What Mom Learned

What Mom Learned

Highlights from this week:

What didn't work:
1. Two sick little boys under the age of 2
2.  Sleep deprived mommy

What did work:
4. Finding a rhythm 
5. Using separate tubs to put my materials for each subject
6. Craft Wednesday

What makes all the hard work worth while:
7.  This afternoon, M started saying 'white' as I pointed out a group of colors
8.  Reading the bible with my boys every morning, praying and listening to praise music during the day. --It's completely worth repeating from last week

Best Projects:
9. for M:  craft laces- He played with that for 15 minutes. 
For Mommy: Hearing giggles, watching him dig in to the craft box.

Worst Projects:
10.  for M: The pattern activity. 
For Mommy:  Just remember to put wet wipes in the craft box so I don't have to go hunt them down while painting.

Rewards this week from homeschooling:
11.  The sorting and concentration games seem to be making a bit of sense to M.
12. Realizing our 100 Ways to Know God Loves Me book and CD does outline God's promises to us which is something I wanted to add to our list.
13. Being able to read so many great books every day. 
14. M asking me to read more bible stories

Challenges of the week:
14.  Introducing the concepts of color to a left brainer will need more time. Next week on the schedule is the letter C and the shape is circle. M already identifies both the upper and lower case as well as that shape very well. So, while we may still do some fun things for those concepts, we will continue to work on the color black. Any tips out there? I've googled and gone through my material on hand. I have been asking mommies with older kiddos, a preschool teacher and an art major friend for some fresh fun ideas. We had fun this week despite both little ones being sick. In hind sight, introducing two colors in one week wasn't the best idea for us. 

Tip for the week:
15.  Small spurts of  focused attention balanced with giggling fun is the kind of learning environment I have been praying to provide. Thank you Lord, for this amazing opportunity to educate my child.

Midweek Peek

A butterfly activity

"My Teacher Sleeps in School" Give Away

I have benefited so much from other people's freebies and printables, I feel I should give something back. One of my goals is to figure out how to create a pdf and get it downloaded to host for others. I have an idea for some lessons I want to do next year, but all in due time. What I can do now is link up with HomeSchool Creations on their Fall 2011 Curriculum Clean Out Giveaway. Check out her site to see what other people are giving away :-)

We were very fortunate to be given a huge pile of beginning readers from a friend who moved over the summer. One of these books is called " My Teacher Sleeps in School" by Leatie Weiss. I've seen several teachers do Back to School activities based on this book, so I thought I'd give my copy away since we won't be using it. 

Here's how it works:

1. Between now and September 30, 2011, comment on this post that you'd like to win this book. Follow my blog if you'd like. I plan to do this on a regular basis :-)

2. Include your contact information in case you're the winner.

3. On October 1st, I'll use random.org to chose a new home for this little treasure and email the winner.

4. If the winner doesn't respond in 48 hours, I'll choose another winner. 

5. I will pay to ship domestically here in the US.

Week 3

Working around another case of croup, here we are rolling in to a new week of learning:

In case you can't tell from M hugging the education cubes, we are focusing on the colors black and white and the Letter Bb

Circus and About Me

I thought I posted this yesterday, but with M having the croup again. I must have sleep blogged or something. Anyway, I commented on this post Sunday night over at Musings of Me and won :-)  Michelle did such a great job with 119 pages in the Circus unit. Hmmm I think I'm now going to change from Cars to Circus for C next week. How can I resist???




Also, the About Me unit has some great crafts I'm excited to try :-)

Bible- A & Abraham

Our scripture for the week from My ABC Bible Verses:

Our story this week was about Abraham trusting God when He called him to move his family. He obeyed and it was credited to him as righteousness. We read it not only from our Story version but from others in our house as well. M diving in to God's word:

Different ways to hide His words in Little Hearts:

Music that filled our house as we learn, love and live:

Seeds Family Worship

100 Ways Book and CD set:

Number 1

I really had to think about numbers in the most simple and basic way for a 22 month old. It's not about counting or quantity yet. It's about just identifying the number itself.

Some materials for the week:

The number One on our chart for the week

M came down and played with everything that was set out:

I really liked this placemat reference sheet:

Matching:

Geoboard:

Flashcards:

Number racetracks. M really enjoyed running cars over them:

Education cube: I found some different fonts and made a few sides just different ones. I'll find even more going forward so all six sides are covered:

Reviewed what Day one was in creation again:

Clip n Learn:

Scratch n Color:

Number books we read this week:

Window Markers:

Adding to our number posters as we learn them :

Letter A

I started the week a bit overzealous in my approach. I knew I wanted to test out many ideas I've seen, read and heard about regarding the alphabet. I now have a better idea which ones are age appropriate going forward with the alphabet. These are the activities that worked:

 A portion of what I laminated for the week:

Our Letter A sensory bin:

Tweaking our schedule pocket chart system. Still not happy with this one either. It will change again until I find one that depicts our checklist in a friendly way.

Our A scripture for the week. Repeated twice a day three times each:

Our A character trait. I broke it down in simpler words. It's a good reminder for mommy to have too

 Puzzle time:

I taped a stencil to the table under his page. So when he scribbled, the letter appeared. We also made the letter out of pencils.

Do a dot with pom poms - this time attached to magnets on the pom poms and using a cookie sheet underneath.

Lower case 'a' activities:

Build a letter:

I spy in a bottle

Fridge phonics

Geoboard:

We started our Chika Chika boom boom tree :-) Our version is many layers of paper towel tubes held together with masking tape. Then I painted the trunk brown. I cut out some leaves from construction paper, laminated and super glued the leaves and pom poms for coconuts.

Exercise time:

 Clip n Learn:

Apple activities:

A foods Caramel apple. Almond paste. We also had an avocado on a different day. We will complete it with an American dinner of chicken pot pie tonight.

Scratch and color:

Window Markers:

A books we read this week: