Tot School

Kayleigh is 25 months old

Hello Tot Schoolers!! I hope you had a great week! We had a lot of nice weather and spent a great deal of time outside.

Kayleigh played a lot on her Little Tikes Swing Along Castle.

We did our version of the egg and spoon race to work on some motor skills.

Kayleigh was supposed to scoop the eggs out of the bowl.



Carry it the spoon to the basket on the other end of the yard.


And drop into the basket.



Kayleigh felt the need to tweak the activity. For one the egg wouldn't always stay in the spoon. So she solved that problem first.

It really works better, she decided, if you hold the egg on the spoon.


But alas, Kayleigh still wasn't happy. It was taking far too long to get all those eggs into one basket.

Problem solved! And that is just a perfect example of how her mind works. Work smarter, not harder. LOL

She also found other uses for the eggs. She's so clever! LOL

She helped her sister and her cousin decorate our fence with sidewalk chalk.

She loved, loved, loved this activity with a tic tac toe game I bought at the Dollar Tree. She played with it all week. Well I should clarify a little bit. She loved it if you could just stand there and stick pegs in. If you started any of that educational mumbo jumbo, like talking about pink and white, she'd run away screaming. LOL

She used egg chalk to draw on her Melissa & Doug Magnetic Chalk Dry Erase Board. She loves the chalk board. I don't use it nearly enough. And I haven't been brave enough to let her use the dry erase side yet. She often likes to write on things that aren't supposed to be written on so I've been leary. LOL Her older sister never did such things.

I got out her Smart Shapes peg stacker. She ALWAYS love this toy. Usually she'll just stack the pegs but this time she even did the puzzle portion.

I decided to give her Melissa & Doug Alphabet Puzzle Book another try. She hasn't really seen it since she got it at Christmas. She totally wasn't interested in it then. She did a little better this time. She would flip through the pages herself and carry it around. She had zero interest in playing with the puzzle pieces or listening to me sing the abc song as I pointed to the letters.

Check out what other tot's are doing at Carisa's.

Weekly Wrap-Up

It was a short week for us. Despite my intentions of not having a formal spring break, we had a few days off anyhow. My niece and nephew were on spring break and fighting like cats and dogs. So my niece came over here for a few days to have some fun with her cousins.

Math

This week was mulitple digit multiplication. The mere sight of those problems freaked her out. But she picked it up pretty quick.

Language Arts

She did some diagramming of sentences with compound adverbs. That made her feel like a genius. LOL

Science

We were still talking about flying machines. Of course we haven't finished the week but I'd imagine the end is the same as the beginning. LOL

Social Studies

We are on to the Louisiana Purchase and Lewis and Clark. Loving it! We're reading The Lewis and Clark Expedition and it's really good. As if a Sonlight book wouldn't be. We've also added in a lapbook about the expedition. It was half off when I bought it so I was very happy. Mackenzie's loving it and it's complimenting our reading nicely.



Our read aloud and her reader are on more of a Native American theme. We're reading Paddle-to-Sea and Om-kas-toe. She must be loving Om-kas-toe because she keeps asking to read ahead. Paddle-to-Sea is an excellent book for slipping in some extra geography. We've been mapping Paddle's trip. Last we read, he was in Detroit. Woot! Go Wings!! (Can you tell I'm from the Detroit area? LOL)


Which reminds me, I always forget about our geography lessons. Along with Sonlight's mapping assignments, we're using The Complete Book of Maps & Geography. She really loves this book. And she's pretty much able to work through it on her own. It's giving her a lot of great exposure on the different kind of maps, how to read them, and the different geographical areas. She's learning about the Pacific states this week.

That's about all we've gotten in. Today's Friday and we have our Friday reading assignments to do but we haven't done the rest since Tuesday or Wednesday. We'll be playing a little catch-up before field hockey tomorrow, I think. We're definately going to finish the work from our core, although I may just reschedule math and LA. We have Busch Garden's plans for next Friday, can't get behind in the core. LOL


Here's some pictures of what she did while she wasn't doing school. LOL And one from Easter, since I haven't blogged about it yet.

Hope you all had a great week!! Be sure to check out what everyone else is up to over at Weird, Unsocialized, Homeschoolers.

Tot School

Kayleigh is 25 months old




Happy Easter Tot Schoolers! I hope you all had a blessed day!!

Kayleigh, bless her heart, did not want to participate in many activities this week. She had no interest and a lot of opinions. I'm totally jealous of all your cooperative tots who do all these fun things every week. Here it's always "no, no, no!" LOL

Here are some of the things we attempted.

