H is for HEART / Valentines Day Preparation / Catch Up week

The Pieces of My Heart

(this is my favorite piece of Vday art that Charlie has made. He cut strips of paper, glued them down, and then wrote the people & things that he loves)


This week we are preparing for Valentines Day. We are doing lots of crafting and baking along with our normal routine. There are also some projects and fun activities that I had planned for the kids to do over the last few weeks and just never got the chance to do them. I am beginning to realize that we are not married to the theme of the week! So here is to a hopefully fun week of school!

Charlie making a color pattern with his letters. I was washing dishes and happened to glance over to see him doing this. I love catching him doing his own stuff!

Spelling words on the dry erase board with our magnetic letters. He is starting to get the hang of sounding out words.

Playing a fun math game. He had to count the candy hearts and then put the clothes pin on the correct number at the bottom of the page. (Homeschoolcreations ?)

Matching the Capital (Mommy) letters with their Lowercase (baby) letters. He thought this was BORING until I started to pretend that they were Mommys and Babies. Then he was ALL about it! "Oh Mama zebra, your baby zebra is lost" etc....to stinkin cute!

H is for heart.

I made some read heart pretzels for the kids after nap snack. Charlie asked me to make pretzels yesterday and I thought it would be fun to make them fit our Valentines Day theme. They were pretty good, especially with melted cheese...yum!

The boys and I also made some candy cane heart lollies. The boys will take them to their "teachers" at church. We LOVE our Mastering Motherhood teachers (a group that I to each week at church). They take such good care of the boys and the boys just love spending time with them!! This is also a GREAT way to use up those leftover candy canes from making our Christmas bark! (Ucreate)

We had some friends over to decorate Valentines Day cookies and exchange cards.
Charlie's card for Nana (Green is Bot from Umizoomi)

We painted with a cool painting kit that Grandma Candace gave Tommy for Christmas
And we made "creations" out of toothpicks and marshmallows. Have you ever seen a marshmallow that big!!!?

Charlie did a great job adding the "feet" to his creation. He kept adding them until it could stand all by itself.

Tommy had fun too!

And we couldn't help but enjoy ALL of this snow!
Sleding with Daddy. Mommy was out of commission on the 3rd time down the hill and for 2 days AFTER!!. I am NOT 15 anymore and neither is my body ;(


(Pieces of My Heart Craft idea was from Spelloutloud.blogspot.com, I tweaked her idea and had the kids write who/what they love on each piece of paper.)

Tommy School time

Little brother has been wanting to do "school" too! Next week he just might have his own workboxes, filled with fun stuff of course!

Tommy practiced writing his Ts, drawing lines and circles. He was SO proud of his work!

We painted with sponges which lead to finger painting. Tommy was rubbing the paint around and singing a song while staring off into space. It was so therapeutic and relaxing....he is so silly!

We practiced colors with our duckie game.


Brothers playing with the fishing puzzle game.

Not really playing the Dora alphabet game, but looking at the different letters and pictures.

Very intensely concentrating on adding glitter glue to his snowflake project.

S is for Snow!

He asked again to cut...he LOVEs to do this and I love that he asks to do it!

Playing with his tool puzzle. This was a great Christmas present and provides hours of imaginative play and fine motor skills!

Hiding Dinosaurs in the snow and then digging them out.



All of Tommy's "school" time is just unstructured play at this point. During our play we do focus on our colors, the alphabet, counting, and simple drawings. He is always welcomed and encouraged to participate in craft projects or science projects that Charlie is doing for school. Sometimes he wants to do them, sometimes he does not.

He is really starting to show an interest in a lot of what Charlie is doing and wants to sit at the school table with Charlie and "do" school. I am going to set up just a few workboxes for him so that if he wants to sit and do school then he will have a few quiet things for him to work on.

When Charlie is doing school, Tommy is usually playing close by or working on the project with us. However, I am not comfortable with the amount of time that he is independently playing and will start to set aside more time for fun activities geared towards him.

S is for SNOW / Winter/ Arctic week 2

We painted with different sponge shapes, including our "snow" packaging noodles!

The boys made an igloo out of packaging noodles, q-tips (icicles per Charlie), and cotton balls.

Charlie found some dice in the dollar bin at Target and wanted to buy them for his math bin. He loves this!

Cutting and taping penguins together so that they can keep warm in the cold Arctic air.

Penguin writing sheet.

Polar Bear maze.

Making a Popsicle snowflake.

Dressing up in winter gear and doing our daily exercise (laps around the house).

S is for snow.

Charlie had to follow the directions to make his own Penguin, very cute!

Mommy and Charlie doing the blubber experiment. This was so neat (Thanks Susana for the idea!) and Charlie really understood the concept.

Worked on more thank you cards. One of the pictures that Charlie drew on the card.

It was to cold to play outside so we brought the snow inside and had lots of fun!




We also did our weekly assignments in Explode the Code and Kumon. This is the last week we will be using Kumon as Charlie really dislikes it and is becoming resistant to doing his math book workbox. So, next week we will only focus on FUN math games and worksheets to revamp his enthusiasim with Math!

Winter week / I is for ice

I is for ice (http://lettersnumbersandbooksohmy.blogspot.com/)
We added our i to our letter tree and watched Chicka Chicka Boom Boom on youtube again. So fun! I also am using our fridge Leapfrog ABCs when we do our letter of the week. I play the song for each letter a few times as we are doing our craft and also sing the ABC song several times.


We made salt dough snowman (thanks Susana for the idea!!)

Charlie had fun mixing the ingredients which was nice since he has not had a lot of interest in baking lately ;(



We also did a fun experiment with ice, salt and food coloring. (thanks again Susana!) Which led to melting ice chunks at bath time.


Charlie continues to practice his hand writing. This week we made our Thank You cards for his birthday presents.

Each day he traces the letters of the day of the week and we sing a fun alphabet song. We also alternate days using his Kumon and Explode the Code books. We are quickly losing interest in the Kumon book though, which is the math book. I am going to check out another math curriculum and see how that works. He LOVES the Code books though and I need to order the next one soon!!

He also did a few different worksheets throughout the week. He did a dot to dot number sheet and a dot to dot alphabet sheet
.

Charlie did a Snowman math game. (1+1+1=1.com) He laid out the Snowman cards in numerical order then placed the correct number of snowflakes on each number card. He had a great time doing this and I might make some similar cards that are higher numbers, maybe in the 20's and 30s



We made melting snowmen out of candy melts, and varies other types of candy. The kids REALLY liked this and kept saying "thanks mama, this is yummy!". I think they did a great job making their snowmen.



We found a fun snowman sheet on a website, can't remember which one. Charlie had fun coloring the different hats, scarves and snowman. Then I cut out most of the pieces and had Charlie cut out two of the hats. We are still working on cutting and I think he is finally seeing that using the correct finger placement is actually easier then using 2 hands to try and cut :)

And last but certainly NOT least, we worked on chores. They boys don't have specific chores that they must do each day but they expected to do the chores that are asked of them. Cleaning up after dinner, putting plates in the sink, washing the chairs and table, feeding the dog, putting laundry away etc.


And of course we just had to play farmer kitty taking a ride on his new John Deere tractor filled with his harvest! Love it!