Nov. 30 - Dec. 12, 2009

I guess I am on a roll with the 2 week posts. I have been catching up on sleep instead of staying up late blogging but it is working out well so here we go again :)

Here is the run down of the last 2 weeks here at L.G. Academy :)...

• I have a money puzzle that my mom saved. I am not sure if it was mine or my brothers but either way, it is Lili's now. She is catching on to the different coins and that there is a number on dollar bills that tell you how many dollars it is. The puzzle has some advanced features with adding money (we will get to that eventually), but for now Lili likes to pick out the different coins and put them in the puzzle.
• LILI KNOWS HER PHONE NUMBER!!! YAY!!! I wrote our phone number on paper and put it next to one of her play phones so she could practice dialing it and it didn't take long before she knew the whole thing. I now have our home address on the wall in her room, it isn't sticking yet but she will get it.

Lili was losing interest in what I had planned for school most days so back to the drawing board I went, well back to google actually. I have been reading tons of homeschooling blogs and getting some great ideas. I came across a new concept of a combination of a story and art (STart). You read a story and then do some kind of project based on that story. Lili loves books and projects so this has been a hit!
So far we...

• read...Bear in the big blue house book about feelings (played with Lili's bear feelings puzzle). I have a few of these activties for next week too.

• To my surprise Lili likes worksheets. We did a few math worksheets and she did great. There were count sheets, sizes, etc... and she gets to write her name at the top :) She likes to write her name whenever she gets a chance. We started a sheet where she writes her name every month for a year to see the progress in her writing skills.I

• Lili likes the show Sid the Science Kid that is on PBS (Channel 11) and one day last week they made applesauce on the show. Lili asked if we could make applesauce too. She knew what went in it...apples, water, cinnamon, sugar. Can't turn down that. So we made some delicious chunky applesauce. Mmmmm.....good!
• We have been getting Lili in the habit of brushing her teeth before school and to teach her about the importance of brushing regularly and eating heathly meals I found a printable board game to print and play with her. She loved it! We played a several times.
• I am trying to see if she in interested and ready to draw beyond a scribble. She hasn't ventured into this on her own yet but is at the age for it. So to get her motivated and feeling proud I made a few connect the dot pictures so she could draw an object, recognize it and like that she was able to do it. We drew a candy cane, a Christmas ornament, and wrote the work CAT. She liked it! Then we moved on to her watching me draw and object (example...a sun) then she would try and draw a sun. She did an awesome job.
• We painted wooden Christmas ornaments with Gabi and daddy. Lili painted a mitten, Gabi painted a Christmas tree, daddy painted Frosty the snowman and I (mommy), painted Rudolph. We hung them on the tree :) Every year Lili (and now Gabi) makes an ornament. Some years I buy one for them also based on an interest of theirs that year. The plan is, when they grow up and have their first Christmas tree they will get a box filled with these memorable ornaments.

Nov. 16-29, 2009

The week of the 5 senses.
1. Sight...we played "I Spy"
2. Smell...while blindfolded we smelled a variety of items from around the house and tried to guess what the item was (lemon, lotion, toothpaste, etc...)
3. Hearing...stayed very quiet and made a list of the sounds we heard in different areas of the house and outside.
4. Touch...found different items in the house to touch and describe how it felt.
5. Taste...more fun with a blindfold. Now we are tasting foods blindfolded and guessing what it was (lemon, sugar, salt, cheese, pretzel, chocolate, etc...). Then Lili listed all the foods she likes the taste of.
To finish off the week of the 5 senses Lili made her first file folder project. I thought she would love this and she did like the beginning and the end but I think it took to long and she lost interest until the end when she got to play the game. In the file folder we glued little pockets with pictures of items on them (such as a rainbow, ice cream cone, drum, coat, etc...) and then we cut out pictures of eyes, ears, noses, hands and mouths. In each pocket you put the picture of the sense you use with that item (such as an eye in the rainbow pocket) Next time I will do most of the cutting ahead of time and just leave a couple for her to cut out so it takes less time and she hopefully will not lose interest the next time.

