easing back into homeschooling after a break

We bought a place and have been moving so we took a 'summer break' and did very little official schooling for the last month. Most of this was done just this week as we ease back into the swing of things.

Rhyme 'domino's' from targets dollar section. Some of the rhyme matches were hard for even me to find so I picked out a few I knew had matches and we played with those.

This book talked about how our tongue can only taste some things and where we can sense them on our tongue so we did a little matching. We used, salt, lemon juice, baking powder, and a piece of candy to label each taste as salty, sour, bitter, and sweet.

Got our kits from Academy of science for kids for the upcoming school year. Since it's summer (for not much longer) we did the Make Snow experiment from the polymers kit. It was a lot of fun and we figured out how if you keep adding water it turns from light fluffy 'snow' into gooey globs. 

More science! We used a kit bought randomly at a garage sale. This goo was made by a mixture of water, borax, & glue. We also dyed it red, 'cus the more it looks like something gross the more fun it is, right?

A marble maze.

You put the peices together attempting to make something the marble can run through to the end. Tricky tricky engineering and logic lessons going on here.

Summer weather fun

In the summer we like to use curriculum and do topics that we might not otherwise get to cover during the year. This summer we are testing out Moving Beyond the Page . We are just finishing up the weather unit.

Cloud formations. a printout of different cloud formations, construction paper sky and a bit of fluff for clouds. We made about four different cloud formations, these are Cirrus on the left and Cumulonimbus on the right. 

I've wanted to introduce form drawing for a while. It's generally introduced in first but for simple straight and curve lines I wanted to start in kindergarten. My kindy boy though is by no means a perfectionist and his motor skills aren't fantastic so I thought to use our Handwriting without Tears pieces for wooden capital letter to use for our forms. Here is the straight forms practice we did from Form Drawing for Beginners 

After practice with the forms using the wooden pieces for a while we will try again using out block crayons. 

Making Rain. Soil + moisture in a ziplock bag and taped to the window. After a bit in the sun the water evaporated, when it cooled it 'rained' inside out bag.

We took our best shot at making boats which we then tried out in our puddle. The balloon boat did make quite a splash but didn't do to well once it got wet. 

Tot school. Matching colors. At 2 he isn't very good at naming the colors but he can match like with like.

These same pieces from the above picture also have removable shapes which we matched and fit back into their proper spaces.

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.

A Winter Solstice Meditation

"These next few days are the days of the Winter Solstice, a time when those who are very attentive to the skies note that the sun, which has relentlessly moved southward on the horizon since last June, seems to pause on its journey before beginning to climb northwards to center again. Solstice is a time of pause. So…pause. Breathe. Relax. Rest. Be at peace.

Spirit of winter rest, help us to enjoy your peace in this quiet place.
Remind us to pause during this season.
Grant us awareness, keep our gratitude fresh each day.
May the songs in our heart be blessings and insights to us and to others
and may compassion always shine forth from the depths of our hearts."

~Christine C. Robinson

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.

A few things from an 'off' week.

This week has been full of 'NO' and 'I don't wanna' from both boys. Im going to chalk it up to a week of -30 weather and boys who need to get out but whatever it is it's been like pulling teeth to get them dressed or fed much less do any school work. Here are a few easy, quick, little prep, cheap activities we did manage to accomplish this week.

Working with the abacus. RightStart Math has a very nice abacus that is easy to use and color coded by 5's.

We practiced mostly #7 as that is the number we are focusing on this week but played with making some other numbers as well.

Turkey handprints. The top one Loch traced and colored himself (I added the feet) and the bottom one I traced and the boys colored in.Tracing is fantastic fine motor skills work for pre writers.

This is one of those $1 games from Micheal's. For Loch he had dice which he rolled and then took turns moving the pieces that many spaces. (Math, taking turns, fine motor) 

For Asher he only took each tee out and placed it back in a hole. (fine motor)

Magnetic dinosaurs placed and moved on the board. (fine motor, storytelling/pre reading)

I had pulled out my drop spindle and was working with it Loch decided he wanted to as well.

This drop spindle was made from a small wooden dowel and wooded 'wheel' from Joann's. I added a bit of roving that already had some twist in it so it wouldn't just break when spun. He practices Holding the roving in one hand and spinning with the other.