Tot School

Kayleigh is 31 months old

Since it’s officially fall it was time to starting working in some of those favorite fall themes. So we did apples this week. We also took a break from introducing a new letter.

Literacy Activities

She did these cute little apple puzzles from 2 Teaching Mommies apple unit. We only did letters A-F, as those are the letters we’ve covered so far.

She did really well considering she hadn’t really worked with lowercase letters much. ( My only goal with any letter activities at this point is exposure to the uppercase.) But I told her what the lowercase letter was and she matched it to it’s “mommy” and she got them all correct. That was a nice surprise!

She made this apple collage, also from 2 Teaching Mommies. There was a lot of gluing involved so she was THRILLED!

She really likes these bottle cap 1:1 correspondance activities from COAH, so we did the one from her Apple unit.

As you might of guessed, we read a lot of apple books. Her favorite was Apple-Picking Day (Clifford's Puppy Days) so we read that one a few times. Not enough for me to want to hide it though. LOL

Math & Science Activities

I got out Hi Ho Cherry-Ofor the first time. I thought that’d I’d be able to convince her they were apples but she didn’t even give me a chance. “Oooo cherries!” Oh well!

She liked it a lot. Just not as a counting game. We each took one spin and after that she just wanted me to put all the apples on the trees so she could knock them off. When she tried to sneek it into the living room, I had to put it away. We’d never see those cherries again. LOL

We played an Apple Roll & Count game from 2 Teaching Mommies. She did not want to color the apples after she rolled so we switched to putting on dot stickers instead. She was happy with that.

Our FOAM DICE had dots on them so I covered one of them with numbers so we could work on recognition too.

View Full Album

We played with real apples. This was Kayleigh’s favorite activity of the week. She loved them so much she was willing to count them, sort them, line them up. She drew the line at making a pattern with them though. LOL

View Full Album

She did a great job with this apple shape puzzle from COAH.

We worked on visual discrimination with these same/different apple cards from Prekinders. I didn’t demonstrate and just gave her verbal instruction and she did it quickly and correctly. On the ONE card that she was willing to do. LOL I think I’m going to leave this activity out for next week and see if I can’t get her to do some of the more difficult cards that she ignored. It’s a good skill to work on.

We talked about the parts of an apple using this adorable felt activity from 2 Teaching Mommies.

View Full Album

Life Skills and

Other Fun Stuff

She practiced cutting with this cut and paste activity from COAH. I cut the apple pictures into strips and she just had to cut between each apple. Scissors and glue…what more could she ask for?

View Full Album

We have a new sensory bin for the month of October. Black beans, mini-pumpkin erasers, stretchy skeletons, mini-pumpkins, rubber bats, and halloween buckets. Both girls love it!

View Full Album

We did a little cooking this week and made Cutie Pies from My Montessori Journey. They’re just cute, little apple pies. Kayleigh helped with the cutting, the mixing, and the seasoning. Mackenzie did that plus handled the crust.

View Full Album

Be sure to click the Tot School button at the top of the page to see what other tots have been up to this week.

Weekly Wrap-Up

Nine weeks in to our year and we’re still plugging along. This week wasn’t as smooth as I’d have liked due to some behavior issues, another day at Busch Gardens, and a time-consuming family obligation but it was all right.  At the end of the week we accomplished all the musts and only had art left over.  We might do some of that this weekend.  Or not.

This week we learned some interesting tidbits about President Lincoln as we continued to read Lincoln: A Photobiography.   While not an important bit of information, we found it it interesting that Lincoln was the first president with a beard. 

Even more interesting was the reason that he grew it.   While campaigning, he received a letter from an 11 year old girl who suggested that he grow a beard because he would “look a great deal better for your face is so thin.  All the ladies like whiskers and they would tease their husbands to vote for you.”  So he did.

We loved that!

We are still reading Across Five Aprils and it is keeping us on the edge of our seat.  If my voice could handle anymore reading aloud, we’d be done by now. LOL

Mackenzie’s  reader is Turn Homeward, Hannalee.  She’s quite a few chapters ahead so that should clue you in to what she thinks of it. 