During this week we also worked on...

• spelling...Lili picked out of a pile of letters which ones she needed to spell her name and them made another pile and picked out the letters that do not belong in her name.
• reading...Lili finished and got her sticker put in book #15. Five more books to go and she will finish the set. I need to take a look online and the other sets and decide if we should get another one or just move onto early readers from the library.
• Lili likes to do at least one art project a week (usually more). So this week we traced our hands to make hand print turkeys for Thanksgiving. Then we colored them with colored pencils.

2nd week (22nd-28th)

• Spelling...we took turns spelling words with letter magnets.
• Math...addition and subtraction with blocks. Gabi likes to help with the subtraction by stealing blocks from us :)
• Reading...Lili got her big girl bed this past weekend and we had to re-arrange a bit to fit it in her room so now we have a bookshelf from her room in the closet of our classroom and it is filled with books and some puzzles. Lili calls it "our" library. So this week we read lots of books from our library and played a game or did a project based on those books. We read one called when is Saturday and then talked about the days of the week and looked at a calendar. We read a book about different jobs and then Lili picked to be a train conductor and we played train. Gabi and I were the passengers and gave her our tickets. Lili also read from her level 1 book set.

We just read, had some free play time and Lili picked out stuff to do on Thursday and Friday. We kept it relaxed since we had other things to do for Thanksgiving and after that we all came down with a cold :(

See you next week!

Nov. 1-15, 2009

Another two week post here. I am getting a little behind. Gabi hasn't been sleeping well so instead of staying up and blogging I have been taking any sleep I can get. She is getting better so here I am at 11:30pm squeezing in an update on what we have been up to for the last 2 weeks.

• Lili has been writing her name so I thought I would use a fun and messy activity to see if I could spark an interest for her to write some other letters. We made chocolate pudding and spread some out on a plate and wrote letters and our names in the pudding with our fingers. I gave Gabi a small plate of pudding as well to dive into and boy did she! It was a mess, but a fun mess. Lili wrote her name over and over and drew some lines and circles but no interest in learning to write any other letters. Oh well, in time we will get there. The pudding was yummy :)
  

• Blue and red make PURPLE!!! Lili learned how to mix colors today. We used water with food coloring and mixed colors together to see what we would get. We made purple, orange, green and of course, black :) She had to see what would happen if she mixed all the colors together.

• We drew a life size Lili! I had Lili lay down on a large piece of paper and I traced around her. We drew her face and hair on it and labeled all of the parts of the body.
• Lili is really into "projects", as she calls them. Anything involving paper, markers, paint, stickers, etc...is a huge hit. Even after we are done with school for the day she will sometimes ask to do another project.
• We are getting started on addition and subtraction. Robb has been introducing this concept for a little while now. We have been doing math using toys such as cars, legos, etc... She is doing well and now learning the terms add, subtract, plus, minus and equals.
• We are learning our address. Grammy R. and Aunt Laurie sent Lili mail so she could see her name and address on the mail. Then we made pretend mail with different addresses for me and Gabi. Lili got to be the mail carrier and deliver the mail to the correct mail box. She had to match the address on the mail to the address on the mail boxes we made from empty tissue boxes. She had a blast being the mail carrier and hopefully it will help her learn her address. We are still working on our phone number as well.
• We tried a bubble painting activity that I saw online but had trouble getting it to work. Lili doesn't have a lot of patience with things that do not work out so she was done with it right when I started getting it to work a little. That is about all you can expect from a 3 year old.
• We traced our hands and colored them like turkeys for Thanksgiving. Lili enjoyed this. It was like a project! :)
• She is still reading her book set and we are on book #14 I believe. Only a few more to go in this set. Then I will have to look into the next level for her.

We are all still enjoying school and looking forward to more holiday activities coming up. I will be on the hunt for winter/Christmas "projects".

