and was just planning on going to the library in a couple of days and just use their die cut machine when I went into Wal-Mart and found that they had packages of fake leaves for a very good price! I realized they would look prettier anyways so I decided to go that route.

So I got out some ribbon and stapled ribbon loops to each of the leaves. I then had the kids sit down and I told them for every leaf I held up they had to name something they were thankful for and I wrote it down. I had 26 leaves total so that meant they were going to have to use their brains and think beyond the obvious things to be thankful for! And they did a very good job and it was a very sweet, tender conversation that we had as a result! (My heart completely melted when Seth gave Heaven as one of his things to be thankful for!)

So we hung the leaves on the tree and then I took all the things they said they were thankful for and made a really cute little 4x6 picture with them that I framed and sat at the base of the tree! I am so very pleased with how it turned out!

Here is a picture of what is in the frame (in case you want to read all the things they are thankful for)

Our Bread Basket Napkin
Once again this was from another idea I found on Pinterest (surprise surprise). The idea there was actually for a tablecloth - they made handprints of the children on the tablecloth and made them look like turkeys. I loved the idea but we already had a tablecloth and I didn't like this idea on the tablecloth we have. But I still loved the idea! So I decided to do it on our napkin that will go in our breadbasket. (which, by the way, our bread basket is going to be another project - we are making it to look like a turkey - SO FUN!)

So on three of the corners I had each child do a handprint turkey and then I decorated and labeled the fourth corner! I can't wait to see how cute this is going to look in our bread basket!

Here are the pictures. You will notice that the napkin is bunched up in the middle - that is because it was still drying when I took the pictures. We put it on top of another towel so that our paint would not bleed through to the table. (btw - we used fabric paint and fabric markers). Also notice the fabric of the napkin - this is the same fabric that I am making my dinner napkins out of (that I mentioned yesterday!)

It was a fun day for our focus on Thanksgiving! We still have lots to do over the next couple of weeks! We have a surprise that we are making for each member of our family that is coming to each of the dinners. We have to make our napkin rings, and the turkey bread basket, and our place cards for the tables. And there are a few other things I would like to throw in there if we can find time!

This has been a lot of work and has kept us busy but it has been a lot of fun and we are making memories to cherish for years and years to come! LOVE IT!!

Our other posts on focus on Thanksgiving:
Our Mantle
Our Fall Trees
Our Tablecloth
Our Pilgrims and Indians

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus On Thanksgiving - Pilgrims and Indians

2011-11-08T11:19:00.001-06:00

Today for our focus on Thanksgiving we made cute little block decorations of a pilgrim, indian, turkey and pumpkin. Of course once again I found the idea on Pinterest. But the Pinterest link was not to a tutorial on how to make them - it was to a site to purchase them. But I thought to myself that there had to be a way to figure out how to use that idea and make a craft out of it! And there was :-)

I went and found 4 pieces of scrap blocks in my hubby's shop :-) and then we used construction paper and ribbon and buttons and stuff to glue on them. I cut out all the pieces and the kids helped me glue everything on. (Older kids would be able to cut out the pieces an do the whole project themselves)

Here are the pictures - I will explain in greater detail with each picture what we did :-)

Here is a view of all four of them displayed on our piano! Aren't they adorable?!?!

Our little indian - Alyssa colored his feather, Seth picked out his button eyes and Aaron helped glue on all the pieces. (the feather was glued onto the back side of the block)

My favorite - the turkey! Aaron picked out his big colorful button eyes and Seth helped glue all the pieces on. (the feathers were glued on to the backside of the block)

Our Pilgrim - Aaron and Seth both helped glue on the pieces - Aaron colored his eyes and Seth colored his nose.

Our pumpkin - I glued on these pieces - I did it before we did the others to make sure that the construction paper would glue to the blocks ok and to give the kids and idea of what we were doing. (the stem was glued to the back side of the block and the green ribbon for leaves was attached to the top of the block with a green thumb tack)

I was very pleased with how this project turned out and hope we can cherish these for years to come! So fun!!

Oh - and I mentioned yesterday about finding fabric for our tablecloth - well I found some for our napkins as well! YAY!! It is actually an old cream colored tablecloth. Thanks to my serger I will quickly be able to transform it into 10 napkins and have enough left over for our bread basket napkin that we will be decorating.

Things are coming together nicely!

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - My Tablecloth!!

2011-11-07T15:31:00.001-06:00

Ok - first I have to SCREAM and SHOUT and JUMP FOR JOY because I get to now host two Thanksgiving dinners!! YAY!! My family was not going to be able to come up on Thanksgiving day so we have worked it out where they are coming the weekend before - WHOO HOO!!! My Mom, Dad, sister and my two awesome nephews are coming!! YAY!! So I am now doing two menus and setting two tables, and having two wonderful family celebrations! I am LOVING this!!

Ok - so on to my tablecloth - LOL! I am so very excited!! A dear sweet lady of the church gave me two tub fulls of fabric last week!! Included in that fabric was a very pretty 60" width nice light weight upholstery fabric - just enough for a table cloth! And in a perfect Fall rust color! All I had to do was serge the two short ends - I am going to leave the long ends natural with an extra stitch to control the fraying when washed!

Here is a picture of the tablecloth! (you probably recognized it - I had just enough scrap for a runner on my buffet!)

I need to figure out what to do for my napkins - I am sure I have the perfect fabric in my huge collection of fabric now - just have to find it LOL!

The kids will be making the napkin rings :-) Of course I will post about those when we do them!

WHOO-HOO!

Other focus on Thanksgiving posts:
The Mantle
The Fall Trees

Until next time,
Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - Our Fall Trees

2011-11-07T13:34:00.002-06:00

Today we did a project for our focus on Thanksgiving - getting the house ready to host family! Today we made fall trees using dot painting. I found the idea from Pinterest. Aaron has loved dot painting ever since he got to do it in one of his co-op classes at the beginning of the semester so he was super excited to do this today!

What I did was make two 8x10 pictures of a tree trunk and branches for Seth and Aaron and 2 4x6 pictures of a tree trunk and branches for Alyssa and I. I put globs of red, orange, yellow and brown paint (washable of course!) on a tray and gave everybody a q-tip for each color. And all we did was just make dots of color all over our picture.

Thank God for washable markers! Alyssa had more on her than her picture by the end of it - but no big deal - these paints wash off VERY easily!!

When they dried I put them in frames and hung them over our buffet. Here are some pictures of the end result.

Ignore the branches for now - this is part of our thankful tree that we are working on - I will post pictures of it when we are done :-)

Once again - ignore the branches for now - but don't the pictures look nice on the wall?!?!

Here are close up of the finished pictures:

Seth's painting

Aaron's painting

Alyssa's work!

My cute little tree!

I have to point out a couple of other things on the buffet table...both of these are from crafts we did two years ago!!

Here are our glove stuffed turkeys! Click here to see the original post from two years ago when we made them.

And here is our fall wreath we made. Click here to see the original post from this one - I got teary eyed when I looked at it - the kids were so little - Alyssa was just a baby!! OMG!!

So once again - we are taking time this month to focus on Thanksgiving. On each of these posts I will put link to the other related posts in case you miss some or want to go back and look at others :-)

Focus on Thanksgiving:

The Mantle

Until next time,

Kellie

Let's Focus on Thanksgiving - The Mantle

2011-11-04T15:19:00.001-05:00

As I mentioned in our weekly review, we are hosting Thanksgiving at our house this year (SO VERY EXCITED!) and I am wanting to get the whole house "dolled up" for the occasion! Not to mention the fact that I think it is good to focus on Thanksgiving more. I don't want to be like the stores who are going straight from Halloween to Christmas. I want there to be a focus on Thanksgiving!

The kids are going to help me with a lot of the decorations! Today I got our mantle done! Here are the pictures!

The view of the entire mantle

I found this picture on Pinterest - loved it so much that I printed it and framed it :-)

The simple garland I made - cut brown cardstock with scalloped scissors. Used my leaf punch and punched each corner. Attached glitter foams stickers and laced cards through pretty ribbon.

My FAVORITE pumpkin glass bowl and lid. Didn't get a good picture but those are acorn beads in it and a votive in the center! I love this thing! To the right you can see one of the pumpkins we made last year from yarn.

When I was putting up the garland Seth asked what it said and I said "Give Thanks". He said "we should put one below it that says Love God." LOVE that kid!!! He melts my heart at times!

There may be a couple more things that will be added to it that I want the kids to make! :-) I will post pictures of those as we get them made.

Oh - and I found this picture today and loved it and thought I would share :-)

Until next time,
Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Weeks 11 and 12 in Review

2011-11-03T11:48:00.001-05:00

Hey guys! I'm sorry I missed the review of last week. We had a short week and left last Thursday morning for a fun fun "Fall Camping Party". It was a weekend of camping and doing fun fall activities with some friends of our. I blogged all about it on our RV journal - feel free to go check out that post by clicking here. I will give highlights from that short week of school, along with this awesome week of school on this post. :-)
ReadingMan Seth is doing so well in his reading! It seems to really be starting to click with him! YAY! Last week for MFW we did days 42 through 44 of the TM. This included more reading of the bible reader, which Seth is doing very well with.
This week we did days 44 through 48 of the TM (skipping day 46 since it had no reading assigned). It is neat to see how Seth is starting to retain some of these phonics rules! YAY!
We have found this week that, at least for creation, things are lining up so well with our Grapevine Studies (explained more further down in this post). We are doing our Grapevine studies and bible story the day before we learn the new words and read from our bible reader. (so for example - for those who use MFW - on day 48 in the TM, we will do the bible story and bible notebook on one day, along with our Grapevine Studies, and then the next day learn our new words and read from the bible reader). What I have discovered this week that is neat about this is that I will leave up the stick figure picture from the Grapevine Studies and I will label it with our new words. Here is a picture from day 48 - which was day 4 of creation. You will see the picture (in orange) with the words to learn labeled around the picture. (for the words that were not part of the picture I just wrote them on the side)

I don't know if this will continue to work this well as we move along in the Old Testament - but I am enjoying this for now. :-)

Seth started reading his Pathways reader last week as well! He really is LOVING it and is doing it so well! In the past two weeks he has read the first 3 stories of the book! We spend two days on each story. The first day I will introduce the new words and will read the Teacher's story to Seth. He does very well answering the questions at the end. And then he reads his story. On the next day we review the new words and he rereads his story and then we do the workbook pages that go with the story! I am LOVING this reading curriculum and am so glad we decided to try it out! I will definitely be doing this Aaron and Alyssa!
Seth has been enjoying doing his Explode the code lessons as his homework every day and is doing very well with that as well.
MathWe are still working on addition and subtraction. Seth is doing very well with this and really likes his workbook pages from the math book! He is also enjoying Rocket Math on the ipad as well! He has to solve addition and subtraction problems to earn money to buy parts to build cool rockets. He is so excited that he is doing so well with math now that he is earning a lot of money for his game! :-)
He also had a lot of fun with the workbook pages that involved using the dice!

