Week 2 of Valentines

It is kind of nice not having a "theme" per se these last 2 weeks. Instead we have been focusing on making Valentines Day crafts and cards for some of our favorite people. This year we are really trying to reinforce giving to others. Whether it is taking food to the food pantry at church, donating used toys and clothes to the Salvation Army, taking dinner to a neighbor in need, or making cards for our family and friends, we want our children to grow up with giving hearts.

The boys made 2 types of hand-print valentines. I added the wording "Happy Valentines Day, Love, Charlie/Tommy". I think they turned out so cute!
We also painted the outside of the boys pinky finger and along the side of their palm to make the heart prints.  They also made their Valentine card box to collect their cards in and prepared their Valentines for the Co-op friends on Monday.

Penny even made a cute butterfly Valentine card.

On Thursday we had a small Valentines Day party with a few of our friends.

For our treats we had confetti cupcakes, brownies and strawberry milk. 

The kids decorated their cupcakes and made a valentine card to take home.  It was a lot of fun!

Besides all our pre-Valentines Day fun, we stuck to our basic lessons as well. Charlie completed lessons in Phonics and Math, practiced his hand-writing by finishing up his Thank You cards from his birthday and we picked up his Explode the Code book.


I had a conference call with Charlie's "teacher" from K12 this week as well.   We went over his test scores from the AIMS web test he did a few weeks back.  Charlie scored average or above average on all subjects.  She was also pleased with the progress that he has made from the beginning of the year and feels that he is right on track in most areas and ahead of the game in some.  She also said that if we continue to complete lessons at the rate we are currently working, then we will be done with his school in late April.  The last day of school is technically June 3rd.  We will most likely continue on as we have been, possibly taking a few days off for the boys to have a "free day" from school and for me to devote to planning their summer curriculum and Tommy's curriculum for next year.

What we were playing with this week:





Linking up this week to:

No Time For Flash Cards
ABC and 123 
Preschool Corner

Week of the Valentines

Tissue Paper Valentines Day Hearts

This week both boys shared the same theme and we worked on our Valentines Day  decorations and cards.  We made tissue paper hearts with contact paper.  They are so pretty on our front window when the sun shines (which isn't often these days!).  

The boys also had fun buzzing around the house with the "love bugs" that they had made.

Charlie continues to do well with his daily phonics and math lessons.  We learned about matter, solids, liquids and gases in science this week.  We also made a weather chart and will be charting the weather for the next few weeks.

 

Charlie is using blocks to solve subtraction problems.

Tommy is still enthusiastic to do "school" with us.  

This week he did a few sheets in his workbook and  played on Starfall.com.  He is also doing much better playing independently when I need to work solely with Charlie. 

Having fun with dress up as Kings and Knights in their "castle".

Our school year with K12 ends in May and won't start up again until August. I am planning a summer curriculum for the boys to do at least 2-3 days a week during those months.  I am also gearing up to put together Tommy's Prek curriculum for the 2011-2012 school year.

And our last bit of fun over the weekend was making some yummy cookies for the Super Bowl.

Linking up to:
Preschool Corner
 
No Time For Flashcards
ABC and 123 

Preschool: Week of the The Penguin

Tommy's Penguin

  I have done some tweaking on a curriculum for Tommy and have decided to focus on one theme for a few weeks.  We will be doing different activities based on the theme we are learning about.


This week we started our Winter theme of Penguins.   When Penny was hospitalized for RSV, my dear cousin Amy from Montana sent us a copy of Don't Be Afraid, Little Pip by Karma Wilson & Jane Chapman.  Ms. Wilson is a personal friend of my cousins and therefore signed the copy for our little Penny. It was so thoughtful of both of them!


We started off by reading the book which is about a sweet little penguin named Pip who desperately wants to learn to fly but is told repeatedly that she must swim instead.

After reading our book we made penguins out of model magic.  I told the boys what characteristics they needed to make or how to roll the clay etc, but they
did everything else.  Their creations could not be any cuter!!


I had hoped to use the penguins to make snow-globes with, but we all agreed that they were just too cute.  See, I am learning to go with the flow! :)
While I was getting our supplies out I set the boys up with a cute video  from National Geographic about penguins.  They learned how scientist tracked and counted penguins by placing bar code chips in their feet and then having them walk over long pieces of metal that they disguised in the sand.  The penguins were so cute!