#1 I thought she would LOVE this activity from Home Grown Hearts. Especially since I put the eggs in a little bunny basket. Yeah, not so much. Sissy tried to interest her by playing along and getting one of our Bitty Twins to play too. We tried playing it in different locations. She's not one to be fooled. She did one put on one egg.

#2 Hide and Squeak Eggs~ These she did play with for a few minutes. Not to match the shapes on the eggs to the shapes in the carton, of course LOL, but she did have fun with them.




#3 Like last week, she had no interest in matching bunnies, butterflies, or chicks. They just sat there untouched.


As did #4, sorting big and little crosses. She refused to attempt this too. We're going to try it again.


She did play with her Melissa and Doug lacing beads. This was a surprise because those usually get tossed aside by her too.

Our biggest success of the week was the Hide 'Em and Find 'Em Eggs. I bought them at Target for $15, which I thought was pricey at the time, but apparently that was a deal compared to Amazon. And since she loved them so much, I'm glad that I got them. You turn them on and they either cheep or shout "I'm over here!" Then your kids go find them. Inside are little bunnies or chicks. They shout "Surprise! You found me!" when opened.

Kayleigh finally worked on the Letter C. She started her C is for Cat page for her ABC book.


She started off painting with Q-tips but she didn't like that. Too messy! So we switched to a paint brush. Mommy still needs to cut it out so she can glue the pieces together and, hopefully, draw the whiskers. Then it will be ready to laminate and put in her book.

Here she is helping with our Resurrection Eggs. We had a hard time keeping stuff out of her mouth. She doesn't eat much food but she eats everything else. LOL

And here's my spirited girl all dressed up for Easter Sunday. Notice she's clutching a bag of gummy bunnies. "I got candy!" is pretty much all she said all day long. LOL

So now we now that she likes candy and open-ended toys and nothing else. LOL

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

Weekly Wrap-Up

Happy (Good) Friday Cyber Friends!! It's time for the Weekly Wrap-Up hosted by Kris.

We had a nice week. School is almost complete, we're finishing an art lesson tomorrow, and we had our first visit to Busch Gardens.

Bible

We stick-figured Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane this week. We also did our Resurrection Eggs. Mackenzie always get so angry when we're at this point in the Bible. "That Judas is so horrible! I can't believe he did that for 30 cents." (Clearly she doesn't have a grasp of what those 30 pieces of silver meant back then.) We did have a great discussion about how God can take the worst of circumstances and use them for good.

She also spent a lot of her free time working on a "newspaper." This was her front page story.

You might be able to read it if you click on it but here's what it says..."Easter is almost here! Kids everywhere are excited about Easter, on the day before Easter kids will be dying Easter eggs and preparing for the Easter bunny. But some people don't know what Easter is really about. It's not about the Easter bunny coming to your house, it's about Jesus. After Jesus died on the cross to save us from our sins some people put him in a tomb. Then after three days Jesus rose from the dead! All the disciples were overjoyed! Then Jesus went to heaven. And that's what Easter is all about."

Language Arts

We worked on diagramming compound subjects and verbs. We also talked about direct objects.

Science

We had a bit of a hodge podge this week. We talked about hover crafts, clocks, and we did an experiment to see what objects would conduct electricity. Mackenzie was a little annoyed because I wouldn't let her watch Justin do the whole experiment on our Discover and Do DVD. We were going to use some of the same objects so I didn't want her to know the results before we started.

Daddy helped with this one.

They tested 5 objects: Paper clip, Coke can, penny, quarter and foil. Here are their hypotheses...

I took a ton of pictures of the experiment but only one came out. My husband has a knack for ruining pictures. LOL He either sticks a body part in the middle of it or it's blurry because he can't be still for more then 1/100th of a second. True story.



Here are their results.

The Coke can had the most interesting results. The body of the can did not complete the circuit but the tab did.

Social Studies

We finished Carry On Mr. Bowditch this week. We were very happy that, despite all the loss he endured throughout his life, that it had a happy ending. We were very amazed with his genius and all that he accomplished.

We also started reading about the Louisiana Purchase in The Landmark History of the American People. Mackenzie and I were both glad that we weren't the ones who had to make that instant decision to buy the Louisana territory from a persnickety Napoleon. It certainly put Jefferson in an awkward position, that's for sure.

Math

We finished our review on rounding by 10s, 100s, and 1000s. We were supposed to start a new lesson on Thursday but we were at Busch Gardens. We decided to put off the new lesson until next week. I love having the option to do that.

Extras

Mackenzie started playing field hockey this week. She loved it. A close friend and her daughter are field hockey nuts so that's how we heard about this clinic. I'm from Michigan so I'd never even heard of field hockey til I met them. One of her coaches in on the Olympic Field Hockey Team. I didn't even know there was a team for men. LOL

Have a blessed Easter!!