Books we read for Math over the past two weeks:

Hershey's Kisses Addition Book by Jerry Pallotta

One Less Fish by Kim Michelle Toft

Adding and Subtracting at the lake by Amy Rauen

I can Subtract! It's Not An Act! by Tracy Kompelien

I can Add! It's not so bad! by Tracy Kompelien

Ten Terrible Dinosaurs by Paul Strickland

The Rooster Who Set Out To See the World by Eric Carle

How many blue birds flew away? by Paul Giganti

Science

Over the past two weeks our science focus has been on Beaches and Waves (and we finished up our focus on rivers at the beginning of last week). Once again we didn't do any of the experiments in the TM - just didn't work out for us. All of our science focus has been through reading books, mainly storybooks, on the subjects.

Books we read for science over the past two weeks:

Turtle Turtle watch out! by April Pulley Sayre

Lonesome George, the giant tortoise by Francine Jacobs

A Beach Tail by Karen Lynn Williams

Scaredy Squirrel at the beach by Melanie Watt

Sneakers the seaside cat by Margaret Wise Brown

The Riverbank: The Wind and the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Moonlight on the river by Deborah Kovacs

What is a wave? by Chris Arvetis

A day at the beach by Ed Briant

The Berenstain Bears go on vacation by Stan Berenstain

Sherman swaps shells by Jane Clarke

Otto goes to the beach by Todd Parr

What the sea saw by Stephanie St. Pierre

Old Shell, New Shell by Helen Ward

Videos we watched for science:

Ready Set Larn with Paz: Seaworthy

I Spy: Seashells by the Seashore

Save Ums: Picnic panic in Wave World

Bible

We did not memorize a Proverbs last week since it was such a short week. Seth memorized Proverbs 13:1.

We have also started memorizing the books of the bible. The video below is Seth reciting Proverbs 13:1 and the first 6 books of the bible!! (remember if you are viewing this on email then click here to go view the video on the blog) And yes, we did have pajama day today! We had a COLD front come in last night...and since we are not planning on getting out at all today we decided it was a good day to stay in our nice warm pjs. :-)

So far Seth is enjoying the bible notebook (of course it is just a lot of coloring, cutting and pasting on the first page LOL). Aaron is doing one as well with him. I will make sure to get a picture of their creation page when they finish.

We are also enjoying our Grapevine studies - we have almost completed the 7 days of creation! Aaron is also enjoying doing this with us as well!

Aaron and Alyssa

As mentioned above, Aaron is enjoying doing the bible notebook and Grapevine Studies alongside Seth!

He also started his weekly speech therapy sessions last week and is doing well with those! He really likes his therapist.

He is also enjoying playing computer cool school while sitting in his bean bag chair! He will sit there and play his games through all of Seth's reading and math lessons. (I wish I could get his sister to cooperate as well!)

Sorry there were not that many pictures! We just get so busy and forget to get the camera out sometimes!

Planning Ahead

We are hosting Thanksgiving Dinner at our house this year and I am so very excited! I want to put a very big emphasis on Thanksgiving this year! Starting today, we are going to start decorating our house for Thanksgiving. The kids are going to help me make the decorations :-) I have found some really cool ideas and am looking forward to seeing how everything turns out. I think it will be so very neat!

I am also fixing to start planning what we are going to do for School for the month of December. It is going to be very relaxed for us. We will not be doing anything new in MFW or Pathways, or anything else. It will be a month of reviewing what we have already learned in reading and math. I am hoping to come up with some fun Christmas games to do our reviewing with. I thought about taking a complete break but my kids do so much better when there is structure and routine in our day so we will come to the school house. But it will be for these fun review games or to work on Christmas decorations or work on making Christmas presents. It should be a very fun month and I am very much looking forward to it! (just need to figure out how to find the time to plan for it - LOL!)

Well that's it for now!

Until next time,

Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Week 10 in Review

2011-10-21T15:08:00.001-05:00

Well another week has come and gone! We are just truckin' right along! :-) We are looking forward to a short week next week due to the fact that we are CAMPING next week!! But more on that later :-) Here is what we did this week!
ReadingWe did days 37-41 of the Teacher's Manual (skipping day 40 because there was no reading assigned to it that day. I have found it to be best to just keep moving on reading.). This week we introduced our bible reader and read the first couple of pages! Seth was pretty excited about this. We even took time to make a cute monster book mark for our reader.

We also just about finished our Before We Read workbook for our Pathway reading program. We are super excited to read the first book in our First Steps pathways reader next week!
We also did lesson one of our Explode the Code workbook. I have that this is a perfect workbook to get him to do during his "nap-work" (homework during nap time).
MathWe had quite a fun week in Math this week1 We finished up our study of geometry by reading a book that was teaching the different shapes using Twizzlers candy! Of course this was a winner for the kids!

We also started our focus on addition and subtraction. Seth loved using his counting bears to complete the worksheets in the math book.

I also set up our restaurant for the kids. You can read more details on it by clicking here to see the post I made yesterday about it (and even print off your own menu and quest checks, and waiter tally sheets if you would like!) This was a big hit and is a fun way to teach addition. Seth was adding 4 numbers together playing this game!!

Books we read for Math this week:The Mission of Addition by Brian P ClearyMission: Addition by Loreen LeedyDealing with Addition by Lynette LongAdding Puppies and Kittens by Patricia J MurphySubtracting Puppies and Kittens by Patricia J MurphyPointy, Long or Round: A book about animal shapes by Patricia M StocklandTwizzlers Shapes and Patterns by Jerry Pallotta
Videos we watched:Math Monsters: The making of Tens
Science For science this week we did days 33-36 of the Teacher's Manual and focused on Rivers. Our focus was mainly through reading books and watching a couple of videos.
Books we read for Science this week:River Day by Jane B MasonWhite Water by Jonathan LondonRiver Friendly, River Wild by Jane KurtzThe Raft by Jim LaMarcheThe Turtle and the Hippopotamus by Kate BanksBig Day on the River by Sarah WilsonThree Days on a river in a red canoe by Vera B WilliamsWhat is a river? by Chris ArvetisDaisy Comes Home by Jan BrettUp River by Frank Asch
Videos we watched:Magic School Bus Wet All OverMagic School Bus Goes Upstream
BibleWe had an exciting week for bible this week!
First - we memorized another Proverbs. Here is Seth reciting Proverbs 12:22. (remember if you are viewing this by email click here to view the video on the blog).

We introduced the timeline this week. I didn't get a good picture of our timeline. I used the string that I had attached to the wall for hanging our projects. I haven't decided if I am going to put the pieces that you are suppose to add to the timeline here or with the Grapevine Studies timeline I have on the other side of the room. Still thinking on that one.

I put Seth, Aaron and Alyssa's birth years on the timeline
Speaking of Grapevine Studies we started that this week! YAY! (sorry...forgot to get pictures). Aaron is participating with us in this :-) and I think both boys are going to enjoy this! I just really think this will make the bible verses so much more interesting than just reading them to the kids!
Another activity that was in the book for this week was to write a letter to a relative (and explaining that the bible is like a letter written by God). Well we were already planning on writing a letter to Mimi this week so that worked out perfect! (So Mimi keep an eye out in your mailbox...it should arrive hopefully tomorrow!)
We also introduced the bible notebook this week :-)
Aaron and AlyssaI already mentioned how Aaron was participating in the Grapevine Studies stick figuring through the bible with us! I am excited that he will be doing this with us (and I think he is excited he gets to do something that Seth is doing!)
Of course Alyssa and Aaron also get to be involved with the restaurant game! They do a very good job being customers for Seth and love ordering their food! :-)

They are still enjoying exploring their busy box at times. Those times are golden! :-)

Alyssa LOVES LOVES LOVES to write on the white board! She drew this "masterpiece" on Monday.

What's funny is that I didn't erase it and Tuesday and Wednesday she didn't even ask if she could draw on the board. Thursday morning though before she woke up (we can sometimes get to the schoolhouse and get something done before she wakes up) I erased the board and even mentioned to Seth that she would probably want to draw again since I erased her work. Sure enough, as soon as she walked in and saw the clean board the first thing she did was ask if she could draw! LOL!
Oh well - I guess at least it kept her busy!
We had a fun day at co-op classes today! Alyssa is sound asleep and the boys are half asleep on the couch watching cartoons! Co-op classes wear us out!!
Until next time,Kellie

Playing Restaurant

2011-10-20T11:53:00.001-05:00

Ok - you will probably get two posts by me today...if I can get the week in review post up tonight...but I wanted to do a separate post to show our restaurant game that I got set up this week for Seth!

Seth has always loved playing restaurant so when I saw in the MFW 1st grade curriculum the idea of setting up a restaurant to practice math skills I jumped all over that one! I took some time to put some effort in this because 1) I know he will LOVE it and 2) I see so many potentials for using this for learning so many skills and 3)Aaron and Alyssa are going to want to do this as well so I see us doing this for quite some time!

NOTE: On all these printables I have listed below, feel free to click on the image to get the full size image to print off and use for yourself if you would like to.