Another fun activity was making snow cream.  I got the idea from Susana, who is my wealth of knowledge blog friend!  Trent gathered some snow from the front yard (we had plenty to spare!), I added some milk, vanilla and a little sugar.  The boys added sprinkles and ate away.  Charlie said it was ok but too cold, Tommy accidentally dumped about half a tube of sprinkles on his and thought it was "gwoss" (gross) and Trent said it tasted like watered down ice cream.  I think we will try it again next year when I can taste it and make it better (no dairy for me because of little Miss Penny).  It was fun  though and something we did as a family, can't beat that!

Tommy also did some worksheets from Starfall.com on the number 3 and the letter C.  Our neighbors had also given a ton of odds and ends preschool workbooks.  I have given one to Tommy as his school book to do with us as Charlie finishes up his seat work.  Tom loves it and it makes him feel so big.
 

Hammering his ABC puzzle

Color match game I made him.

The boys also had some fun in the tub with  a full bottle of shaving cream (our fake snow) and a few chunks of colored ice.  I took different plastic containers and filled each of them with water that was different colors. I then just put them outside for a few hours and later that night brought them in when it was bath time.  We let the boys play in the shaving cream with the chunks of ice and they loved it.  Since they were in the bath it didn't matter how messy it got.  In the end the boys had fun, they were clean and I had a squeaky clean bath tub! Win, win for everyone!!

 We made these adorable penguin footprints and a snowman snow-globe out of more model magic.

Linking up to:

Preschool Corner and 5K too

Read.Explore.Learn 

Kids Get Crafty

Weekly  Wrap Up

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No Time For Flash Cards
ABC and 123 Learning 

Homeshool: Kindergarten week 7

The boys raking leaves in the back

Today is only Monday, but I can't let the day go by and not jot down some notes. If ALL days were like today, we would surely be living in School Heaven! Hands down this was our best day of school ever!

The boys and Miss S. all got a long beautifully. There was little or no bickering and lots of team work. We accomplished A LOT and had LOTS of fun doing it.

Honestly, if I can squeeze even one more day like today out of this week then we will be at least 3 weeks ahead in Charlie's curriculum and we won't have to do any school work right after baby comes. Even though I plan on doing some work with him during that time, it will be a relief to know that he won't fall behind if we don't get to his lessons for a week or two.

Charlie has really been working on his handwriting and spacing of his words. Just recently we started having him write not only his first name, but his last name as well on all his worksheets. Within 2 days he could spell his last name from memory.

One area that I know we need to work on is Charlie memorizing his phone number and being more confident in knowing his address. He knows his address but needs lots of reminders or questioning to recite it. I want him to be able to write and say both of these important pieces of information and do it without hesitation. I think I am going to make up a daily sheet that he needs to fill out with this information to practice reciting it and his writing.

This week Charlie worked on the sounds /u/, /ch/,/y/,/sh/, and /aw/ in phonics. He reviewed many lower and uppercase letters. One of them being the lowercase letter "q". He also learned that q is always followed by the letter u, and that they are called "glue letters" because they don't like to be alone. He is starting to learn different rules like this and is doing well remembering them.

He also continued to finger stretch out words, divide words by syllables, made complete sentences and learned about sound subtraction.

Charlie continues to be ahead in math. In the curriculum they have moved away from identifying shapes (thank goodness!!) and now have him counting to 10, which is still far below his skill level. I am supplementing his math curriculum with Singapore Math and other fun ideas that I find. I have also started to teach him how to tell time to the hour. He uses his Kumon book for practice. We are also moving on to the value of money. I plan on talking with his "teacher" from K12 and see about moving him up a bit in the math program. I think at this point it is needed.

We also had lots of fun this week since Halloween is right around the corner! For science we started to learn about our bodies and our skeletons. I choose this lesson to coincide with Halloween. Charlie did a
skeleton dot to dot,
worksheet, we watched a video/song on youtube about bones, and made a skeleton art project out of pasta noodles.

We all had fun making our skeleton!

We learned about joints and bones and why they are important to our bodies.

