Weekly Wrap-Up: The One Where 3 Manly Dudes Pile Out of a Girly Van

Since last week I only blogged about Mackenzie's week, I'm mainly going to focus on Kayleigh this week.  But rest assured, broken ankle or not, school continued on for Mackenzie.

See...

We wound up taking to another ER because getting her in with an orthopedic doctor through the system turned out to be impossible.  She still wouldn't have seen anyone had we done it that way.  My husband wound up taking her to the military hospital's ER where they have an actual ortho on call for the ER.  What a novel idea!!! They xrayed her, put on a real cast, and they gave her pain meds.  First time our military health care worked for us. lol

As for Kayleigh, we've been just rolling along.  Slowly.  Taking our time.  Doing school or not.  Mostly not.  We've been working on what's to follow for a couple of weeks.  Because we can.  Or we didn't feel like it.  Or Charlie and Lola was on.  Or a bike ride sounded like a better idea.  Or whatever.

Raising Rock Stars Preschool and All About Reading

We've been working on N for the last couple of weeks.  (See the reasons above.)  Because of our lack of progress RRSP and AAR are still lined up for the moment.  So I'm lumping them together for this post. They might not be next week.  Who knows?  We throw the best of plans to the wind on a whim. LOL

The length of the verse was not to her liking.  She hung it on the wall any way.  The craft was a win-win  her book.  Watercolor paints and glitter.  I wasn't as thrilled because paint + glitter = big mess for me to clean up.

Of course, I could've done the project however I wanted, lol, but I'm trying to be a good mom and let her enjoy school and fun projects.  But now my school room is covered in gold glitter despite repeated vacuuming.  Sigh...

She was still working on getting ready for syllables in All About Reading.  They did this by having you break up a compound word, like "Sunshine" and saying each part separately pausing between the words.  Then the child had to say them together to guess the "new word."  It took Kayleigh a few minutes to figure out what I wanted but once she figured it out she was gung-ho.  We repeated this a lot. What a great idea!  I would've never thought of teaching syllables like that.

I do have to say that the AAR animal for the letter N was a stretch.  They chose Nanny goat.  Seriously.  What a silly choice. She just kept saying goat because what small child says nanny goat? LOL And to her, goat starts with g.  How about nightingale or newt? The Nanny goat was referred to as goat each and every time she saw it. lol  She did LOVE the rhyme from the book and the craft (color the goat and glue on foil "tin cans" but she'd never say it started with N.

 

 

You Can Read

We are still working on unit 3 of You Can Read.  Part of the issue has been we just haven't been schooling consistently for those pesky reasons.  They other part of the reason is that she just wants to call "my" "you or me."  It's always a surprise.  LOL  We've been having fun with the unit though. We broke out the nerf guns and rolled (our education cubes with YCR inserts) and shot our words.  HUGE hit!  I totally recommend it.  Seriously.  Do it today.  And we've been working on some of the activities included with the unit.

For Fun

Mackenzie, a Webkinz nut, saw that the Webkinz Road Trip was coming to a local museum.  So we went.  With her broken ankle.  Like that would stop her.

There are only a couple of things that I want to say about it.  First, you leave there with a TON of FREE Webkinz stuff.  Massive amounts.  Please see how full my friends arms are.  Then note that all of the kids were also carrying stuff and I had a bag full of stuff.  That's a lot of FREE stuff.  (On a side note, all of the kids were very well occupied with Webkinz activities for the evening.  I call that a double win.)

Most important...Please take a good look at the Webkinz van behind my daughter.  Notice the festive and somewhat girly colors.  Then imagine our surprise when the van rolled up to the curb and three manly-type dudes pile out. (You can see a couple of the dudes in the pictures.)  My friend and I were cracking up.  Our minds were reeling. We had so many questions. Especially once we found out that they've been doing this for two years.  How did you wind up with this gig?  And why? What keeps you road trippin' in this girly van? Do you like to play Cash Cow when you're not driving?  Do you tell potential dates about your job right away? So much to find out.

We fully intended to find out, dear readers, but we failed.  It got really hot, really quickly and we had to bug out.  We don't do that kind of muggy heat. It's not in our skill set. Plus it was about to start pouring for the hundredth time.

I'm so sorry that you'll have live without that knowledge.  Next time...I promise.  I'll be watching for their return and we won't leave until Neil from Merritt, Georgia spills his guts.  Unless it's hot, muggy, and ready to down pour.  Then we bail.  Again. Just keepin' it real.