I made menus for our restaurant. Here is what it looks like. I made several copies and laminated each copy.

I then made a couple of waiter tab sheets. I printed these off and laminated them as well. The cool thing about laminating is that you can use a dry erase marker with them and wipe off and re-use over and over. Seth (or anyone acting as the waiter) will make tally marks beside the food items when the customers order.

I then made the customer check tabs. I made a sheet of six of them and then cut them apart and laminated them (once again so that they can be used over and over again with a dry erase marker). I used the Sunshine Cafe logo from the tabs that came with the curriculum. The reason why I made different ones was because I wanted to be able to have Seth add more than two numbers. The ones provided with the curriculum only provided spaces for two numbers to be added. I didn't want our restaurant to be that limited.

Today I introduced the restaurant game to the kids. Alyssa and Aaron were the customers. I acted as the hostess/manager and Seth was the waiter in training.

I welcomed Alyssa and Aaron to the cafe and seated them and gave them their menus. Then Seth came and took their order.

I got a cute video of Alyssa giving her order. (Remember if you are viewing this post by email click here to go view it online)

He then brought them their food (we used our foam animal shapes today...LOL!)

And then he had to fill out the guest checks to figure out how much they owe (where the "school" part comes in - LOL! He still loved it!!)

First he had to label two checks - one for Alyssa and one for Aaron. He then had to write the prices for each of their items on their check. I had him use his cube counters to add up the total. He made a group of cubes for each number and then added the groups together to get his total! (WOW - he was adding more than two numbers together today!!).

That is as far as we took it today! I have a whole bunch of play money ready to go for when we start focusing on counting money. I will be able to have the customers give him money and then have him figure out the change they need!

Then we we start focusing on telling time I am going to put a play clock on the wall and I am going to add to the menu what times of the day certain items are available. I will set the time on the clock before we welcome in the guests and he will have to determine if what they are ordering is available at that time!

Oh this is going to be so much fun!!!

In the next couple of weeks I will get everything set up for our store as well :-) and Seth will learn how to be a cashier LOL! (Or he can be the kid sent to the store with a list from Mom and money and have to figure out if he has enough money). Oh there are so many ideas in my head! LOL!! But what a FUN FUN FUN way to learn! Don't you agree?!?!

Until next time,
Kellie

Making Reading Fun

2011-10-19T13:22:00.000-05:00

We are about waist deep in phonics rules right now! Our English language has so many rules! Seth has been feeling a bit bogged down with them as well lately so I have been doing my best to do what I can to make it fun!

I found on Pinterest how you can make a magic wand e! Seth loves this thing. I forgot to get a picture of ours so here is the picture from Pinterest. But you can put up a word that has a short vowel such as mad and then put the magic wand e at the end - the e doesn't say anything but it does magic on the vowel and makes it say it's name!

I have also started telling stories about the letters to help him remember the rules. We started this with the rule of when you have a w before or the or make the /er/ sound. I started off the story telling him how or was walking along having a grand ol day and very comfortable in their /or/ sound until one day the w met up with them. W was such a funny looking letter and they were so caught up in how funny looking w was that they forgot their sound and started making the /er/ sound. W confused them for some reason.

Today we did the igh sound. So the story of these letters was that gh was walking along having a happy day when i decided to join them!! They were so scared of i they couldn't say anything! Because of the fact that they wouldn't say anything i had no choice but to say his name!

As I have been telling the stories I have been drawing out the stories on the board with the letters and Seth has been loving them! I think it is helping the rules to stick too! (in fact I am thinking about going back and making up stories for some of the others to see if that will help with those as well!)

Pinterest does have a lot of poems and games for some of the rules as well to help! (told you I was addicted to Pinterest - LOL!) But I am just trying to do my best to keep Seth interested!

I do have to add this in though - he is still loving the pathways workbook (and I really do love their approach to reading...Seth doesn't feel near as bogged down with that curriculum - I hope it stays that way - we have only just begun). He has also started book 1 of Explode the Code and he is liking that approach as well! My thinking is that the MFW curriculum will do a good job of introducing these rules but the Pathways and Explode the Code will help cement them into his brain. :-)

1st Grade is quite a challenge! (I should be a pro by the time I do it with Alyssa - LOL!!!)

Until next time,

Kellie

Monster Bookmarks!!

2011-10-18T11:48:00.000-05:00

Have you discovered Pinterest yet?? OMG! There are so so many ideas on there for anything and everything! There are a LOT of good homeschool ideas on there...like the monster bookmarks that we made today! We introduced the bible reader with the MFW curriculum today so I thought this would be a cute craft to do for this special day! I loved how they turned out!

Seth's monster was the dotted one with blue eyes, Aaron's was striped with brown eyes.

Marking our page in our new book :-)

MFW 1st Grade - Week 9 in Review

2011-10-13T20:23:00.001-05:00

It's hard to believe this school week has already come to a close. Even with me struggling with allergies to the point that I had to go get a cortizone shot on Monday, the week still flew by! (And thankfully we didn't lose any school days due to my sickness...I just kept plowing through! Of course it helps when the kids are so excited about school.)

We are getting into a really good routine. Seth has learned that when we get in the classroom he is to get his daily folder out and work on it. In that folder I have his number of the day sheet, calendar page, place value chart, weather graph, tally mark sheet, and measuring page (he is drawing lines that the length of the number of the day in cm). He has really in the past week or two gotten very independent with this folder, which is what I was trying to accomplish!

Reading

We did days 32-36 of the TM this week (omitting day 35 since there was no assigned reading that day). The rules are getting a bit harder for Seth to grasp but he is really doing a good job though. On the review the next day he doesn't have a problem and when there are words put in his reading lists from past rules he remembers most of them. But this week we did the /or/, when /ir/, /er/ and /ur/ make the /er/ sound, the /aw/ sound spelled aw and a, and the short u sound spelled a, e, i, o and u. I think Seth has decided that the vowels are just mean because they try to be so tricky to him. (I think I have to agree - LOL!)

I have added another thing to our curriculum that I think will help him grasp these rules and that is the "Explode the Code" workbooks! I ordered book 1 and it came in this week! We did the beginning consonants pre-test this week, which he passed with flying colors.

I am excited that next week Seth will be introduced to his MFW bible reader and will start his readings in that book! YAY! :-)

We also made great progress in our Before We Read workbook for the pathway readers. we did pages 16-39 this week!! He is loving this workbook and does not complain AT ALL about doing any of it! This week he learned to read the names of the eight basic colors (red, blue, green, yellow, black, brown, purple, orange) and he has got them down! He gets excited when we come to another worksheet to review them (just a few short months ago I couldn't get him to color for nothing!)

Today we got to the page where they introduced Rachel, the little girl in the family that he will be reading about in the readers. I had to tell a short story about her and then have him answer questions. He got all the questions right and really seemed to enjoy the story! YAY! He is getting very excited about starting the book about this family!

I think I mentioned before about taking the knock-off version of a Jenga game and adding words to the blocks for a reading game. I introduced that game to Seth this week! I showed him a word on each block and for each one he got right he got to use that block in the game. When we finished reading the words we played the game (Aaron played with us). They had a lot of fun with this! We played it two days this week!

our tall tower - right before it fell!

Math

We did days 28-31 this week. To be honest I didn't spend much time on math this week. Seth has always been really good at knowing his shapes and sizes. He even did his worksheets out of the Math book as part of his homework a few days and had no problem at all completing them. We did, though, read a lot of books on shapes and sizes this week. This not only helped cement the concepts for Seth, but also helped Alyssa and Aaron with them as well.

Books we read on shapes and sizes:

The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns

Tinka by Rainy Dohaney

The Wing on a flea: a book about shapes by Ed Emberley

Two Greedy Bears by Mirra Ginsburg

The Littlest Dinosaur's Big Adventure by Michael Foreman

My Very Own Book of Sizes by Guy Smalley

Circus Shapes by Stuart J Murphy

What is Shape? by Tea Benduhn

Color Zoo by Lois Ehlert

Learning About Sizes by Tina Thoburn

We also watched a Math Monsters video on geometry.

Science

This week we focused on our Thunder and Lightening theme. Other than reading the pages in our Things Outdoors book, we read a lot of books on storms and thunder and lightening, and watched some videos as well. And God helped us out this week by bringing us a good rainy, stormy day! Seeing that we have been in a HORRIBLE drought lately, we welcomed the storms with open arms and enjoyed every second of them!! :-)

Beautiful grey clouds during a break in the rain!!

Books we read on thunder and lightening:

Why Does It thunder and lightening? by Chris Arvetis

Are you ready to play outside? by Mo Willems

The Monster Storm by Jeanne Willis

Thunder-Boomer! by Shutta Crum

The Berenstain Bears count their blessings by Stan Berenstain

One Dark Night by J.J. Hutchins

Videos we watched:

Magic School Bus Kicks Up A Storm

Peep and The Big Wide World: Stormy Weather

Bible

Seth memorized Proverbs 12:18 this week and we talked about healing words vs hurting words. Here is the video of him saying his proverbs. He had trouble all week remembering the word piercings.

(If you are viewing this post via email click here to go view it on the blog).

I showed him the page of the greek alphabet and agreed to try to copy a few of the letters, but wasn't interested in doing the whole page, and I didn't push. I also showed him the Genesis 1:1 verse written in Hebrew. He thought this was pretty cool and had fun decorating it with trees and flowers and grass. (I forgot to get a picture of it).

I am super excited to start our Grapevine Studies next week as we begin our Old Testament studies!

This week instead of doing copy work of our Proverbs we wrote a letter to our missionary family that we are praying for. (remember last week I mentioned that they have a boy the exact same age as Seth). Seth told me what he wanted to tell his missionary friend and I wrote it on the board and he copied it onto his paper. He was much more willing to write this letter than he is writing his proverbs. He did a very very good job with it too! We got a small toy to send with the letter today and got the letter in the mail. (We realized though that we are not going to be able to send a toy every time because the shipping cost was quite pricy...oh well...we did find out that sending just a letter sized envelope is not! Seth said he could just draw him pictures :-) ) It is neat to see him so excited about writing his friend!

