Back to School, Fall 2012

 We actually started back to school several weeks ago.  I didn't say anything about it because I didn't want to make all those public schoolers jealous.  haha!

Here are our first day of homeschool pics from then.  We're using My Father's World this year, which is new to us.  David and Elizabeth will be doing some of Adventures in My Father's World together, while she also has the MFW First Grade.

And here we are on the first day of public school (today public schools in our area started).  We started our day by looking at all the BTS photos that people were posting on fb, then we prayed for all the students and teachers we know in public school.

 All my students in our classroom!

We do lots of reading and we have a timeline this year.  This is what Christopher Columbus' ship would have looked like if Elizabeth had been his sail designer!  haha!!

 Here's our puppets.  The boring one in the middle was made by Mom.  : )

I had to move the marker board calendar, because Sarah kept erasing it!  Beside it, we have our new spelling board!  I'm very excited about using All About Spelling this year with David.  And cool repurposing project? Oh yeah!  That spelling board was formerly the front of my dishwasher!! 

Review in process...

I've been invited to try Time4Learning for a month in exchange for a candid review. Their online program can be used for homeschool, as an after school tutorial and for summer learning. My opinion will be my own, so come back and read about my experience. You can write your own curriculum review, too!

The previous paragraph is one of the requirement fir the review.  : )

Back to School Fun: Spring 2012

We jumped right back into school as soon as the new year passed and we were all ready to get back into a normal swing of things!  We did some extra fun learning activities to get going.  Dot painting gave us the chance to work on patterns and following instruction.  I gave them a specific pattern to follow and after doing that, then they were allowed to exercise their creativity with the rest of their peacock.

I had planned a game of 10's Go Fish to refresh some math skills that might have been forgotten.  When I started shuffling the cards, I realized that my kids have never seen plain playing cards before!  So we played a simpler version to get used to the cards and and how to handle them.  I wish I had Grandma's card holders!  Guess I'll have to make my own.  This turned out to be a good counting review for Elizabeth anyway.

Another math game using dice & adding for David & Elizabeth to work on together.  I challenged David to a speed round later, which turned out quite exciting!  I was ahead by a long shot, then my dice would not cooperate and he pulled ahead for the win!

I love mixing learning with Christmas!  Found a great deal on the Crayola Activity Center that I'd been eyeing for a while anyway, with a coupon and a store sale the day after Thanksgiving!  Elizabeth loves it and is getting in some good handwriting review!

David's favorite subject is World History.  He is happy to be back in the world books.  Here he is marking the reign of Alexander the Great as we read about him.  It was a fun first week back to school and a good start to the Spring 2012 semester.  This week, perhaps we'll wear clothing for school instead of PJ's!

Puppy Week: A Kindergarten Unit Review

I have used HomeschoolShare for lapbooking resources several times with David and have really been pleased with the results.  Our favorite of all time had to be the My Father's Dragon lapbook!  He still talks about that one.  Amazingly, I never got pictures of our completed book.  The site is free to join and has a lot of free printables for lapbooks, notebooks, and unit studies.

HomeschoolShare has some new Kindergarten Kits coming out soon and I had the chance to try out the "Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit" set with Elizabeth.  She really enjoyed it and I took lots of pictures!  Elizabeth is 4 1/2 years old.  Not old enough to be a public school kindergartner, but we're starting kindergarten this year at home anyway.  She is more than ready!

Disclaimers: "Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit" was given to me to review & test out before the final version was released on HomeschoolShare.  I didn't have all the books recommended for the unit and didn't have a library trip scheduled either, so we made due with what we had.  Also, I love the light in our dining area, but it makes backlight in all the photos, so I apologize for the darkness of the activity in the photos!  And finally, my printer was just about out of color ink, so the printouts are a little dull.  I went over the edges of some things with a marker so they'd be easier to see.  If you have a good ink cartridge in your printer, your printouts will look much better than mine.

Here's all the puppy & dog books that we had.  We read these as we were going through the activities in the pack.  Also had an informational book about dogs that somehow missed the photo.

Going over the days of the week, she decided to count them.

This was the cutting page, but she wanted to trace the lines first.

Then I cut the page into strips for easier handling.

This was really good practice for her because we haven't done a lot of cutting.  Unless you count her bangs.  Doesn't that look lovely?  She and her brother did that.  At least they were working together, right?

Anyway, Elizabeth loves coloring, so the same size/matching activity was right up her alley!

The next activity that she really loved was the

A-E-I-O-U Game.

She could have kept playing this for hours!

I liked that these were lowercase letters.  She identified the vowels, put them in alphabetical order, and identified them by sound.  This opened the discussion of long and short vowel sounds also. 

Then she hid the bone and had me try to find it, except that she always left a little corner of the bone card peeking out... and she thought that was hilarious!

We used our hodgepodge of ABC magnets and a cookie sheet for her to copy some words.  This is  beginning spelling & reading skills.  Then we talked about the sounds that each letter makes and slowly let her sound out the words.

The smile was after sounding out a word, when she realized that she had just sounded out a word!

Doggy, Doggy, Where's Your Bone? had her place the missing numbers on the chart.  The instructions recommended printing the missing numbers on sticker paper, but I didn't have any.  That would have been really fun to use, though!

She was proud that she made it all the way to 30!

We love nonstandard measurement activities, and this one was no exception!

The bone ruler and 3 puppies came in this activity.  She measured each puppy, measured them stacked up, sorted them by size, and then found other things to measure.

Her plate is 6 dog bones across.

The eraser is almost 2 dog bones long.

The little trampoline is almost 7 dog bones tall.

Her foot is 5 dog bones long.

We compared her foot to my foot.

Baby Sarah's foot is 3 dog bones long.

The last thing I got pictures of was the One Stop Puppy Shop Game.  Once again, the games are her favorite!  We used real money, but paper money is included in the kit if you want to print it and use it.  I wrote on the coins with a Sharpie how many cents they were.  We talked about the value of each coin or bill.  We matched the coin to the puppy supply it would buy.  (For example, the quarter is 25c and it will buy the frisbie.)  Then we rolled dice to play the game per the instructions in the kit.  She loved this!

We had a lot of fun with the Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit!  I'd highly recommend it!  Other Kindergarten Kits will be available soon, free of charge, on HomeschoolShare!

Oh, and look... We did the Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit just in time...

That's our new puppy, Daisy!