Oct. 18-31, 2009

It has been to long since my last post. We have been busy and sick but still kept up with school. Lili won't let me slack off, lol I thought we would take breaks in the year around holidays and such but I think anything more than a couple days and Lili would ask for some school time. She treats it like a game and has a great time everyday. This is what we have been up to for the last couple weeks.

• We made apple shake-ups. I found this activity from another homeschooling blog. Lili cut up apple slices into bite size pieces with a small plastic knife and we put the pieces in a zip-lock baggie and added some sugar and cinnamon and then... shake it up and eat it! YUM! Lili loved it and we made this a few more times over the past couple weeks.

• We did a pattern activity where I would make a pattern with toys and Lili had to tell me what would come next. She caught on right away and hand fun with that.
• We did some sponge painting of a Fall tree. I cut a kitchen sponge into small squares and we used brown, green, orange and red paint to "sponge" on our leaves to the tree. Lili loves painting so this was a hit. After the tree she wanted to make a sponge painting of herself. I helped draw it and she sponged some paint on it. A few days later she wanted to sponge paint another Fall tree.

• At Gabi's party grandpa R. gave Lili a painting kit with water colors. It came with 3 pictures to paint. Sort of like a paint by number but instead of numbers the the items in the picture are outlined in the color you are to use for it. Lili did a great job painting these. She stayed in the lines really well.
• We also spent time this week getting ready for Grandpa Riner's surprise birthday party. He turned 50! We had his party on Saturday the 24th. Lili had a great time and loved the whole surprise aspect of it.
• Earlier last week we made a paper pumpkin and Ghost and glued them to popsicle sticks. Lili loved it and this week she requested to make "a bat on a stick". So we did. I do the cutting, Lili is getting better but itsn't quite ready to cut out shapes yet, and Lili does the glueing. We are ready for a Halloween puppet show now.

Will it sink or will it float? That was the question we asked for our project this week. We filled up the water table that Gabi got from Grammy for her birthday and found different objects to put in the water to see if they would sink or float. We tried different bath toys, kitchen tools and coins. I wrote down the items to test and Lili put them in the water. It took until we were almost done before Lili started to get the idea of "guessing" whether an item would sink or float before she put it in the water. She was in such a hurry to see what would happen there was no time for a hypothesis, lol

• We attempted to make a food group chart. We cut food pictures out of magazines. Lili even cut out a few herself! But before we could make the chart or put some food pictures on paper plates to make a picture of a healthy meal Lili was tired of this activity. Maybe it was to much. I put the chart and the pictures we cut out up in the closet for another time. We will go back to this subject later.
• Lili wants to learn to jump rope so we started practicing for that. I tied a rope to the bottom of the banister of the stairs and we started with the rope lying on the floor. Lili would jump over and then I would make the rope higher. Then I would slowly turn the rope . She still needs some practice with this but she had a blast trying and did really well jumping over the rope at different heights.
• A great activity for a gloomy and cloudy day....making shadows!! We kept the shade closed in Lili's room and set up daddy's flashlight to shine on the wall. Then we found toys and stuffed animals to make shadows with. Your favorite part was making a shadow of yourself and walking closer to and farther from the flashlight to make your shadow really BIG and then small.

We have 2 more days of school activities until we are done with what I had planned for Lili for preschool. This schedule was supposed to last us until August. HA HA HA! Not even close. Lili flew through it all so fast. There are a few things we will need to go back to but other than that we are ready to move on. I have been searching online for preschool and kindergarten ideas and lessons for us. I am finding a lot of great ideas from reading other homeschooling family blogs. I have all of November planned out. We are still working on Lili's reading set. She just finished book #11. And can read #'s 12-16 with very little help. We are doing great and having fun!