Aaron and Alyssa

Aaron had fun doing pages from a boy's busy book that his Granny had gotten him. It is a book that has lots of stickers, and stencils and coloring pages. He enjoyed doing these this week while Seth worked on his reading lessons :-) He loves stickers so much! I am going to have to try to find some inexpensive stickers. I seriously think I could stick a page of stickers and a white sheet of paper in front of him and he would have fun and be content with that for quite some time! (same things for going cutting paper)

I am, of course, still trying to figure out Alyssa. (I swear I will be writing this statement every week - UGH!) This week was kind of a tough week. She was in a destructive mood and really didn't want to do anything that I would like her to do. No, she was just trying to destroy the school house! UGH! I did get her to watch her show on the computer one day. Man, that was a nice day!

We did enjoy some puzzle time this week!!

she played puzzles for maybe 5 minutes!

It was all in all a good week!! :-)

We are headed to see Mimi and Poppy this weekend!

Until next time,

Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Week 8 in Review

2011-10-06T13:55:00.000-05:00

Wow! Another week has FLOWN by!! Where does time go?? We only had school for three days this week due to the fact that Aaron had two different dr appointments on Tuesday! Tuesday just ended up being a run day! I went ahead and did my grocery shopping and errands while we were already out so that we only lost one day of school!

Reading

We did days 28-31 of the Teacher's Manual for reading this week. We skipped the Day 30 Exploration day for reading since there wasn't any assigned reading on that day. So this week we focused on learning the /th/, /oo/ (as in book), and /ar/ sounds. Seth is seeming to get bored with the same drill of reading the words on the page every day. So today when we were working on the /ar/ sound I just wrote the words on the board and had him read them off the board. That really seemed to help.

I have heard a lot about the Pathway Readers by Rod and Staff publications! I have a good friend who uses them and loves them! I was able to get a close look at them a couple of weeks ago and decided that this would be really good for Seth. I went ahead and ordered the first books. We started on the first workbook "Before We Read" this week and Seth is loving it!!! It is so very simple but yet it is keeping his attention and is actually enjoyable for him! We are still doing the MFW reading... but starting in 2nd grade of MFW there is no reading curriculum, and they give suggestions for curriculum to supplement with, but they don't have any recommendations for continued phonics... that is a bit unsettling with me. I believe Seth needs at least another year of phonics, if not a couple of more years. This Pathways curriculum does that! And the good thing about it is that, no matter what I decide for next year, I know I have my reading curriculum decided on :-). (Yes I do believe it is that good that I can go ahead and say it will be our reading curriculum next year...it is impressing me that much! And to top it off - IT IS CHEAP!!!!)

Anyways, I know I probably give too may details, LOL!, but we completed the first 15 pages of the Before We Read workbook this week!

Math

We did days 25-27 of math this week, finishing our concept of numbers and counting. This was an easy week for math for us. We mainly did all of our math through reading this week :-) And I have to say, again, Aaron and Alyssa have really strengthened their counting skills by listening to the stories as well! Aaron impressed his Granny and PaPa last night by counting to 20! :-)

Books We Read for Math this week:

Skip Count by 10, Let's Do It Again by Tracy Kompelein

Skip Count by 5, It's No Jive by Tracy Kompelein

Skip Count by 2, Now Can You? by Tracy Kompelein

1,2.3, It's Easy For Me by Tracy Kompelein

Too Many Balloons by Catherine Matthias

Buzzing Bees: Discovering Odd Numbers by Amanda Doering Tourville

Click, Clack, Splish Splash: A Counting Adventure by Doreen Cronin

Science

This week we did days 25 through 27 of the Teacher's Manual. We finished our study on rain, and started talking about thunder and lightening. I have to admit - we did not make it to doing our experiment on making rain...just didn't work out this week. We did enjoy reading books on the subject though.

Books we read this week for Science:

It is Stormy by Kelly Doudna

It is Raining by Kelly Doudna

Rumble, Boom!: A book about Thunderstorms by Rick Thomas

Why Does It Rain? by Fran Harvey

I Love The Rain by Margaret Park Bridges

Raindrop, Plop! by Wendy Cheyette Lewison

Franklin and the Thunderstorm by Paulette Bourgeois

Smudge by Julie Sykes

Bible

Seth memorized yet another Proverbs this week. He memorized Proverbs 29:11. Here is the video. You will need to turn your speakers up because he is soft spoken in the video today. (as always if you are receiving this through email you will need to go to the blog to view the video. Click here to do so).

We also learned how to draw a map of the bible lands this week using the silly little poem in the teacher's manual. Seth caught on to this really quick and did very well drawing his map.

The Teacher's Manual mentioned making a large map to put up in the room to refer to when we start doing our Old Testament study in a couple of weeks. Well, I tried but I kept being unhappy with my drawing and the placement of the countries and places when looking at other maps that I decided to just find some good maps online that I could print and use. Next week when we revisit our map again and to learn the bodies of the water I will outline around my printed off map with the lines that Seth can make to make his map . but I feel that the printed map with all of the places already labeled will be MUCH easier to use in the Old Testament lessons!

Here is a picture of my nicely printed maps - on the wall, ready to go! (I found a map of the whole area, and then a close up of Israel showing Jerusalem, Bethlehem, etc...

We are just within a couple of weeks of starting the Old Testament Study! I am so very excited!! The reason why I am so very excited is because we are going to be using the Grapevine Studies Stick figuring through the bible! It goes along with the MFW lessons so well and I think Seth will really enjoy these and it will help him to learn the stories and put a really fun spin on it!!

The friend of mine that introduced it to me has already completed the Old Testament Overview with her kids so she is letting us borrow her timeline that she made of the old testament. I got that put in our room this week! It hangs over the top of our whiteboard a bit, but, thankfully our board is big enough to handle it :-).

When we do the timeline with MFW we will just clip those pictures along this other timeline where they fit in. I think it will work so nicely together and I am so very excited about this!

Here is a couple of pictures of the timeline up on our wall.

trying to show how it stretches across the whole long wall, and turns to go a bit as well. The picture really didn't come out well.. oh well...

Another thing that I want to mention in the bible section this week is the fact that we have a missionary family that we are praying for as part of our homeschool. Our church supports over 100 missionaries from all over the world. Every year families choose a missionary family to pray for for the next year. We just had our service where we did that a few weeks ago. I chose a missionary family to personally pray for and I also chose a family for the kids to pray for as part of school. The family I chose was the Picketts, who are missionaries to England. This family is quite special to us. Daniel and I really liked them when they came to the church while on deputation almost 10 years ago and have kept up with them since then. Then they had a son on the exact same day that Seth was born! Then last year they were back at our church while on furlough and Seth got to meet their son and they really hit it off!! In fact, Seth asks about him all the time! So with that history I thought they were the perfect family for Seth to be praying for this year! Seth is also going to become pen pals with their son!! I have gotten their address and we will be working on our first letter and package to him next week!

I put up a poster with a picture of the family, a world map so he could see how far they were from us, and a close up map of the United Kingdom. Here is a picture of that poster (I have blocked out their address on the poster for this blog).

Aaron and Alyssa

A couple of weeks ago in co-op classes Aaron's Around the World class learned about Australia. They got to do some dot painting, like what is done in Australia. Aaron really took to this and did an excellent job on his picture!! He has been talking about doing it ever since. So this week he got to show Seth and Alyssa how to dot paint. Here is a video of him explaining dot painting. I figured that we always have a video of Seth, we need one of Aaron too. (remember to click here if you are viewing from email to view the video on the blog)

Alyssa wanted to draw on the white board again today. I gave her a marker and man did she go to town!! Look at this piece of art!!

Aaron is taking more and more interest in school! He is really trying hard at his counting and his letters and is enjoying doing workbooks with Seth! It's neat watching him take interest. :-) Here are the kids watching Leap Frog's Letter Factory! It just seems like yesterday that Seth was watching this! After just a few times watching it Seth knew all his basic letter sounds! I am hoping Aaron catches on as quick as well (which I really have no doubt he will!)

We have another fun filled day of co-op classes that we are looking forward to tomorrow!

Well that's all for this week! For a shorter week of school, this really turned out to be a quite lengthy review! LOL!! There are just some exciting things happening! And it just thrills my heart that the kids ask almost every night "is tomorrow a school day?" and when I say "YES!" they start jumping up and down getting so excited!! It just THRILLS my heart!!

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!! See you next week!

Kellie

The Schoolhouse - Rearranged AGAIN!

2011-10-03T10:43:00.002-05:00

I have once again rearranged my school room - LOL!!! But seriously, I LOVE this new set up!!! It gives us even more space for our reading corner, and makes my desk more functional for me!! YAY!! It has taken a lot to figure out the best use of my space, but I believe I have come a LONG way with this new set up!!

Here are pics for your viewing pleasure :-)

As you can see I have moved my desk to the back corner (this is the back wall where the bookcases used to be). That way I can be at my desk with my planner and teacher's manual as I am teaching Seth. I was having a problem trying to figure out where to put my stuff during our teaching session. I don't know why I didn't think of this sooner!

Here is the other side of the back wall. You can see that bookcase has been moved as well. I put a white board there in case we need one during time in the bean bags. You can also see that the monitor is mounted on the way (below the kangaroo) so kids can enjoy videos while sitting on their bean bags. I also have a wireless mouse and keyboard so I can show them powerpoints and other things on the computer from this story corner!

Here are the kids enjoying watching Leap Frogs' 'The Letter Factory' while sitting comfortably on their bean bags! LOVE IT!!!

The bookcases were moved to where the desk used to be! Can you see from these pics how much of a better use of space this is??

I was able to get this accomplished on Saturday and we have LOVED our first day of school with this new set up! YAY!!