We also bought some different pumpkins at the store and Grandpa brought us some pretty cool gourds that we dissected and compared the insides. We then painted with the pumpkins and some apples.
Charlie colored and wrote in a pumpkin life cycle book that I made for him to complete, and practiced his handwriting in another Halloween book.
We also watched a pumpkin story on Starfall.com and made a cute little foam pumpkin that Miss S. gave to us for Halloween.



The kids also made these fun monster cupcakes out of snowballs and candy.
and then had fun eating them

We read the book Five Little Pumpkins

and pulled out our felt board and Five Little Pumpkins felt set that I made last year. The boys loved playing with it and we have read it a bunch of times during the week.


Charlie also made a replica of the Empire State Building out Legos. He got his hands on the Lego Holiday catalog (thank you Suzi :) and hasn't put it down since. There is a HUGE set for the Empire State Building that he wanted but it cost BIG bucks, so he opted to build his own. I just love how creative he is!



It was a nice week, we accomplished a lot. I am happy with Charlie's progress at this time and feel comfortable taking the next 1-2 weeks off of our daily routine after baby comes.

Homeschool: Kindergarten week 3

(Charlie making a collage of drawn trains and train pictures he cut out of magazines)

Charlie had another good week of school. He continues to do well with his lessons. I am hoping that within a few weeks of having the baby that we will be able to settle into a daily schedule, for now we are doing school between my doctors appointments etc. So sometimes we are doing school in the morning (which seems to work best for us), during naps (Charlie is usually pretty tired by then and needs a rest as well, not the best time for school) or after naps (which works fine, but Mama is low on steam by then). Mornings seem to be our "good" time of the day for all of us, so we try to sneak school in then whenever we can.

Charlie continued on with his core lessons of Language Arts, Phonics and Math. Charlie also took the KRAL test this week and one online session with his K class.

We have gone back to Explode The Code for Charlie's handwriting practice as well as supplemental phonics. He really enjoys these workbooks far more then the Handwriting without Tears program...which literally brought us both to tears at one point :)

For fun we made Mummy Pizzas for lunch. I used toasted English Muffins, spaghetti sauce, pepperoni, sliced string cheese and grapes (for the eyes). The kids loved them and ate them right up!


One of the craft projects that we did this week was make suncatcher leaves using contact paper and tissue paper. Both boys loved doing this project. Charlie started off by making a pattern with the different color paper and then dumped a bunch of tissue paper over them to fill in the spaces. Tommy placed piece by piece and refused any help. His attention span these days is incredible. I have had both friends and his speech therapist comment on how amazing it is.

After the boys placed the paper down, they rolled out the air bubbles and then I sent them out to the backyard to find as many types of leaves as they could. Charlie brought back 4 different leaf styles that I then traced and cut out of their mosaic tissue paper creations. Daddy and Charlie later identified what kind of trees the leaves came from.

Charlie also did 2 different art pieces this week using pastels, which was his first go with them and he really enjoyed using them. So much in fact that I had to cut him off after he completed 2 art pieces one right after the other. My friend Susana, over at Our Homeschool Fun, introduced me to an amazing new art site for kids. I allowed Charlie to pick out one of the fall art projects from Art Projects for Kids and use his pastels for the first time. He choose the How to Draw a Fall Tree project.
This was the first time I had assigned him to look at a something and then draw what he saw. I think that he did a great job. He smudged the pastels with his fingers and tried to blend colors together to make the clouds. I also sat with Charlie and drew the same picture. We talked about how each of us was looking at the same inspiration picture and yet our pictures were very different and why that was.


Charlie had such a great time that he begged to make another drawing. This time he choose The Symbols of the Season project.

The only thing I made sure that he did was divide the paper up into the 4 boxes. I was really kind of surprised at how with this picture he added more detail and paid closer attention to the actual inspirational picture. He added the lines for the pumpkin and his eggplant had great resemblance to the other picture.


We did a lot of fun things this week alongside our normal studies. However,it was a hard week in terms of scheduling everything we needed and wanted to do. The 4 weekly doctor appointments are truly putting a damper on all the extracurricular activities and fun projects that I would like to do and had planned for the boys. We have had to withdraw the boys from the homeschooling co-op that meets on Mondays for this semester. It just wasn't possible to make it on Mondays until the following session that starts in January. I am really bummed about this (thankfully I hadn't talked about it too much with the boys!), but I know that this is a short season in our lives and in a few months we will be settling into a new routine and will be able to add more back into our daily lives.