Oct. 11-17, 2009

Gabi's party went great! Lili had great practice with patience this week. Planning and getting things ready all last week, it seemed to take forever for Sunday to arrive. After all the fun and cake, Monday sneaked up on us. Lili was in the mood to color so we went with it. She doesn't ask to color very often. We colored some Halloween coloring pages that I printed. Lili is starting to get the idea of coloring inside the lines. She did a great job on her picture. We did some work with scissors this week. Lili can cut along a line now. Next is to cut out a picture.
We played a fun game to build eye-hand coordination and distance perception. We tossed clothes pins into a basket from different distances. Lili loved it and Gabi enjoyed getting the pins that missed the basket and tossing them in herself. So simple and so fun!
Lili worked in her dry erase letters workbook a little bit and we worked on books #11 and #12 from her reading set. On Friday we made a jack-o-lantern mask/puppet. It is a jack-o-lantern made from paper and glue and then we put him on a popsicle stick. It was a little laid back but a fun week.

Oct. 4-10, 2009

Ahhh......what a busy week. School was low key since we were so busy getting ready for Gabi's 1st birthday party. We still did a little something on most days because Lili can not go more than a day or two without some school time. If we don't do anything in the morning she will ask in the afternoon for some school time. It is great that she enjoys it so much. This week we...

• Mon - We went to the library. Lili always picks out at least 10 books. Gabi also picks books now. We made a phone number chart and cards with the numbers in our phone number for Lili to put in order and learn our phone number. We touched on 911 but I don't think she quite got the idea so we will come back to that later on. She kept the phone number cards as well to practice with. To end our day she had some creative time with play-doh.
  
• Tues - She still puts her weather card on the fridge everyday and if the weather changes by the afternoon she changes her card. She notices the weather all on her own now. We went shopping for chocolate lollipop making supplies for Gabi's party and while out came across a dry erase preschool workbook with letter activities, letter writing and more. When we got home Lili and daddy got started on the workbook while he was home for lunch. Lili also helped me make the chocolate lollipops. Yum!
• Wed - party planning, grocery shopping. A day of experiences out of the house.
• Thurs - Went out to order the cake and balloons. I let Lili pick them out for Gabi. Decision making 101. :)
• Fri - A few pages in our new workbook and some house cleaning for the party. Lili is a great helper!! We read all of our library books throughout the week as well.

Back to our "normal" schedule next week.

1st month at L.G. comes to an end

Our first month of homeschooling went great. Lili still loves having school everyday and even when I plan for a day off she ends up asking to have school at some point in the day. I was going to schedule for a few days off next week while I get the house ready and do some shopping for Gabi's first birthday party but I think I will have to squeeze a short session of school time in for Lili :) She is breezing through most of my scheduled plan for the year. We are already into Nov. and Dec. activities. So I will have to find more to add or jump into a Kindergarten curriculum soon. She has been reading a lot all week and has finished several of her "Now I'm Reading" books. We are on book 11 now. I may have to look into getting the next set for her by Christmas or sooner.

This week Lili learned how to pour her own glass of water. We haven't attempted juice yet. She did really well with the water though. I filled a empty bottle from apple juice half way with water and let her pour into different cups. She had fun and even drank the water. She usually only wants juice. She now says she wants water sometimes and that it is going to make her grow big and strong. :)

Lili kept up with her weather cards all week. Most days were cloudy and or rainy. We did get out one day when it was warm and grabbed some leaves before they all fall to the ground. We brought them in to make leaf rubbings. We placed the leaves under white paper and rubbed paperless crayons over them and saw the leaf prints appear. Then we traced a large leaf onto orange paper and cut it out. Lili wrote her name in glue and then we poured lots of purple glitter on her name. She has recently tried writing her name a few times and is getting really good at it. She gave her leaf to daddy. He was home sick that day :(

At the end of the week (now it is Oct.) we made labels for items around the house. I wrote the word on an index card and Lili sounded out the words and then had to go find that item in the house and tape the "label" (card) to it. Such as...door, window, chair, couch, toilet, bathtub, stairs, refrigerator, freezer, stove, microwave, etc... She loved it! And the labels are still all over the house on the items. We may add more next week.

Today we learned about money. The difference between pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. Lili knows the penny but gets confused with the rest. We will go pack to money again.