Until next time,

Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Week 7 in Review

2011-09-29T20:08:00.001-05:00

Week 7 is in the books!! Whoo Hoo!! As I am typing this post we are sitting out at our campsite :-) We have decided to have a nice relaxing weekend in the RV! It has been so long since we have been able to take the RV out due to this HOT summer we had!! It is nice to get in the outdoors (even though the days are still pretty warm, at least the nights are cooling down). And to make it even more fun we have some friends that are joining us with their RV tomorrow morning!! :-) I believe lots of memories will be made this weekend!

We only had 3 days of school this week due to the fact that Aaron had a speech therapy evaluation on Monday! But Seth was able to have a little bit of "school" at a friend's house while Aaron and I were at the evaluation. He just about memorized his new proverbs there and worked on some phonics and got to play with a pocket chart having fun with word families. Thank you Mrs. Angela for being the "substitute" teacher that day for us! (oh and Alyssa enjoyed being spoiled by their family that day as well - LOL!)

We did Days 24 - 27 of the Teacher's Manual this week for reading. (we skipped the day 25 exploration day since it doesn't involve reading). We continued our work on long vowels and today worked on the sound /oo/ as in spoon. Seth was so funny with this one. He kept trying to add the /n/ sound at the end of it. He was so cute. I figure I had him say /oo/ 50 times or more - LOL! But he started getting it at the end.

MathWe did days 22 through 24 of the math grid this week. We continued our work on learning numbers. As I shared a couple of days ago Seth learned about the alligator that likes to eat bigger numbers (greater than/less than signs)

Books we read this week for Math:
Prairie Dogs Perching: Counting by 3s by Amanda Doering Tourville
Sunning Sea Lions: Discovering Even Numbers by Amanda Doering Tourville
Hiding Hippos: Counting from 1 to 10 by Amanda Doering Tourville
Look Who's Counting by Suse MacDonald
How High Can A Dinosaur Count by Valorie Fisher
Counting by Sar Pistoia
Underwater Counting by Jerry Pallotta

Science
We did days 22 through 24 of the teacher's manual this week for science, which means we finished our study on trees and started our study on rain. Of course it would be a lot funner to study rain if we could actually experience some rain. Here in Texas were we live we are under a very bad drought right now (in fact the lake we are camping at this weekend is quite low! There are large beach areas that are usually not there). But I guess I can show them how things in the state they are in outside right now are a result of no rain and how the ground and the trees and the animals need rain to survive.

I am looking forward to our experiments next week. We are going study evaporation by watching how water disappears from a bowl (shouldn't take too many days to dry up that bowl - LOL!) and we are going to create rain! (oh how I wish we could maginfy the amount we are going to create and actually produce a good rainfall outside! Oh well - I guess creating a little bit in the kitchen from a jar will have to be good enough).

Books we read this week
The Busy Tree by Jennifer Ward
One Rainy Day by Christina Butler (VERY CUTE book!!)
When Rain Falls by Melissa Stewart

Bible
We memorized Proverbs 16:24. Here is the video of Seth saying his Proverbs. (remember if you are viewing this from email you will have to go to the blog to see the video)

We also didn't get to our activity of making a bible costume today since we wanted to get things packed up for camping... I am hoping to work that in to next week sometime. I have planned my lessons for next week - that will be the week where Seth (and Mommy) learn how to make a map of the Bible lands map! That should be very interesting! I am going to have to get creative though on the day that we are suppose to be looking at a globe and a flat map...because I haven't gotten our globe yet...

Aaron and Alyssa

As mentioned, Aaron had a speech therapy evaluation on Monday and is being recommended for speech therapy. We are playing the waiting game right now waiting to see if insurance will cover it with this facility that we had the evaluation at. In the meantime I have been given good information to start working with him at home. I have found several websites that have a lot of good printables, games, etc for us to do. And I have found some good ipad apps (which works well since Aaron LOVES the ipad). I mentioned the Tiga Talk app the other day in this post if you want to read more information on that.

Aaron and Alyssa have finally shown interest in my "busy box" that I made up for them! I am so excited and hope that the activities will hold their attention while I try to work with Seth.

I didn't do a very good job getting pictures this week! I am hoping to have some more schoolroom pics to show next week :-) I have figured out yet another way to rearrange my room to give us more space and have better use of the space we have! Hubby has agreed to getting in there with me on Sunday afternoon to help me move things around! I am so excited!!! It will make a BIG change, but will solve a lot of the headache I have been having with the room set up :-)!! I can't wait to share pics with yall!!

But for now I am going to go back to relaxing with my family!

Until next time,
Kellie

This and That

2011-09-28T11:08:00.000-05:00

Here's another "this and that" post of different things going on in school this week!

Seth's Math -
Seth is learning the greater and less signs this week. I took an idea that I saw on pinterest (yes, I'm addicted) to teach this concept to him. I had him envision the signs being an alligator's mouth and that the alligator always wants more so his mouth is always open to the bigger number. I think it really worked because he nailed all the problems on his worksheet after this explanation! :-)

Aaron and Alyssa have decided that they want to now explore the box of busy items I have made for them. They had fun today exploring through that box. :-) Hopefully this curiousity will stick and they will continue to want to play with these because it does keep them busy so I can concentrate on Seth's lesson.

I will be honest - Alyssa has been a holy terror this week!! She has been fussy and cries whens she doesn't get her way! Sometimes I just don't know what I am going to do with that girl. But I know I need to just take deep breaths and realize she is still so young. I need to pray for more patience!! My oh my! Her screams are just so loud!!

Aaron had a speech therapy evaluation on Monday and is being recommended for speech therapy. We are in the waiting process now - waiting to see if insurance will cover the therapy. In the mean time I am starting him on some speech exercises during school time.

I wanted to share an awesome ipad app we have discovered!! We started playing it today and I love it, and more importantly - he LOVES it.

It is called Tiga Talk. The iTunes store describes it as "Tiga Talk Speech Therapy Games, developed with licensed speech and language pathologists, is a fun way for children to develop speech sounds through playful voice-controlled games that can improve speech clarity, articulation, and instill confidence"

It goes through each of the sounds and teaches the child the correct way to pronounce the sound and then has them say the sound...if the microphone does not pick up the correct pronunciation it will continue to work with the child until it does. After the kid says the sound correctly it will let them play a game where they have to use the sound correctly over and over again to win the game (like using the p sound to pop all the balloons). There are different levels and the higher levels even have sound blends.

Not only is this helping Aaron say his sounds correctly, it is also helping him in getting his voice out (which is another area we are working on with him) because he has to say the sounds loud enough for the microphone to pick up!

I am THRILLED to have found this app and really think it will help Aaron alot! I have also found some other apps, along with some printable games and stuff that we will be using! And hopefully the insurance will be approved, and it won't take very long to do so! :-) I would much rather work with this group instead of going through our public school system that we are zoned for.

Until next time,
Kellie

The Reading Corner - officially set up!! LOL!!

2011-09-27T10:59:00.000-05:00

Ok, so you have read in other posts that I have been trying to make a reading corner, remember? I am really wanting reading time to be a big focus on our school time and have wanted to have a special place for us to have this reading time.

Well... I have finally accomplished that!! YOOHOO!!!! :-)

This weekend we were having a "family date day" (having fun out as a whole family) and we were at Target and guess what they had?!?! BEAN BAGS!!!!!!! YAY!!!!!! I was so excited!!!

The bean bags, of course, are huge, which makes for very comfortable seating for the kids, but they do take up a lot of room...and we have a rather small schoolhouse.

So I did some rearranging today and I am super happy with my results. Would you like to see?? You know I of course took pictures! So take a view of our new room :-)!!!!

I got the kids each a bean bag and then you can see my "box" in the corner... it is a cushioned ottoman - the top comes off to store our blankets. It is actually very comfy to sit on too.

I moved the craft table over by the door. I had two 3-drawer filing cabinets sitting beside one another. I decided to stack on on the other to give us more room (and thankfully it does not make them too tall to reach either :-) )

This picture shows you where the craft tabe is in relation to the desks (they were kind of out of place during this picture...Alyssa likes to move them around)

Here is a view from the door - LOOK how much floor space we gained!! YAY!! And if we are doing an activity that we need more floor space the bean bags can be stacked in the corner and the desks can be pushed up against the wall where the white board is and we have almost the entire floor of the school house free!! YAY!!

I guess it's pretty evident how excited I am about this rearrangement of things!! I don't know if you noticed the pocket chart on the wall in the story corner...but we will be able to do pocket chart activities while we sit on our bean bags as well! Fun! Fun!!

The kids are super excited about this too :-)

Until next time,

Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Week 6 in Review

2011-09-22T15:20:00.001-05:00

WOW!! It is hard to believe that we have just finished our 6th week of school!! OMG!! We have had 20 days of school (LOL that number doesn't seem as high...but it is due to the fact that we only school 4 days a week...)!!
We are LOVING the MFW 1st Grade Curriculum still!! And it has been so neat this week to see Seth's reading clicking like it has been!! This week has been a good week to remind me what homeschooling is all about!! I love being right there when that light bulb goes off in his head and he reads a word! I feel so privileged to be able to experience this with him, something that a lot of moms are not able to do. Thank you God for giving me the opportunity to be able to do so!
Reading

We did days 19 through 23 in the teacher's manual. One of the things that I love is how I can change up the lesson plans as needed. We went ahead and did a reading lesson on our exploration day this week because we are not going to be able to do school on Monday due to Aaron's speech therapy evaluation. But I don't think Seth really minded that much because he is enjoying his reading lessons right now. Our main focus on reading this week was the silent e and how it makes the other vowels say their name. Seth also finished his animal tales book that he made writing the sentences from each day and drawing his pictures to go along with it! He is very proud of his book and can't wait to show it to Daddy.