 

Tot School:

Since we didn't finish up with M last week, we finished up with it this week.  We are still working on our third You Can Read unit.

Raising Rock Stars Preschool

Our Raising Rock Stars verse was 1 John 3:18 and we talked a lot about showing our love.  Her verse was of acceptable length this week. LOL  She enjoyed making the craft about sharing however I have to clarify that she said that she would not be willing to share any of the items that she pasted on that paper.  Sigh...

 

 

You Can Read

We are plugging away at our You Can Read unit.  We built our words in the pocket chart, I wrote them on the magna doodle and she crossed out the words as she rolled them.  Her absolute favorite activity is always the roll & slap activity.  This week she added a little something to it.  Instead of rolling the die she decided to turn it into a baseball type of game. LOL  She did that for 45 minutes.  That really helped cemented those word.  There is still one word she has trouble with so we'll stick with this unit for another week. 

 

All About Reading

We did an activity that is a precursor to syllables.  I would slowly say a short sentence (3-4 words) and Kayleigh would lay out a block for each word.  Surprisingly, she really liked that.  I suppose Zecora the puppet helped.  We made our craft and made Ms out of play dough using our Handwriting Without Tears cards. Then she pressed "princess jewels" into the M.  Jewels + Play Doh = Happy Tot

 

 

Sonlight

We read a ton of princess stories this week so we added in some other princess fun.  Kayleigh often "arrived to school" dressed in her princess best.  We made princess stick puppets, a sparkly princess crown, and worked on a Tangled tot pack.  We also pulled out some of our Angelina Ballerina books with a princess theme and did some matching jigsaw puzzles.  

  

Tot School: Changes

There are some changes happening here for Kayleigh and her education.  As I mention in a previous post, Kayleigh has been making a lot of progress in the area of reading.  I guess since she's actively learning to read, she's really not a tot schooler any more.  I might have to officially call her a pre-ker.   Darn her for growing up!

Raising Rock Stars

This week in, Raising Rock Stars Preschool, we were working on K and Psalm 34:13, Keep your tongue from evil.  That is a good one for Kayleigh as she can have a very sharp tongue.  She was happy because she loves the letter K, for the obvious reason. LOL  Here are her highlights.  My favorite is her reaction to the cutting/taping of the verse.  Definitely not long enough to suit her tastes. LOL  And maybe the verse itself hit a little to close to home?  ;o)

She had a grand old time painting her RRS craft.  So much fun that she totally covered over the lines and I had to redraw them once the paint was dry. lol

Kayleigh was doing her "sassy pose."

 Reading, Reading, Reading

Since her reading is taking off, we are now going to be doing her All About Reading at a faster pace.  The second half of the program focuses more on phonics and I'm anxious to get there.  But I want to continue with the first half because it contains some great pre-reading skills that I still want her to be familiar with.  This week we worked through K & L.  We worked on some more rhyming activities, made our letter crafts, and made our letters out of pipe cleaner.  

We finished up with our second You Can Read unit.  She has officially added I, can, me, you to her list of known words.  When I get around to remembering, I'd like to make her a a portable word wall.  One day I will get around to it.  This week she played sight word bingo with her sister and found her words in sentences.

To give her more phonics practice, I have added in the Get Ready for the Code series.  So far she loves the book.  She's worked through about 12 pages this week.  I'm sure that won't last. LOL  She does great with the phonics portion but struggles with all of the writing, so we skip some of that. I'm going to switch her over to Handwriting Without Tears for handwriting in the near future.  We own all of the manipulatives already and I really love the program.

Sonlight

All of our reading came from the 20th Century Children's Book Treasury.  Kayleigh loves it as much as Mackenzie always did.  She often reads it to her babies.

The Rest

She's been having some fun with some of my Pinterest finds this week.  I saw some great ideas and we had to try them out.

Reading a "legend".  She had to put the correct color sticker on number according to the legend.  She really liked it.  She did not like having her picture taken.  lol  I made printables for numbers 1-10 and I'm going to work on 11-20 soon.  Click the picture to download.

Work those fine motor skills by weaving on a cooling rack.
She loved it and did it for a few days.

  

Cut a straw and the string the pieces.

Huge it.  She's worn it all week.

 I found this on Rock-a-bye Butterfly.  So cute and versatile.  You can just switch the number of bears to coincide with the child's abilities.  So I made a printable to go with it.     Kayleigh had a blast.

        

  

Stacking foam blocks with tongs.  HUGE hit!