Tot School

Kayleigh is 32 months 

It was another busy week but we managed to get in some fun activities.  Our theme this week was pumpkins/Halloween and the letter H.  Here's what we've been up too.

Literacy Activities

Kayleigh has been spending some of her free time playing "circle time" with her dolls.  It's so cute to see her singing the songs to her "babies."

We sang lots of pumpkin songs that we found on Carisa's Fall Fun Page.  She had a lot of fun acting 5 Little Pumpkins and both girls loved playing Ring Around the Pumpkin.

We worked on the letter H with some fun Hippo printables from COAH.  She sorted Mommy H and Baby H and helped the hippo spell his name.  We didn't get to our H page for our ABC book but we haven't done G yet either. LOL

Math/Science Activities

I bought some marshmallow ghosts and made sorting and pattern printables for her.  Any activity that involves her eating treats is a big hit.  You can download them HERE.  I imagine the marshmallows will be dirt cheap now.

We went to our friends annual pumpkin carving party and Kayleigh got to check out the insides of a pumpkin.  She wasn't too impressed and quickly ran away from that mess. LOL

We read The Pumpkin Patch Parable and then made faces on felt pumpkins.  I tried to call out different shapes in the hopes that she'd follow my instructions but she wasn't falling for that.  She only made one face before she lost interest.

Fine Motor/Learning Toys

She got out our BRISTLE BLOCKS  and played with those a lot.  She loves the little people that game with them.

She worked on her scissor skills and made a pumpkin.  She's getting quite good at the cutting and actually cut all the pieces herself. Those Kiddy Scissors that we bought really did the trick. She's now able to cut up Mackenzie's math with regular kid scissors. Bless her heart!

The girls painted some little mini-pumpkins.  Kayleigh usually has a 3 minute attention span with painting but she worked on this for a good 20 minutes.  Then we put them out on the patio to dry.  And then a freak thunderstorm came and washed them clean.  Good thing I took pictures. 

She did some Trick-or-treat writing that I found at 2 Teaching Mommies.  They had a pre-writing version and a more "advanced."  She did such a good job!

Ironically, she did better at the "advanced" because she doesn't have the fine motor skills need to trace the lines in the "pre-writing" pages.  Which totally makes sense, when you think about it.  Now I feel a little guilty about all the tracing pages that I gave my former students over the years. LOL  I probably stressed the poor buggers out.  "What do you mean keep my pencil on the skinny line?"  

And we went on our yearly jaunt to the pumpkin patch.  Naturally the weather didn't cooperate.  They said HOT (which is what we usually deal with) so we dressed for hot.  As soon as we got there it got cold and rainy.  That was a bummer considering how we were dressed. LOL  

Weekly Wrap-Up: The One Where We Had Bad Weather at the Pumpkin Patch...As Usual

Another week gone, another great book finished.    A field trip and our usual Friday with Friends hang-time got us a tad behind, so we have a couple of odds and ends to finish.

Since I haven't mentioned much about any subjects other than history, I thought I'd do a quick run-down of some of our other subjects.

Bible 

 We're still in the book of John.  This week we read about Jesus being arrested and tried.  Reading these verses are always good reminders of how it's important to obey what God is asking us to do.  And aren't we happy that He's never asked us to do anything as difficult as what Jesus had to do?  They always change Mackenzie's perspective when she facing something that she views as "too hard."

We're also reading through Starting Strong.  We just finished reading the section on friendship which had some great advice on choosing and keeping friends.

Language Arts 

 In First Language Lessons  she has been working on writing friendly letters, reviewing diagramming, and she just started conjugating verbs.  Big fun. lol

Science:  We started a new lesson on the nesting habits of birds.  This one made us laugh a bit.  Particularly the brood parasites, like cowbirds.  We thought it was hysterical that they hide one of their egg in another birds nest.

Our experiment that we started last week regarding what color feeder would birds prefer was a bust.  They didn't have a preference, they were just happy to have food.  The book said that they would prefer the red one.   It doesn't surprise me that the birds here were less then cooperative.  They're like my children. LOL  Hopefully, the experiment for lesson 5 will go better.

Social Studies

Geography is going great.  Mackenzie loves the Star-Spangled Statebook.  It's so easy to use and she is learning so much.  She is up to Oklaholma and she can find any state, A-Oklaholma, on a blank map.

History is just awesome, naturally.  We love, love, love our Sonlight.  This week we finished reading Across Five Aprils and it might be our all-time favorite Sonlight book.  We loved it!  It had us crying all the time, we learned some awesome history, and we love that it was based on a true story.  It made the Civil War some much more real for us than if we had just read some boring old text book.