It’s about a little-known event that occurred during the Civil War.  I’d certainly never heard of it and I was a stellar history student in high school and college.  Apparently a couple thousand textile workers were shipped north by the Union army to work in the mills there.  Children included.  This book is a fictional account of that historical event.   And it is good and emotional.  Just liked you’d expect from a Sonlight pick.

Mackenzie is working on her Life As a Soldier pocket in her Civil War History Pocket and she made a Confederate flag out of construction paper.  I love the stars. LOL

We’re on Lesson 4 of Exploring Creation with Zoology 1: Flying Creatures of the 5th Day .  On Flying Factuals.  It’s been interesting to learn about what makes the bird fly and about what they can endure during migration.  God sure knew what He was doing when he created them.

We’re a bit behind in our experiments because we need a cow bone and Daddy can’t find a steak good enough for him to purchase so we’re still waiting. LOL

Language arts and math are continuing to go well.  Nothing that exciting to report there.

While we didn’t get to our art lessons this week, we did keep up with our artist study on Mary Cassatt.  Here’s her notebook page for this week.

She had a soccer game today and she did some great defensive work.  I missed the first half of the game because I had to be at Soccer Tots with the tot.  Their team won so they were happy.  The team’s big scorer was back and she was hot.  The coach took her out for most of the second half because we were beating the other team so bad.  I thought that was nice.

We spent Friday enjoying Busch Garden’s Hallow-Scream.  Here are some pictures.  But not from yesterday but the week before.   I got behind on my uploading and editing. LOL  The only difference is that this week my girls were wearing different halloween shirts.

 

And that was our week!  Be sure to head on over to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers and see what everyone else has been up too.

Tot School

Kayleigh is 31 months

Tot School this week was very much Kayleigh-led.  My plan was to finish up the Letter F using  2 Teaching Mommies’ Forest Unit.  But instead we had a lazy week and just got a few of my planned activities done.  We didn’t even get our Letter F page done yet.  lol There’s always next week.

Here’s what we did do. 

Literacy Activities

Kayleigh used our Do-A-Dot Markers and painted a “F” and Swimmy the Fish.  We read Swimmy this week and she wanted to paint him.   Since the main characters were a fish and a frog, they fit in nicely with our letter of the week.  And hooray for Making Learning Fun for having a Swimmy printable.

She did the F is For Fish Magnet page from COAH’s Letter of the Week Curriculum.

Math and Science

She played with our Feed the Frog Game again.  She just loves that.   She’s even taking to counting them out a bit instead of just shoving the “flies” down the poor frog’s throat. 

She did this fun forest animal track puzzle from 2 Teaching Mommies.  She really liked that and did them more than once.  Because she’s a little odd, she jumped on the puzzles EACH AND EVERY TIME that she did them.  She said she was playing hopscotch. 

View Full Album

She also did the Count and Match Pine Trees game from 2 Teaching Mommies.  She did a really great job.  She was even kind enough to find the correct number after we counted the trees.  Apparently, she is starting to recognize some of them.  =o)

We never did get to the Pinecone Sorting game so I’ll save that for when we get to P.

She really got in the forest aspect of the games because we had read Little Rabbit Foo Foo until my throat was raw and bleeding a couple of times beforehand.   The book is now hiding under my mattress. 

And as long as we’re on the subject, Kayleigh was certain that the rabbit was not naughty because the mice, tigers, worms, and goblins enjoyed being bopped on the head.  “Deys happy!”  I think she secretly wants to be a goon.  She did manage to refrain from bopping any of us on the head though. 

Kayleigh pulled out her Shapes on the Farm magnet book.  (And hey, farm starts with F. We’re still on topic. Sorta.)  This is one her all time favorites.  She plays with it all the time.  She usually just places the shapes randomly.  This time she chose to put them on the “proper” page.  Without any prompting from me.  I was stunned.  Generally her motto is “I’d rather walk barefoot over hot coals than do things the right way.”

Fine Motor and Learning Toys

I finally broke out My First Book Of Mazesand let her try it.  I put them in page protectors and gave her a dry erase marker.  She LOVED it!  And she did pretty good considering this was the first time she’d done anything like that.

View Full Album

She got out our Krinkles, similar to Bristle Blocks.  Both girls always enjoy these.  And guess what?  The particular set we have has a farm theme. LOL  I couldn’t have planned it better myself.