That was our week. With the weather cooling off and staying home more we will have lots of time for school and get to add many more fun things to our school year. I keep adding as Lili discovers new interests.

Preschool material for Liliana (and reviews by me)

Lili picked these dvds out at the library. I didn't think she would like them nearly as much as she did. She watched each one over and over until it was due back at the library. I was shocked when she came downstairs after watching the letter factory and began telling me what every single letter sound was. I couldn't believe she knew them all and she picked it up so fast. She continued to check out each dvd and she loved them. After several weeks of getting these from the library Lili asked me to teach her to read. I wasn't expecting that but since she knew the letter sounds and how putting letters together made words I thought we would give reading a try and see how it went. I would recommend these dvds to other parents whether they are homeschooling or not. These are great!


I'm Reading Now Level 1 by Nora Gaydos. This is the set I chose to teach Lili to read. It is a great set. Lili enjoys learning with these books. This picture shows a set with 10 books and that is all I can currently find. I bought our set on ebay and it came with 20 books, the parents guide and stickers. Lili loves to get a sticker in each book as she learns to read them on her own. These books are great! Easy for beginners to learn with. Great pictures and funny stories to keep young children interested. I would definitely recommend them.



The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise.
This book was recommended on a message board I frequent so I looked at the library and they had it so I thought I'd give it a go. It is a great reference book for homeschooling all grade levels. Starts with preschool and goes all the way through high school. I may just buy this book or check it out from the library every year, lol. Tons of other book, magazine and curriculum recommendations throughout. Definitely worth the read.


Slow and Steady Get Me Ready a parents handbook for children from birth to age 5 by June R. Oberlander. This book is regularly recommended on Diaperswappers ("my message board") on the homeschooling page. And it was recommended in the book above...The Well-Trained Mind. So I had to check it out. Lucky for me he library had it. I love the library...I love all things free!! The book is full of activities for every week from birth to age 5 so there is a lot in there. There were many activities within that we had already done but I found many ideas to add to our lessen plans for the year. Although I don't feel this book has enough to keep us busy during our preschool year, we did get some great ideas from it. If you are starting from birth you will get you money out of this book. If not, I would see if your library has it and look through the age of your child and take notes of the activities you would like to try.

Sept. 20-26 Our week of learning

Another week flew by as I blinked. I can not believe Fall is here. Lili is still enjoying her "school" time everyday. This week...

• Math with measurements. We made some delicious apple cookies with some of the apples we had left from the orchard. Lili loves to scoop and measure ingredients and mix it all together. She loves tasting as we cook of course! The cookies were so moist and yummy. I am going to try and work on adding some labels to the blog so I can have a few categories of posts that everyone can navigate through. If I figure it out I will add a recipe tab to share our cooking fun with everyone. First up...apple cookie recipe!
• We made weather card magnets. A sunny, cloudy, rainy and snowy card so far. Lili wants to add a windy card. Everyday she looks outside and checks the weather and puts the appropriate card on the front of the refrigerator.
  
• We talked about taste. Sweet, salty, bitter and sour (small tastes on our finger tip of sugar, salt, cocoa powder and vinegar. Looked in the mirror to find our taste buds. Thought of foods that fit in the different taste categories...cookies and cake, chips and crackers, pickles, etc... Lili figured out that if she dipped her finger in the cocoa powder and then the sugar it made the cocoa sweet like chocolate! YUM! She continued to dip in the cocoa and sugar and examine her tongue in the magnifying mirror.
  
• Skipped story hour this week. Oddly, Lili said she didn't want to go and Gabi was pretty crabby (teething) so we decided to take the day off. We read books and a highlights magazine at home instead. Lili had a subscription to the kids magazine "Highlights" last year. There were sections of them that she was a bit to young to do so we are going to get them back out. She enjoyed the first one so we will continue with the rest.
• We also read her "I'm Reading Now" books all week along with the library books she picked out. We go to the library every week. She finished book #5 in her set. And she is so close to getting books #6,7 and 8. There are just a couple words that she gets stuck on. That is a really nice reading set. I am impressed and Lili is still interested in learning to read. I need to post all the school material we are using for this year. Well, that was our week.
  