Seth has earned $1.00 in his book fund!! We are working real hard to see how much money he can earn before our trip to a BIG bookstore in a couple of weeks!! :-)
MathWe got through days 18-21 of Math this week! We continued our focus on numbers and counting and worked on learning how to count by 2, 5 and 10!
Books we read this week for Math:Penguin Pairs: Counting by Two's by Amanda Doring TourvilleArtic Fives Arrive by Elinor J PincezesThe Big Storm: A Very Soggy Counting Book by Nancy TafuriLyle Walks the Dogs by Bernard WaberCat Count by Betsy LewinPie for Piglets: Counting by Two's by Michael Dahl
I have to note about the books - the good thing about reading literature to help with our math concepts is the fact that it gets Aaron and Alyssa involved. They loved the reading of these books and loved helping me count in the books. Through just reading those story books, their counting skills have improved :-)
ScienceWe did days 18-21 of the Teachers Manual for science this week. Our focus this week was trees. Exploration day was especially fun this week as we made bark rubbings and climbed trees. You can read more detail about it here.

On exploration day we also watched the Reading Rainbow episode "Once There Was A Tree". (I want to give another shout out to my awesome Mom for supplying us with these video resources!! Thanks MiMi!!! We love you!!)
Books we read this week on the subject of trees:Curious George Plants A Tree by Margaret & H.A. ReyThe Giving Tree by Shel SilversteinLittle Bear and the Wishing Tree by Norbert Landa and Simon MendezThe Man Who Lived in a Hollow Tree by Anne Shelby & Core HazelaarA Tree for Emmy by Mary Ann Rodman BibleWe memorized Proverbs 21:23. Here is the video of Seth saying his Proverbs. (remember if you are viewing this from email you will have to go to the blog to see the video)

We also talked about the books of the bible and talked about the different authors of the bible, and how God is the true author. Seth doesn't believe that he will be able to memorize the books of the bible later in this year. I can't wait to see his face when he does :-)
Aaron and AlyssaWell we found something to keep Alyssa busy while we are doing reading lessons - PLAY-DOH!! (at least that is what worked this week...hopefully it will next week too LOL!!)
Aaron was my hard one this week. Aaron would get very upset when I would not let him do what HE wanted to do when HE wanted to do it because it would be distracting to Seth trying to do his reading! Aaron ended up a couple of times standing outside the schoolroom because crying fits are not allowed in the school room. By the end of the week though he was being more compliant when he realized that he is not always able to get his way.
At least, so far, Aaron and Alyssa are not being super difficult at the same time LOL! Lord help us all when that happens!
:-( And on a sad note, after school this morning the kids were playing outside and Alyssa encountered her first cactus and decided to grab it with both hands!! I don't know if I have ever heard her scream that bad!But after drying glue all over her hands and peeling it off and then using duct tape I think we got all the quills.

All better Mommy!
We have co-op classes again tomorrow and the kids are super excited about that! Then we are looking forward to a spending a fun weekend with Daddy - just enjoying some family time! :-)
I hope you all have a good weekend as well!
Until next time,Kellie

Exploration Day!!

2011-09-21T11:02:00.001-05:00

Today was exploration day again! The kids get super excited about these days because it is less "work" and more "fun"!

The boys enjoyed their pattern blocks again! Alyssa actually enjoyed putting the colored counting bears in their matching color cup! YAY! And she did a good job at it too! :-)

Since our science focus for this exploration day was trees we had some fun with the trees in our yard. First off we made bark rubbings on one of the trees.

And then I gave the instructions for the kids to just have fun exploring the trees!!

Of course Seth decided that meant climbing the trees :-)

Daddy - Seth wanted me to take this picture to show you :-)

Aaron told me he was not a good climber so we found a tree with a very low limb for him to climb.

Alyssa just wanted to touch a tree...that's all :-)

(and yes I know...they are in their pjs today... I told them we could have a pj morning because we are going to be getting baths before lunch today due to a busy afternoon of dental appts for me and Seth...and I like to have them nice and clean for church on Wednesday nights... so what's the point of getting dressed before baths... of course Aaron was ECSTATIC to be able to stay in his jammies! LOL!!)

And the weather was pretty enough that I just opened the doors of the school house so that I could get some work done while they enjoyed playing outside :-)

Oh - and I have to add this. We went ahead and did a reading lesson today (even though the curriculum tells you not to on exploration day) because we are not going to be able to have school on Monday due to Aaron's speech therapy evaluation. I did not want us to get too behind, especially since we usually only school 4 days a week.

Our reading lesson today was o_e and oe. One of the words that Seth had to read was home. When he sounded it out and it clicked what the word was he said "home...as in Home Depot! My favorite place in the whole wide world". LOL! That's my Seth! (I just don't know why, of all places, that is his favorite...I guess it's because it's his Daddy's favorite!!)

Until next time,
Kellie

This and That

2011-09-20T10:23:00.000-05:00

As everyone knows I am still trying to figure out what to do with Aaron and Alyssa during school time. Well play-doh has seemed to work the past couple of days. Both of them have enjoyed playing play-doh during Seth's reading time! It would be nice if this trend would keep up :-)

See the stack of blankets and pillows in the background?? I really wish our school house was just a wee bit bigger for a nice story corner...it would look so much better. I am hoping to at least be able to get some bean bags or something for Christmas. I know there has to be a good solution for a good story corner...I just haven't thought of it yet :-)

See Seth in the background concentrating hard on his workbook?!? Thank you Aaron and Alyssa for being so good and letting him concentrate! :-)

Seth is doing really really well with his reading!!! It is really starting to click with him and I am so excited!! I came up with my own reading "game" to give more practice. I have been putting all the words from the workbook on flashcards. Well we started a "book fund" - for each word he read correctly he earned a penny towards his book fund! In a few weeks he is hoping to have enough money to go buy a Star Wars book :-)

After we do all of the scheduled school stuff (reading, math, bible, science, art, reading corner) all three kids can choose activities that they want to do independently, like puzzles or ipad games, play-doh, etc..., while I get everything prepped for the next day, or work on a blog post for our blog (like I'm doing right now), etc... We probably spend another hour after our "school" time in independent activities. The kids love being in the school room :-) and this allows me to get everything that needs to be done for school done while we are are still out there so once we get back in the house I can concentrate on house chores and other stuff.

Today Alyssa wanted to help me. So I plugged in computer cool school for her while I was on the laptop. I really think she thinks she was helping! I think her "writing" in the picture below was what she wanted to do tomorrow (I just wish I could read her writing LOL).

It really makes me feel good when the kids wake up excited about a day of school! I guess I must be doing something right! :-)

Until next time,

Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Week 5 In Review

2011-09-15T17:10:00.001-05:00

We had a fun week this week! We are continuing to love our curriculum!
ReadingThis week we did days 15 through 18 in the teacher's manual. We continued our focus short vowel sounds with looking specifically at o and u, and then on Thursday started with long vowel a, learning the rule "Silent e makes the other vowel say it's name". After we finished the lines on the workbook page he seemed to be still struggling with the concept so we tried one of the games suggested in the back of the book. I put all the words for the day on the white board and gave Seth the eraser. I told him he could erase the word when he got it right. After doing a few that way he really started grasping the concept! And I LOVED watching the light bulb come on in his head as he started "getting it" (one of the greatest joys of homeschooling!!)

I guess propping a foot on the wall helps him concentrate - LOL!

Seth is also continuing to read short books during our story corner time! He is doing really well with his reading. I am very proud of him.
MathThis week we did days 14 through 17 in the teacher's manual, continuing our focus on numbers and counting. Seth is very good at recognizing his numbers and can easily count to 100 so this was pretty much just a review for him. But he still enjoyed doing the worksheets in his math book.
Books we read on this concept:How Many Kisses Do You Want Tonight by Varsha BajajTally Cat Keeps Track by Trudy Harris
Some of you may remember my post a few weeks back about the pattern blocks and how I hadn't purchased the pattern block book. I just used templates from online but they were way too easy for Seth. Well, I ultimately decided to go ahead and purchase the pattern block book and I am so glad I did!! During our exploration day this week we did a couple of templates from that book and it was a lot more challenging for Seth! He enjoyed trying to figure it out though!! Yay! We didn't do any of the worksheets that day though, just had fun working with the templates.

And Aaron enjoyed doing the simple templates that I had found online!! YAY!! So I didn't waste paper printing those out LOL! I was really pleased at how well he did with them and he had fun working with them too. (I think it helped him to feel "big" like his brother).

ScienceWe did days 14 through 17 in the teacher's manual this week, focusing on seeds and how they grow! On Exploration day we did the experiment suggested the book. The night before I soaked some beans (decided that this was a good time to go ahead and soak some beans for supper the next night as well!! YUM!) On exploration day we examined a few of the beans and studied their different parts. We then put the rest and wrapped them in very wet paper towels and foil. We are pulling out a couple each day to observe how they are changing.
We are recording the changes in our science journal.

Books we read this week on this topic:Mouse and Mole and the Year Round Garden by Doug CushmanHow A Seed Grows by Helene J JordanMax's Magic Seeds by Jean-Pierce CorderochRose: A Flower's Story by Joanne Randolph

BibleSeth learned another proverbs this week. Here is the video of him reciting Proverbs 23:12.(Remember if you are viewing this from email you will have to go the blog to see the video...it won't show up in the email)

He told me the other day one of his favorite things about school is learning his proverbs :-) I am so glad he is enjoying this! He gets excited about being able to recite them to Daddy during supper every night! :-)
Aaron And Alyssa
Of course I am still trying to figure out what to do with Aaron and Alyssa during school time... I have a feeling this will be a common theme all year!
Aaron did learn how to make the letter A this week, on his own. (If I would have asked him to do this he would have refused...he's just that way - he is going to do things his way on his time). Anyways, here is a picture of his A he put on the white board.

Alyssa enjoys writing on the white board but you have to keep a very close watch on her to make sure she doesn't try to take the marker to another part of the room to "draw". That little stink!!

We are going tomorrow to our first field trip with our homeschool co-op group! We are going to tour a fire station and then going to the park for lunch and play time! And then we have to go grocery shopping and get things ready for MIMI to come see us for the weekend!!! :-)
See yall next week!Kellie

Seth has homework!!

2011-09-14T13:41:00.000-05:00

We started something new this week that I think is going to work out really well for us! Seth has started having "homework"... or I guess for us it would probably be more appropriate to say "nap-work" LOL!