Naturally the instrumentsmade an appearance.  She loves anything that makes a lot of noise.

Lastly Kayleigh and Daddy played with her, wait for it, Little People Animal Sounds Farm.   I should’ve done F is for Farm.  Clearly that’s what she wanted.   I’m surprised she didn’t get out her Melissa & Doug Farm Puzzle.

Life School

We made some yummy banana bread, in the form of muffins.  I decided to be a good mom and let the children help out.  I’m one of those people who doesn’t really enjoy cooking and I enjoying it even less when there are “helpers” who make a bigger mess. LOL  I’m trying to overcome that flaw though.

Of course, the fit she threw when she wanted to crack the eggs instead of mash the bananas did not endear the project to me. LOL

View Full Album

And that was our week.  Be sure to click the Tot School button at the top of the page to see what the other tot’s have been up to.

Weekly Wrap-Up

This is our first week doing a full five days.  That’s good because I doubt that will happen next week. LOL  The weather looks good for a Busch Garden trip on Friday.  =o)

We had a big review in First Language Lessons .  In one section Mackenzie had to proof read a paragraph that had capitalize errors.  I swear, if that child does not start capitalizing the word I, I might have to hurt her.  She even missed it when it was the first word in the sentence.  LOL  It’s like a total mental block for her.

We’re really getting starting to get into the Civil War.  I love how Sonlight makes history so personal for you by using living books instead of a dry textbook.   We are reading The Perilous Road and Across Five Aprils right now and they are really bringing the history to life for us.  We’re getting such insight on what it was like to live through that time.  Across Five Aprils, with it’s story of brothers fighting on opposite sides, is particularly emotion.  I love a book that can draw the emotion out of you.

We also started Lincoln: A Photo-biography which is, obviously, not historical fiction.  But it is so good.  It gives a real picture of what Lincoln the man, as opposed the president, was like.  It cracks Mackenzie up that such a famous president was a slob.  Now she feels that there’s hope for her and her messy room yet. lol

It was a little disappointing to read that Lincoln, although he was against slavery, did very little to stop it during his early political career.  Even when entering into the Civil War, slavery was not his priority.  Saving the Union was.   But in the end it did become his priority and he did the right thing even though it was the hard thing.  Such an awesome man with a tragic ending.

Along side of The Story of the USA and The Landmark History of the American People, these books make history our favorite subject.

We also read Life on a Plantation (Historic Communities)which we picked up when we went to Jamestown.   Excellent book with great pictures. 

We started another pocket in American Civil War History Pocket.  This pocket is focusing on the life of a Civil War soldier.

As a side project, we made homemade ink from berries and wrote a letter as a Civil War soldier would have.  We smashed some raspberries, added a little vinegar, and viola!  Homemade ink.  It was fun but Mackenzie is very happy that she can use a pen or pencil.  Much easier.

View Full Album

This week our assignment in I Can Do All Things was more color mixing.  Neither one of us is particularly good at making vibrant colors yet but it sure is fun.

View Full Album

We’d been finishing school early, before lunch, almost everyday last week.  (Woot!)  And so Mackenzie asked to do an extra art project while the Wee Babe was napping.  Her drawing/painting came out BEAUTIFUL but boy was it an ordeal.   I know she’d love for you to check out here work and comment. Although I’m sure she’d be a tad embarrassed that I ratted her out.  LOL  But I need to write down this stories so I can share them with my future grandchildren, so it had to be done.

Piano lessons are going GREAT!  She loves it and she has a little natural ability it seems.  She came home so excited today because the teacher said that she could work ahead in the book.  Not bad for the only kid who’d never touched a piano before.

We had our third soccer game this weekend.  It didn’t go so well.  It was hotter than hot, our star player was away, and there were no subs.  So the only break they got was the 5 minutes at half-time.  They got creamed.  But on the bright side, they executed better team work then they usually do.  Might that be because they couldn’t rely on their lovely friend, with the amazing kicking leg, to do all the work?  Hopefully, they’ll continue to do this when they have their “star” back.

View Full Album

And that was our week!  Be sure to check out how everyone else’s went over at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.