Thanks for visiting.

This week with Lili and Gabi

Wow! This week flew by. It was a pretty laid back week compared to our busy schedule for our vacation last week. We are still working on our Now I'm Reading set. Lili just finished book #4 and received her sticker! She is still excited about learning to read and asks how to spell words all the time. Today we were out shopping and she spelled the store name off the building and asked what it spelled...PETCO!! We got 2 new fish :)

This week we...

• Made obstacle course/lines with rope. We had to follow the rope while doing different actions such as bouncing a ball or carrying an egg in a spoon (a play kitchen egg that is).
• Played a matching game with upper and lower case letters from our felt board. Lili has them all down except an occasional slip up with lower case b's, d's and p's. I think they all look to similar to her, she mixes them up sometimes.
• We made cardboard stencils of a circle, square, triangle and diamond and used the stencils to draw those shapes and color them.
• We did "magic" watercolor painting. We wrote on white paper with white crayons and then painted our paper to see the white crayon picture we drew appear.
• There is a new show on channel 11 called Dinosaur Train. Lili has always been a fan of dinosaurs but it has escalated. She loves the new show and playing the games for the show on PBS's website. Since Lili was finished with this weeks plans I added some dinosaur work for her at the end of the week. We printed out a dinosaur cut and paste project. It was a stegosaurus that we colored, cut and glued and it stands on its own. Then we collected all of Lili's play dinosaurs and set up the play-doh so Lili could make dinosaur foot prints in the play-doh. This was her favorite activity so far. She spent time doing this that morning and again in the afternoon. It was a hit! Here is a pic of her and her dinosaurs.

• We went to story hour at a local bookstore. We have been going for several weeks now on Friday mornings. They read a story, do a craft, play a game and have a snack. Lili has a great time and enjoys playing in the children's area of the store. They have toys!

Gabi is learning new things daily it seems now. She can get on and off Lili's ride on pony all my herself, she climbed up onto the couch all by herself and now wants to use spoons and forks by herself. She found a way to reach a cup of yogurt from the table while in her highchair and figured out the spoon very quickly. She finished off the yogurt. Most made it into her mouth but by the end she had also had a nice facial :) What a big girl!

That was our week. Time to plan next week. I need to add more to our plans for next week since Lili is speeding through everything. It is nice to be able to add to our schedule based on interests that pop up. Like the dinosaurs this week. I may add more dinosaur activities again since she is enjoying it so much. Thanks for reading!

A few free days and field trips

Robb was on vacation last week and we were ALL recovering from a cold so we took the week off from any "formal" school work. We did read almost every day and squeezed in a trip to the library. Mainly we just enjoyed our week with daddy and had a few "field trips". Monday we all went to our first circus. Grandpa R. came too. Lili dove into her cotton candy that grandpa bought her. Gabi even had a taste.


The elephants were huge and so close to us as they made their way into the ring. Lili said her favorite parts were the acrobats and the clowns. Lili also enjoyed popcorn and came home with a circus coloring book. We had a great time!


Tuesday we took a trip to the County Line Apple Orchard in Hobart. We normally don't go this early in the season. Boy have we been missing out! The trees were bursting with sweet apples!! We want a honey crisp apple tree for the back yard.


Lili even got in there and helped with the picking. We went to the kids farm at the apple orchard too. Lili played in the little kid's barnyard where she shoveled hay and rode on a kid sized tractor.


 They have many animals and some you are able to feed. Here are two ponies.


And the cutest baby bunny!! For the past several weeks Lili has been putting on her own performances of the three little pigs. We were excited to see this pig area with the houses made of straw, sticks and bricks and don't miss the big bad wolf behind the houses.


