whats the title?

We bought Life of Fred: Apples and LOVED it. Loch doesn't quite get it all of course and there are parts I just skip over but he is loving reading them and even I'm learning stuff. We managed to inter library loan the 2cd book (Butterflys) and a discussion of the Orion Nebula turned into a full on  little study of our solar system. We had some old card board boxes so Loch drew and colored the sun and all 9 planets and I cut them out.


(And yes I said 9. Because there are 9 planets in our solar system. It's only a matter of time before Pluto regains it's planet status.)

At a thrift shop eairly this summer I also found a Magic School Bus kit about asteroids. So I dug it out of my 'homeschool stuff for later' box and we read the book and then created this nifty little homemade 'plant'. Flour covered the bottom and then we added cinnamon, cloves, & chili powder for coloring. 

Then... is that a bird? a plane? No! it's an asteroid! (or a rock)  Coming to disrupt our planets surface!

AHHHHHHH!

A few army men took the brunt of the blast, one lost a head but the rest lived to fight another day.

Shadow puppet play!

Playing with color. If I look through blue and yellow what color is the light?

red and blue?

 This could be used with colored plastic wrap too we just happen to have borrowed these fancy ones from a friend.

A bit of preschool doings

  

Working with chop sticks for fine motor control. Slowly getting better and better with these.

Painting with ice. Froze water with food coloring to create this fun project.

Measuring practice! is the broom longer then a yard stick? Is a pencil?

For yule we were blessed with a set off wooden letter pieces from Handwriting without Tears. This was R week but we had fun seeing what other letters we could make with these shapes as well.

We are trying to get a local children's museum together so there are bi monthly museum without walls events. This was working making a tower from on the light board.

pre-k activities over the winter break

Been taking a nice easy break. Presents and family, and siblings, and weeks & weeks of -30 makes lazy people. so here are a few activities we did for school.

Practicing with a hole punch. Originally I was making sewing cards but The kids wanted to try it and it's good for that fine motor control stuff.

Practicing buttoning on a dressing vest. We are pretty good now with unbuttoning and re-buttoning with the large ones and can unbutton the small was well too.

Story telling cards. First he told his own story then we took turns picking cards and telling part of a story. Story telling practice, Memorization, Social Skills, Taking Turns.... 

While watching The Electric Company I got this idea and we made up these cards. I wrote down some easy 3 letter phonetically correct words. L had to read the word then he could jump over it. 

If he needed help to read the word he had to read the next word and jump over both. If he kept missing the list of words kept getting longer. If he read a word independently the line got shorter. 

I picked this up at Once Upon a Child for a $1 it's basically word bingo. So lots of easy fun reading & matching practice.

We sure do use a LOT of paper...

Making christmas presents; a quick google search and I found these stockings with writing promps on them. We plan to do the set then get them laminated, bind them, and give them to grandma for solstice. 

These ones say: 

Christmas is... By LOCH Christmas is the smell of LOVE & Christmas is the sounds of HOHO

Santa Lucia day included making hot cross buns and star boy / candle hats. 

A quick and easy santa lucia inspired sewing card. I made a few paper starts and punched holes in them for the boys to 'sew'.

Sanint nicholas day fun. Using shoes to print patterns on paper.

And robots.... always robots...

Grouping. I have a bunch of little 'things' that make their way into my house. Here we grouped them by rocks, metal, and alive things.

Sneak peek for Yule/Christmas

Christmas can be hard, what to get the kids? I have some ideas for you to make Yule/Christmas fun with secretly educational toys that the kids will love.

(Bonus if you live in Fairbanks/Anchorage I bought pretty everything locally: Check out Enchanted Forest Toys for Fairbanks or Over the Rainbow if you're in the Anchorage area. Both of these will ship so check 'em out.)

Okay lets get started shall we... a sneak peek at my kids yule loot.

  A pretty rocking wooden castle with stairs and a bell. Wooden dragon, a farmer & his wife. Also a really really really cool hearth with cauldron. (Can you tell that one might be my favorite?)

Hoop painting kit, a purple Sarah's Silk, a game of pick up sticks, and a story telling game.

Sewing kit, Harp with music inside, build your own wooden construction truck, Geo gear blocks, and this magnetic 'drawing' tablet. 

Stocking Stuffers phase one: a foldable block dragon.

A paper fan, & wooden cow that is a music shaker.

Stocking Stuffers phase two: Don't disregard Micheal's and Targets dollar sections. They are a fantastic for inexpensive little stuffers.  None of these cost more then $5.

Also Just because it's old to you doesn't mean it can't be new for them. I recently went through boxes of my childhood things and picked out these books that I thought my own children would love. Now they get a whole new life and the kids get another thing to get to rip the wrapping off of.

Happy Yule / Hanukkah / Kwanzaa / Christmas / Hijri  !!!

Curriculum for the younger years?

The question pops up on homeschool forums every few weeks, it goes something like this "What curriculum should I buy for my 2/3/4 year old?" Often the answers are mostly saying this like don't. Play, read to them, let them help with cookies, take walks, provide make believe toys etc etc.
 Although this is true play is the main way of learning for kids until about 1st grade or so it is a totally unhelpful suggestion for a parent just starting out. Normally parents grew up in a public school setting and are not used to unstructured learning. It's not that the child/ren needs structure it's that the parent needs a check list.

 This is okay. In fact it is good. If just left to float in a pool alone many parents will soon feel overwhelmed, alone, and toss in the towel before they have even begun their homeschooling journey.