I have additional workbooks and resources (a lot that have come from my mom, a veteran public school teacher) to help Seth further grasp his phonics and reading concepts. I have been having trouble figuring out how to incorporate them into our school time in the mornings.

I am also having trouble with Seth doing work independently... he wants me to be right there to let him know if he has the right answer or not before he puts anything on his paper (because he hates to have wrong answers).

So I figured out a way to kill these two birds with one stone - homework!! I am saving some of the worksheets from my additional resources for Seth to do during his "nap" time. He has not been taking naps for a while now but he still has to have quiet time in his room (so that I will be able to have some quiet time...Mommy needs her nap LOL). Anyways, I am giving him his worksheet assignments to do during his quiet time. He has to listen very carefully to the instructions so he will remember what he is suppose to do, and then he has to do the pages in his room, which is a different room than I am in. He has to do his best to finish the worksheets to the best of his ability and then I will check his work after naptime is over.

Today was our second day to do this and he is doing very well with it (and even though I don't know if he will admit it I think he is enjoying it as well). This is not only teaching him how to work independently, it is also helping me to see what information he is truly retaining. And of course he is able to concentrate on his work without his brother and sister pestering him.

I just thought I would share this in case there are others out there that could use this idea!

Until next time,
Kellie

We love games!!

2011-09-14T11:36:00.000-05:00

I picked up a domino game at Wal-Mart for less than $4!! We enjoyed playing today! Of course when I saw it I saw real quick that this will work for more than just a fun domino game! It can also be used in math for addition and subtraction, and for Aaron and Alyssa to help with matching and counting! That's a lot of stuff to do with a game that was less than $4!

I am also working on another game to help Seth (and eventually Aaron and Alyssa) with his reading. I saw another wonderful idea on Pinterest (have I mentioned that I am addicted?!?!). That link talked about using duplo building blocks and attaching word and letter labels. I have a bunch of fish link toys that my mom gave me that I am using. On one side of the fish I am just putting letter of the alphabet so that we can build simple words or words that follow the rules such as "silent e tells the other vowel to say it's long vowel sound". On the other side some of the fish will have the blends such as "ck" and "ph" to make words with those blends.

(the flash of the camera made it hard to see some of the letters in the above pic...sorry)

I also picked up a tumbling tower game (like Jenga) at Wal-Mart for less than $6. I think I am going to write words (sight words and commonly used words) so that we can build sentence towers with that game. Still thinking about exactly how I want to do that one though. :-) I will be sure to post pictures when I decide what to do.

Until next time,

Kellie

First of School Pictures

2011-09-13T11:55:00.000-05:00

I found this idea on the web for first of school pictures and have seen people from several other blogs do this. Even though we are in our 5th week of school already I thought it would still be a good idea to do :-). I am hoping to be able to do this at the beginning of every school year. It will be neat to see how them grow and see how their answers change on their interviews! These will also be very cute to put in the front of our yearbook that I am wanting to have made at the end of the school year. :-)

(if you right click on each picture and choose to open in a new tab you can see the full size of the picture to be able to read it better. If you are viewing this on email you should be able to click on each picture to open it up on the web to view the full size)

(of course I answered Alyssa's questions for her)

Until next time,
Kellie

MFW 1st Grade - Week 4 In Review

2011-09-08T13:28:00.001-05:00

I am going to start linking up with a My Father's World blog hop with a "week in review" post! I am looking forward to the chance to connect with other MFW moms!!

We finished Week 4 of our first grade year this week! (for others using MFW 1st grade - this does not line up with week 4 of the teacher's manual. We only school 4 days a week and I am not trying to double up on work to turn the MFW 5 day schedule to our 4 day schedule...so I will state what days we do as listed in the manual as best I can...) And actually this week we only did school for 3 days because we took Labor Day off! (Friday is our co-op day so we weren't able to move day 4 to Friday this week).

Reading
This was the week where we really started doing some 1st grade "stuff" and Seth was so happy! He was so tired of writing his alphabet (we are going to have to work on his dislike of handwriting LOL)! Anyways, we did days 12 - 14 of the teacher's manual. We learned what a vowel was and learned the 5 vowels of the alphabet. We discussed in detail the short vowel sounds for a, e, and i.

Seth read some short books in our reading corner that used short words with the vowels a, e, and i. You can go to this post to see what our reading corner is all about and go to this post to read more about Seth being able to sit on the "bunny cushion" while he read to us!

Oh and we have started an idea that I found at pinterest.com. Have you discovered pinterest yet?? OMG! It can be very addicting but I am finding some great ideas on there! And I love it so much better than bookmarks because of the pictures!! So cool!! Anyways, back on topic LOL, one idea I found was making a paper chain of books your child has read. Now the whole idea they had was "I Can Read 100 Books" and it was for a classroom to see which kid could get to 100 books first. I just liked the whole idea about making a chain - something that Seth could literally see growing as he read books. So I made "Seth's Book Chain". Any time he actually reads a book himself he gets a link on his chain. I will try to remember to periodically put an updated picture of our book chain on her so yall can see how much it is growing as well.

Math
This week we did day 11 and 12 of math, which finished up our sorting and classifying concept. You can go to this post to see more details on activities we did to learn this concept. On Thursday we did day 13 which started our numbers and counting concept. We played a game of Number War (a game mentioned at the beginning of the Teacher's Manual). I made my game with Mickey Mouse paint cards from Home Depot. I grab a few when I think about it when I am in that store and have built up quite a collection. Seth also enjoyed his color by number page in his math book.

Science
We finished up our study of the seasons on Wednesday (day 13). We found a lot of good books in the library on seasons. Here is the list of books we read:
4 Stories for 4 Seasons by Tomie de Paola
What Can It Be? Riddles about the Seasons by Jacquiline A Ball
Red Sings from Tree Tops by Joyce Sidman
All Around the Seasons by Barney Saltzberg

On Thursday we began our study of how flowers grow. We read our pages in our Things Outdoor book and then we read Mouse & Mole and the Year-Round Garden by Dough Cushman.

Bible
Seth memorized Proverbs 10:5!! Here is a video of him saying his proverb :-)

(if you are viewing this post by email you will have to go to the blog to see the video)

On Wednesday we started our memorization of Proverbs 23:12. On Thursday we did our first copywork of our Proverbs! I was proud of Seth's handwriting!! Now he did forget a few words (which you can see we added at the bottom) but overall he did very well. To be honest, he is a typical little boy and did not like doing it, but was very proud when I told him how well his handwriting looked.

We also made our scroll from our alphabet pages. Seth was very proud of his scroll. (I used unsharpened pencils instead of dowel rods for the handles).

We have our first week of co-op classes with our homeschool group tomorrow (Friday)! The kids are super excited to see all their friends again and are very excited about their new classes. I am actually teaching two classes this semester. I am teaching a puppet fun class for ages 2-5 (that both Aaron and Alyssa will be in) and a sewing class for girls ages 7-12! I am really looking forward to this as well!!

Alyssa and Aaron

I am still trying to find out what works with Alyssa and Aaron to do during school time. Of course with Alyssa being only 2 I am not pushing school at all! And Aaron, at 4, is still in pretty much control of that as well. There are days when he wants to do worksheets and he wants to do some of the fun activities with Seth, and there are days when he wants to lay in the floor and play with his Buzz Lightyear!

I had mentioned in a prior post that hubby is letting us use his ipad now for school! Well Aaron has a favorite game that he loves to play on my phone (when I let him). Well we put it on the ipad today and he spent the majority of the school time playing that game! It is an animal matching game and he is actually very sharp when it comes to memory games! I didn't have a problem with him playing this game because it really helps his concentration skills! (and as you can see in the picture Alyssa liked watching him play too!)

Alyssa did ask to play computer cool school today so I went ahead and set her up a profile and let her play on the drawing screen. She had fun and looked so cute up at the desk.

Oh - and I do have to say that you will probably no longer see pictures of the kids in their pajamas in the school pictures. Hubby has told me that he would rather see them dressed, especially if I am going to be taking pictures of them and posting them on the blog. And he is right - I agree. :-) So this morning we added "getting dressed" to our routine of getting ready for school. And I have to be honest and say I think it helped them - I think it helped the mindset. (but I do occasionally want to have a "pajama day" for school...because that is one of the beauties of homeschool - but if we only have it on occasion it will make it to be a fun and special day!) :-)

Well, I think that covers everything for this week! Until next time,

Kellie

I am linking up here.

Math Concept - Sorting And Classifying

2011-09-07T10:07:00.000-05:00

Activities from the Complete Book of Math

Seth had fun with the button sorting. Being that I love sewing I had a big bag of buttons for us to use. Seth did very good at sorting the buttons. He sorted them by color and then we talked about what we learned by that sorting. We then talked about other ways we could have sorted the buttons.

We also sorted our cuisinaire rods. I told Seth to sort them by something besides color. He decided to sort them by size, but found out in the process that they were being sorted by color as well. :-) So we talked about how classifications can have more than one thing in common. The only thing that matters is that they have at least one thing in common. On this day we read the book Junk Collector School (in book list below) and that was a PERFECT book to read because Andy, the little boy in the book, made a rather unusual collection. No one thought it was a true collection until he told the one thing that all the things in his collection had in common! I thought it was a very good book for learning classifications!

Books We Read:

3 Little Firefighters by Stuart J Murphy
"A Lost Button" from Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel
Is It The Same Or Different? by Bobbie Kalman (a fun activity book about classifications)
Junk Collector School by Adam Dahlin and Emma Akerman

Other things we did to help Seth learn this concept

We watched a video called Learning About Sorting and Grouping by 100% Productions.

Daddy is letting us use the ipad for school - YAY!! I found some different sorting and classifying apps. Seth really liked the one called What Does Not Belong? by Brain-Go! (and Alyssa enjoyed watching him play).

Seth continues to enjoy his math book and is doing really well so far with these math concepts! I hope this keeps up. :-)

Until next time,

Kellie

A new reader in the corner

2011-09-06T10:51:00.000-05:00

One of the "rules" of the story corner is you can sit on the "bunny cushion" if you are the one that is reading! Well Seth got his first chance to sit on that cushion and read to all of us today! And he did a very good job. (and as you can see today was pajama day - LOL!!)

