Tot School

Kayleigh is 26 months old


Hello Tot Schoolers!!!

There was not a lot of official Tot Schooling going on here this week. To be honest we only got in one day, not counting baby gym. So our rain/rainbow theme didn't get a lot of action. In fact the rain activities didn't get any. LOL

Here's what we did get in on Thursday. Some rainbow fun.

We practiced recognizing and counting 1-5 with some cute circle-time rainbows from here. Kayleigh liked playing with the pointer and she even attempted to count along a bit. I knew she could count to 3 but she surprised my by actually counting to 5. No real # recognition that I can tell. Of course she does her best learning behind my back. LOL


We worked more on counting by counting clouds with an activity from the same site. I deviated a bit by using cotton balls for clouds instead. I'd like to say it's because I wanted to make the activity more tactile for Kayleigh but that's not true. I just didn't feel like cutting around all those little clouds twice. LOL The sensory aspect was just a bonus.



She also did a rainbow magnet page, also from Home Grown Hearts. Her rabbit helped out too.

We read about rainbows in All Aboard with Noah!: A Lift-the-Flap Book . Very cute! And she didn't rip all the flaps out. She's notorious for ripping flaps out. She only got to a couple this time. Sigh...

I made a really cute umbrella shape matching game, again courtesy of Home Grown Hearts, but we didn't get to it. Maybe we'll get it out next time we have a rainy day.

She did play with this.

Naturally, she didn't sort anything. She just randomly stuck things on pegs. So, since I didn't get any pictures of this, you're not really missing out on much. LOL

We did spend a lot of time outdoors early in the week. Before the weather turned on us. She decided she was ready to be a Sonlighter like Sissy. She decided to study birds in The Usborne Book of Knowledge.

She played with her beloved Fisher-Price Little People Dance n' Twirl Palace. Quite frankly, every little girl needs one of these. My oldest was quite upset that they didn't make this when she was a tot. (Never mind that she had every other FP Little People set made at the time. And I won't discuss how we got rid of every single one of them about 2 years before Kayleigh arrived because we thought more kids just weren't happening. LOL)

Kayleigh is really starting to play interactively with dolls. She sets them up, makes them do realistic things, and has them singing. It's just the cutest thing to see.

Kayleigh loves it so much that she even shares her most favorite thing with her little people, rocks. Mmm, mmm rocks are perfect for a royal feast.

Lastly, Big Sis taught her how to cloud watch. How cute is that? (And how irritating that it's the only "activity" that she actually followed directions for? LOL You've got to love her.)

Be sure to head over to 1+1+=1 and see what the other tots have been up too.

Weekly Wrap-Up

Happy Friday cyber-friends!! It's time for the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers. I'm always excited when I actually get to the Wrap-Up on Friday.

We had a good week! In our most exciting news, we finished up with First Language Lessons . Woot!! It's great to see the year winding down. Math-U-See and Writing With Ease will soon follow. Yay!!!

Here are our highlights...

Math

This week she was working on multiple digit additon with regrouping. She did great with double digit last week but this week she's having trouble. Being a first-born perfectionist, this distresses her greatly. Her real problem is messy writing causing her to make silly mistakes. One day she'll write neatly like I ask and suddenly her math will improve again. LOL

Language Arts

Our last week of FLL consisted of reviewing diagraming and a small unit on letter writing. In WWE, we did poem narrations.

Social Studies

We finished reading The Lewis and Clark Expedition. An excellent book about an exciting time in our nation's history. We were going to Netflix a short National Geographic movie about it but they no longer have it. There's a longer one on Netflix streaming that we might try instead. She might sit through it if it's exciting enough.

We also finished Justin Morgan Had a Horse. It was really good. As Marguirete Henry's books always are.


Mackenzie is reading Sarah Whitcher's Story as her read aloud. All we can say is wow! A great story about keeping the faith.

Science

I'd like to tell you I remember what we've been doing but I can't. LOL Wait I remember. Military aircraft in the beginning of the week. We're a military family so that's not exactly new and exciting for us.


She did an experiment on circuits. Series and parallel, to be exact.



Here is Mackenzie with her series circuit. Not very bright. And if one bulb goes out, they all do in a series circuit. You remember those kind of Christmas lights don't you?

Here she is with the parallel circuit. Now I know it doesn't look very "parallel." That's because we wired it wrong 100 times and by the time we got it right everything was a tangled mess. But it worked! Finally!!! You'd think that after watching Justin, from Sonlight, do it we'd have got right away. LOL

And look it still worked, even with one light bulb removed.

In other science, we planted a little garden. We were going to just grow a few tomato plants in our topsey turvy hangers, like last year. But daddy is home now and he always has grander plans.

It wasn't easy for him.

He had to battle a large amount of some vine like plant with a lot of roots. (You can get an idea if you glance behind Wee Babe's head.) Did I mention lots of roots, big ones? Who'd have guessed? (And can you believe that I didn't take a before shot?)

In the end, he solved that dilemma like this...

Yep, that's a chainsaw. LOL

Mackenzie helped with the planting. In this photo, she's planting something in a pot but she did help with all the planting. I just didn't get pictures.

Our little garden. Hopefully my black thumb won't kill it. Or Kayleigh's trampling feet.