 So what curriculum would be good? Well, okay. I'm totally bias. There are plenty of curriculum sources out there for preschoolers but I will give you my favorites. As an avid curriculum hoarder I've tried most everything or at least looked through it so here are my choice picks for the toddler / young kindergartner;

Toddler / Early Preschool

Little Acorn - This is my most favorite EVER. It is a very easy natural rhythm type of 'curriculum' Each month provides you 4/5 weeks of stories, fingerplays, poems, songs, and a craft a day. It is not too overwhelming to do one craft a day so works well for busy mom or someone with several children.
For a younger child it would require some tweeking of the crafts to account for ability but having used this for 2 years in a row (and about to start again with my new 2 year old) it is a minor inconvenience for an abundance of fun & learning.

Timberdoodle - I wouldn't buy a whole grade level but it has great materials for getting ideas or picking and choosing what looks fun. If you just want some good educational toys to play with Timberdoodle has you covered.

Sonlight - A very Christian company but the secular books on their lists are AWESOME. Many are classics (Make Way for Duckling, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Goodnight Moon, etc) but there were a few books on the list that I had never heard of that are now family favorites.

Christopherus - This is not a day by day check list to follow but if you need some inspiration, songs, finger plays, and ideas this is a fantastic resource.  I suggest; Kindergarten with your 3 to 6 year old.

preschool in full swing

In trying to keep this log updated I'm trying to take even MORE pictures of our weekly preschool/kindy homeschool. I'll try to add some more informative posts soon but the kids are keeping me busy! I hope though that anyone looking around my blog can find some good ideas for doing activities with their own kids.

a science kit found at the dump leads us to the question; are different materials translucent or opaque? I rounded up a bunch of random items from around the house to experiment with.

How many sticks do you see? I would count them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. but we are trying out RightStart Math borrowed from a friend and trying to learn to see numbers. In this case I added the color coding to the process. 5 is 2 on the outside, 1 in the middle and 2 in-between. 

We are still working on this concept and often we are still counting them to double check.  

the book is How do you lift a lion? and we pulled out our simple machines set from Kaplan to see if we could recreate some of the machines used in the book. Unfortunately we discovered there was no way to make a wheel and axle  with the set so our wheels kept moving around and throwing out poor animals off the cart.

Oooooo it's a ghost!!!! Totally stolen from a Montesorri blogger (can't remember who at the moment) I took dry white beans and added sharpie marker to make eyes. Then Loch (4 1/2 yrs) got a set of tweezers to practice moving the beans from the left bowel to the right one. and Asher (22 months) used a 1/4th teaspoon to practice scooping and transferring the ghosts from one to the other. 

We are on a mineral kick having found some cool rock samples at a yard sale so we read some books and then broke out the Papier-mâché and made our very own 'rock' who we named fred.

some school this week

We are on Oak Meadows kidy H week so we made a house. clothpins, silks, + chairs = fun! 

This started by using the icetray to mix together food coloring to see what colors they made. It then turned into seeing what happens when we add other things, like rice or feathers. Do they dye? what if you dip the feather into several different colors?

Kaplans 'simple machines' box has been great fun. besides the machines you are supposed to make it leads to many interesting configurations of transformer like robots and frequently, catapults. 'cus I have boys.

Weighing, does a square pyramid filled with rice weigh more then a cylinder filled with rice? what about a triangle pyramid vs square pyramid? 

tot school/ Stacking small blocks 4 high!

preschool on the cheap vol #3

So the idea of preschool on the cheap is doing homeschool for.. well... cheap. Sometimes it's about finding educational items at garage sales, thrift stores, or the dump but sometimes it's about making things. Sometimes I look at products and think 'I could make that' but I totally don't because well, I have a life. and I'm lazy. 

I could make wonderful materials that last for many children but really once it's mastered I have to store it and my cabin is very small so storage space is reserved mostly for books and yarn.

So I give you some simple ideas I used this week for preschool on the cheap.

We borrowed a copy of RightStart math level A from a friend and so far have been really liking it. So this was part of doing lesson 2. it's just construction paper so super easy but there are a couple of things going on here for this lesson which is a review of #'s 1-3 and introduction of #4.

1. the blue paper is folded into 4 sections

2. there are 4 shapes cut out. (circle, diamond, triangle, square)\

3. there are 4 of each shape

Now the idea was to sort them into groups by shape. which was easy enough but once I ask him to not pile them on top of each other but to give them each their own pile he natural assigned each one of them a place within the folded squares of the blue paper. =D

He likes to pattern. He has AB patterning down. (eg ABABABABAB)

as normally has ABC patterns (eg ABCABCABC) 

but this was the first time he did a ABC pattern of his own without any prompting.

SCIENCE fun! water + food coloring + celery = awesome. 

Digging up the potatoes from out raised bed.

Once we got the potatos inside and washed them off we decided to have him line them up from biggest to smallest. 

*think - patterning, sequencing, counting* 

Seward Seas Life Center Summer 2011

A trip to Homer for a wedding meant a LONG drive with the boys so we broke it down into several trips. Anchorage to see the grandparents and go to the Imaginarium (Children's Museum) And then Seward which when I was a kid the sea life center was the 'go down to the beach and poke at stuff in tide pools with sticks'  center and although that has it's own awesome-ness about it, I was more just as excited as the boys to check out the new fancy sea life center.

Seals! This was totally the post awesome part about it.

You then can go down below and watch them swim around. We could of done this for hours.

Several underwater sea life tanks.

Most of the museum was more geared for adults or older kids but they did try a bit with some child friendly bits such as this mini crabbing boat.