Bible Crafts

2011-09-06T10:45:00.000-05:00

Here are some bible crafts that we have worked on in the first couple of weeks of school.

Making Pottery Jars
We followed the recipe in the teacher's manual for making cornstarch modeling clay. Our jars were pretty small but the kids did enjoy making them. We were able to make small scrolls to put in them and put the lid on them. I think Seth got the idea that jars were used to store scrolls even though ours were on such a small scale.

One of the jars showing the tiny scroll inside.

The lid on top of the jar.

Alyssa showing her tiny scroll.

Making A Scroll

For the first 10 days of our curriculum Seth had to use his very best handwriting to write all the letters of the alphabet. We did about 6 letters every day. He really didn't enjoy this because he really doesn't enjoy handwriting! But today we put the completed set together and made a scroll from this, a scroll that he was very proud of! :-) He even told me that even though he was so glad that he didn't have to do those pages again he was glad that he did his best so that he could have a cool scroll. :-) That's my Seth!

(I am trying to put some "themes" to my posts...rather than random posts...I think that will help me do better about making posts...we shall see - LOL!)

Until next time,
Kellie

Our New Story Corner

2011-08-29T11:22:00.000-05:00

Saturday morning Alyssa and I did some work in the schoolhouse :-) We decided to make a Story Corner for us all to enjoy our story time. I rearranged my bookshelves so that all my books were together on the bookshelf in the back corner of the schoolhouse. I brought out a play mat that I made when Seth was a baby and we brought out pillows for us all to sit/lay on so that we could be nice and comfy during story time!

Here are pictures I took today when I introduced the corner to the kids.

They are all on their pillows ready to be read to :-) (I use the big white bunny as my cushion...he makes a very nice cushion LOL!)

Here is a more overhead view so you can see the cute hippo mat that we all sit around.

Here you can see our many books that we have started accumulating (and we have about that many more on the bookcase in the boys' bedroom)

Right now I am putting the library books in a blue bin on top of our filing cabinet. But I had a friend that mentioned the idea of keeping them in a rolling suitcase...that way they are easy to carry around (because we get so many) plus I can keep them safe from Alyssa... I am really thinking about this idea...just have to figure out where to find a cheap rolling suitcase.

They are really excited about their story circle!

We read Dr Seuss's I can Read with My Eyes Wide Shut since it talks about all the many things you can learn about by reading books and I talked to them about how important reading is in school and that I want them all to grow a love for reading because reading really opens up your imagination and you can learn so much by reading. I told Seth that we would be reading a lot of books to help him learn his math and science concepts this year.

Another thing I wanted to mention today is how much Seth is enjoying The Complete Book of Math. I have really heard conflicting reviews on this book as part of the MFW curriculum but am finding, at least so far, that the activities of this book are capturing Seth's attention. (of course we are only on the first concept of patterns but by scanning through the rest of the book I really think he is going to enjoy the whole book).

I am already finding though that the big bucket of foam shapes that you can get at Wal-Mart is really coming in handy!

I am finding that the foam shapes have worked well in completing the worksheets where he has to complete the pattern. For him I find that he has more fun gluing shapes than drawing and coloring them. And the small shapes in the bucket are about the same size and same color as the shapes on the page so it works out perfectly. (the shape bucket did not have star shapes in it so we used star stickers for them)

And one last thing I want to share today - Seth has memorized his first Proverb!! I got a video this morning of him reciting Proverbs 9:10 that I thought I would share.

(If you are viewing this post through email then you will need to go to the actual blog to see the video.)

Until next time,

Kellie

She's Loving Reading!!

2011-08-26T09:44:00.000-05:00

Alyssa's favorite part of school time has been our story time! She gets so excited when she sees me grab the books that I want to read to the kids for the day and head over to sit on the floor in our reading corner :-) (speaking of I have some ideas rolling around in my head of making an actual reading corner in our classroom...just got to figure out best way to do it since our space is a bit limited).

Anyways, as most probably already figured out, we don't do school on Fridays. Starting in September we will have co-op classes with our homeschool group every other Friday and we decided it would just be best to not school the other Fridays either. Fridays are our off day!

Well today there isn't much going on. I am working on lesson plans and finding books to go with our math and science subjects through the year (since our library doesn't have over half the books on the recommended reading list). Anyways, I heard Alyssa mumbling in the background as I was working at the table. When I turned my head I saw that she was up on the couch "reading" a book!!!

She was so cute about it too! She was getting very animated with her voice (like I do when I read to them) and was really enjoying her book! Hopefully this is beginning for her for a love of reading!

And as I was uploading that photo I realized I took another photo yesterday that I thought I would share. This is a picture I snapped at the beginning of class yesterday. I have found over the past couple of days that it works real well to have Aaron and Alyssa do their little workbooks while Seth is doing his daily folder (that has his calendar and number of the day worksheets). I thought it was such a cute sight to see them all working so hard! :-)

Have a great weekend!!

Kellie

Our first exploration day!!

2011-08-24T12:01:00.000-05:00

Every 5th day of the My Father's World 1st grade curriculum is Exploration Day! No reading lessons are done this day. This day is designed to focus on doing fun things related to the current science topic. It's also a day to explore with the pattern blocks and cuisinaire rods for the math work for the day.

The curriculum states to spend some time outside enjoying God's creation on this day. Well - with us having 105 degree temps right now it's kind of hard to spend too much time outside :-( but I did come up with some fun activities and it was a very fun morning!

We opened up our our Things Outdoor book to the pages covered in the science lesson on Monday (pp 16-17 things close to the ground) and we pulled out or DK Encyclopedia of Animals and our Children's Encyclopedia. We looked in those books and read about different topics such as moles, worms, ants, soil, etc...

In the Children's Encyclopedia on the topic of soil it had an experiment of putting some soil in a jar and mixing it with water and then watching as the particles settle to see what different kind of particles are in your soil. I thought this would be a fun and quick experiment to do and would give us a few minutes outdoors :-)

So I got a shovel for the boys to do some digging...

Poor guys! We have gone so long without rain that our yard is so very hard!! They had the bright idea though of finding one of the many cracks in our yard as a good spot to dig.

We scooped some of the very dry soil into our jar...

while Alyssa stood at the bench and ate her cheerios LOL...

and then added the water and shook it really good (and had to a little bit longer because it was so dry). We then watched the particles settle.

We had a few floating above the water while most settled to the bottom.

We then watched Peep and the Big Wide World: Peep Plants a Seed/The Root Problem while we made pictures of worms and dirt and stuff.

After the "Peep Plants A Seed" segment the video showed kids doing the experiment of putting beans on wet paper towels inside a ziploc bag to watch them sprout so we decided to do this experiment as well. We will be keeping watch on our beans in the next week or so to see if any of them sprout.

Ok - for all those MFW users out there I have a question. I did not purchase the deluxe edition of the MFW 1st grade because I already had some of the "extras" and didn't see us using some of the others so I was coming out a lot cheaper by buying the basic package and just purchasing separately other items of the deluxe package that I wanted to use.

One of the items that I did not buy was the Pattern Animals book that you use with your pattern blocks. I figured I could just find pattern templates online that would work. I never even actually looked at that book to even know what all it had in it.

I did find a site online that had some pattern templates. Here is the link in case you are interested.

Anyways I had Seth do some of them today. The thing is...he can already master all of them. I even found what I thought was one of the toughest of all the templates, the lion, and he completed it with no problem.

So my question is this - does this Pattern Animals book have any that are more complicated to complete than these templates or is this just something that Seth has already mastered? I am trying to figure out if it would be beneficial to buy that book. Maybe I just need to find it in a bookstore and check it out.

Or, does anyone know of any other books that I can get that has templates to do with these pattern blocks. The thing is he really really enjoyed doing these. He loves puzzles in general... I would just like to see if I can get some that are a little bit more challenging for him :-)

Here he is completing the dog - VERY EASY for him!

And here is his lion! He was so proud of himself. But it really didn't pose that much of a challenge for him.

For our story time, keeping with the exploration theme of exploring things close to the ground, we read Diary of A Worm and The Grouchy Ladybug.

It was a fun morning! These exploration days are going to be a lot of fun and are a good break from the day to day lessons! :-)

Until next time,
Kellie

Patterns, Stories and Cars!!

2011-08-22T14:07:00.000-05:00

Today started our first "full" week of school. By full week I mean a 4 day week because we decided that we don't do school on Fridays. Why? Because we homeschool and we make the rules - LOL! :-)

In math we are concentrating on learning about patterns. The kids enjoyed watching a Math Monsters video on patterns and then we pulled out our big box of foam shapes and made patterns with them.

One of Seth's pages in his math book wanted you to draw hearts to finish the pattern for each line. I decided to make it a little bit more fun for him and had him glue foam hearts on to finish the pattern. He really liked doing that and did very well with it. :-)

While he was working on that Alyssa and Aaron enjoyed gluing some foam shapes on paper and coloring their paper.

(oh how I wish I knew what was going on in Aaron's head sometimes - he looks like he is thinking hard about something don't he?)

The other day I was at a teacher supply store with a couple of friends and came across a book on how to draw characters from the Disney Cars movies! I knew instantly that this was something my boys would enjoy and would provide good lessons on paying attention and following directions!

Well today we decided to draw our first picture from this book. Here is a picture of the one I drew on the white board (I had them follow my instructions and draw on their paper what I drew on the white board as we went along)

(yep he's a bit short and a bit fat...but I still thought he turned out pretty cute)

(can you tell how much Seth enjoyed doing this?!?! Love that face!!!)

Alyssa even enjoyed "drawing" with us. (She decided she wanted to sit on top of her desk)

Here is Seth's finished car! I was very pleased at how well he did!!!! He was too!! :-)

One of the kids favorite parts of our school day is story time! We all sit in the floor and I read stories to them. Today we read some Dr Seuss books!! :-) (and yes we school in our pajamas - we like it that way!)