Tot School

Kayleigh is 26 months old

Hello Tot Schoolers, I hope you had a fabulous week! Ours was good. Great weather for the most part and a trip to Busch Gardens on Friday. It's our Friday ritual in the spring. Go hit all the rides as much as we can before PS lets out. We don't do lines. LOL

Big Sis, Mackenzie, was bug-sitting some caterpillars and ladybug larva for a friend who had to go out of town. Kayleigh got to enjoy, and be repulsed by, the critters. Last week both the ladybugs and the butterflies were ready to be released. (We're also watch a praying manthis but he hasn't hatched yet.)

Kayleigh was DYING to hold a "yadybug." Right up until you tried to hand it to her. Then she'd run screaming. LOL

She finally decided to participate by carrying around the cage that still had a couple of "yadybugs" in it.

She was the same way with the butterflies. "I hod it." Then run away, screaming.

Then she tried to kiss it. LOL



Finally, she let it sit on her leg. She was so proud.

I made this shape matching game from Making Learning Fun. It was supposed to be an Easter game but we didn't get to it so now it's a Spring game. LOL

As you know, if you've ever read my blog before, Kayleigh is not big on playing by the rules or doing what I'd like. She almost always refuses to sort, match, name correctly anything. She always opts to do it "wrong." On purpose. ( I should make a video of her strategy for mismatching. It's hilarious.)

Please notice in the photo below that she actually matched the circles CORRECTLY. It's a miracle!! And it's the only one she did right. After that she continued with her normal madness of matching them to all the wrong choose and then setting the piece aside instead of putting it on the correct choice. LOL (I did the other two as an "example" of how to play.)

She played with Mr. Potato Head.



We were given these Sesame Street My First 123's Deluxe Activity Cards from a friend. They come with dry erase markers and you can practice counting objects and tracing the numbers. I got out #1-5 so we could work on some number recognition. I thought we could play some games with them, like I call out a number and she hits the correct card with the fly swatter. Well, eventually, after some practice. No dice. She wasn't interested. She just wanted to color on them.

We tried spooning her "treasures" into a tray (frame from the Dollar Tree really).

She used spooned ONCE.

It's faster if you just grab handfuls and don't try to sort them by color.




The big hit of the week was her Melissa & Doug Deluxe Pound and Roll Tower because what's not fun about banging something with a hammer and making a lot of noise?


Be sure to check out the other tot's at Carisa's.

Weekly Wrap-Up: Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

Hello Fellow Homeschoolers! It's time for the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Because it's "Busch Gardens Season" for us, we crammed 5 days of work into 4. We hit the coasters on Friday.

Things are winding down for the year. Handwriting as been done for a while and we are finished with Spelling Power for the year. We have about 4/5 more weeks left of First Language Lessons , Writing With Ease, and math. That will leave us with just our Core 4 reading and science for another 4 weeks. That will be easy, peasy because our Sonlight reading is our favorite part of school.

Here are some of the highlights of our week.

Math

Mackenzie learned multiple digit multiplication this week. And boy did she LOVE it! She said, "It's fun, easy, and awesome!" She picked it up right away so she was able to skip the extra practice pages. Except that she WANTED to do the extra pages. LOL

Social Studies

We are still reading The Lewis and Clark Expedition and working on our Lewis and Clark lapbook. It's been fascinating reading about all the places and animals they discovered. How cool to be able to name places after your family and friends. We also made a discovery of our own while reading the book. In the book, Lewis' dog is referred to as Scannon. In our lapbook materials, Seaman. We were wondering what's up so we did a little research of our own and learned that the dog's true name was Seaman. Apparently the journals, understandably, were a bit blurry and they couldn't quite read the name. The error was discovered in 1916, when a researched noticed in Lewis had named a creek after his dog, "Seaman's Creek." So with a little more double checking it was learned that the dog's name was indeed Seaman.

We are also learning how the Morgan breed of horses was started in Justin Morgan Had a Horse. It's been a really good book so far, funny and exciting. And it's a true story. If you're a horse-lover should should check it out.

Mackenzie read Meet Thomas Jefferson as her reader this week. She's really been enjoying reading biographies this year and this one was no exception. She finished it in 3 days.

Science

This week we continued to study flying things in our reading and circuits for our experiments.

We also had some Painted Lady Butterflies and ladybugs that we were bug-sitting for friends who had to leave town. Sadly, the butterflies did not emerge as we had hoped. Out of the 5, only two hatched from the chrysilis and both had damaged wings. Poor butterflies.

The first one's wings were the worst. He couldn't fly at all.

The second one was a little better off. If could fly down but it couldn't lift itself off the ground.

The lady bugs did great. They look nothing like lady bugs when they start. At first we weren't sure that they'd ever look like ladybugs. LOL But they did.

I only managed to get blurry ladybug pictures. I need a better lens for stuff like that I guess.

We're also "sitting" a praying mantis. Nothing to report there yet. LOL

Be sure to head over to Kris' and see what everyone else is learning.

Win a Sunny Patch Gift Pack

from Melissa and Doug.




If your tot is a Sunny Patch fan be sure to enter. Lots of neat stuff just perfect for spring and summer play.

Melissa and Doug See and Spell Give Away

Home Grown Hearts is giving away a Melissa & Doug See & Spell. Melissa and Doug make awesome learning toys and this one is no exception. I've been eyeing it for a while now. Pop on over to Home Grown Hearts to enter.