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 :)