One evening we walked to the park. This is one of Lili's favorite parks. The playground is a giant pirate ship. Note the spongebob pirate hat. She loves to go on treasure hunts. Aye Matey!!


What did we do with some of those yummy apples? We made our first homemade apple pie!!


Does that look good or what!? The filling came out a bit running but it didn't matter since it was so yummy.


Our vacation week was quickly coming to an end :( Friday we went to the Midwest Zest Fest here in Highland. $2.50 per ride for the kiddie rides....unreal! Lili went on a few rides and Gabi hung out on me in our moby wrap and to finish off the evening we had ice cream, yay!


Throughout the week Robb and Lili built this lego star wars replica together. Lili had the best time hanging out with daddy during the week.


Time to get back to our normal routine. I'll be back next week to share what we are up to.

Preschool!!!

Tuesday, September 1, 2009....Our 1st official day of preschool. Lili has been so interested in school I figured we could try something a tad structured and see how it goes. This morning as we began our school time, in our p.j.'s, I gave Lili her 1st day of school gift. It was a red "locker" bin. In the front slot is her name and every morning there will be the supplies for our school "work" for that day. Today inside her bin was a ball, I'm Reading Now books #3 and #4, construction paper strips, tape and some new school supplies (paper, pen, pencil, markers and scissors). Lili enjoyed opening her surprise.

Our project for our 1st day was to make a chain with the names of the people in our school...Lili, Gabi, Mommy and Daddy. We linked the chain together and hung it up. Lili helped write the names and decorated the links with her new markers. Lili also read book #3 by herself and she has almost got #4 down. It will be time for a sticker soon. We practiced the new words from book #4 that she has trouble with by putting them on our felt board so she can see the letters put together to make that word. We also played a game with the ball to work on eye hand coordination and timing to catch the ball after 1, 2 or more bounces. Our day went pretty well. It was a bit different for Lili since we had some set things to do for the day but there was plenty of time for her to add in her own ideas and games.

Gabi keeps herself busy with all the fun toys and of course tries to get into what Lili is doing now and then.

For our 2nd day of school we read some library books and played a game of memory with upper and lower case letters.

Lili reading video

I finally got it up here. Took some "homeschooling" of my own to learn how to do this. Always learning something new :)

Lets build a word!!!

Lili is constantly fitting spelling into all parts of our day. This past Thursday (8-27-09) we were driving home from the park and she begins spelling pig, P-I-G, cat, C-A-T, and many more animals. She calls to the front for help spelling horse. Then we begin taking turns giving each other words to spell. An impromptu spelling bee began as we made our way home.

She also likes to build words on her felt board. I am in the process of making more letters so we can make a larger variety of words. Here are pics of her in action!





Gabi is getting in on the action too! Lesson of the week...crayons are for coloring on paper not for a snack.

Mom, teach me to read.

A few weeks ago Lili asked me to teach her to read. I had not planned on starting any formal teaching yet but since she asked we jumped right in. She had been watching a few Leapfrog dvds from the library and had already picked up most of the letter sounds and saw how putting the letters together made words. I think those dvds sparked the interest in learning to read. So I searched for the perfect first reader book set and found the program "Now I'm Reading!" We bought level 1 and it arrived this past Friday. She was so excited when she opened the box she hugged me and said "Thanks, Mom". And by Monday (yesterday) she had read her first book all by herself!!! She was thrilled to put her sticker in it that she had done it. She read it again this morning to herself. I hope to get it on video soon. 1 book down 19 left to go in the set. And there are 4 or 5 sets if you continue with this program. We are almost through book #2 and #3.

Lili is reading!!! Yay!!!

Our homeschooling blog

Welcome to my first blog experience. The goal for this blog is to track our homeschooling adventures with Lili (and down the road, Gabi) and maybe if I get time we will throw in some other content just for fun and entertainment. Everyone, including Lili, because you know she loves to see herself in pictures or videos, will be able to check in here to see what we are up to and get involved in Lili's love of learning. Thanks for visiting. Please come back soon!