We also read about George Washington Carver in American Adventures: True Stories from America's Past, 1770-1870.  It was a really good story and I learned so much more about him than I was taught in school.  As we were reading, they talked about some of the 300 uses for peanut butter.   I was so surprised that they hadn't mentioned peanut butter, like I learned in school.  So I googled it.  It wasn't mentioned because he didn't invent it.  To paraphrase  Wikipedia, "it's a popular myth that is still taught in American Schools today."  Yep, that and 10 million other half-truths that they fed me.   Thank goodness we decided to homeschool so I could beef up my education.

Mathematics

She's continuing on with division with a side of geometry.  She's doing well.

Extras

She's doing fantastic with her piano lessons.  And her soccer team's record is 6:1, which is a huge improvement from last years 1:6.

We would've finished our Mary Cassatt artist study last week with a Cassatt-style art project but, well, life you know.

And our annual field trip to the pumpkin patch.  We always look forward to a nice fall day at the pumpkin patch.  And we always end up with a nice sweltering day.  This year's forecast was no different.  So we dressed for hot.

When we got there a little rain blew in.  So it was chilly and wet with us in our "hot" clothes.  Sigh...it was hot later that day at our friends field hockey.  By then Mackenzie had changed into warmer clothes and was sweating to death. LOL

At any rate, here are some highlights from our trip.  No hayride picks though.  I do not let rain touch my Nikon.  I'd rather my children got wet.  =o)

And that is my, very late, wrap-up.  Pop on over to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers and see how everyone else fared.

Tot School~Lite

Kayleigh is 32 months

It was a very easy week here at our Tot School.  Between doctors appointments, errands, and our weekly outing with friends not one Tot School activity done.  It was all we could do to get fourth grade work completed.  Instead Kayleigh just played. 

Wait!  I was mistaken.  She did pull one Tot School activity off the shelf.  Spooning our "fall treasures." However, she never did spoon them.  She stirred them up and called it "soup."  LOL

And she asked for "candy corn math."  We all know her motivation for that request, don't we? LOL 

Here are the other ways that she passed her time...

Finished up her Soccer Tot season....

Rode the "big girl" swing for the first time...

"Painted" our fence...

And rode her bike...she's finally getting the hang of pedaling.  And that's no easy task with the cheap plastic wheels they put on bikes these days.  Shame on you Radio Flyer!  She might be getting a new one soon with "real tires."

And that was our week.  We'll do all the fun stuff I had planned for this week next week.  Be sure to see what the other tots are up to by clicking the Tot School Button at the top of the page!

Weekly Wrap-Up: The One Where We Caught Up on Experiments…Finally

It was a good week.  Mostly because history is always so fascinating.  We love history!
We are still studying the Civil War.  It’s still fascinating and emotionally draining. 
This week we finished Lincoln: A Photobiography and Turn Homeward, Hannalee.  Both were fabulous!  And I learned tons of things that my public education and history minor didn’t teach me.  Mackenzie doesn’t know it yet, but I think I’m going to have her write a little report on Lincoln next week.  She learned so much about him that it would be nice to have a little memento about it.
We are still finishing up Across Five Aprilsand it just keeps getting more exciting.  And we just learned that it is based on a true story.  That makes it even more thrilling, and moving, for us.
We finished the Major Battles pocket in our Civil War History Pocketand have moved on to War Technology.  It coincides nicely with what we read after Lincoln, The Monitor and Merrimac.   That was a quick book about a very life-changing battle.
Mackenzie also started reading Shades of Gray which is about the struggles people faced after the war.  So far she says it’s awesome and has, naturally, read ahead.   She pretty much says that about every Sonlight book. LOL
We were playing experiment catch up in science, Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the 5th Day ,  this week.  We hadn’t done any of the experiments for lesson four because we needed a cow bone and more bird seed.  But we finally got them finished.
So are first experiment involved comparing a cow bone and a chicken bone.  We observed, measured, weighed, etc.

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And we are testing a hypothesis regarding a birds color preference.  We placed food in a blue dish and a red dish.  Mackenzie says that they’ll be more attracted to the food in the red dish.   So far they don’t like either. LOL  Kind of like our bird bathes that they hated.

And we did a little more candy corn math, just for fun.  And a sugar high.

Be sure to pop on over to the Weekly Wrap-Up, hosted by Jamie this week.