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!