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!