Our Young Author

Dec. 5th-18th...Lili wrote (dictated) and illustrated her first book this week. She loved doing it and LOVES reading her book even more. It is titled "The Pet Shop" and is about a girl who goes to the pet shop with her mom and gets a puppy. When they get home the puppy sees cat, he barks and chases the cat. The dog gets lost and the girl is sad. In the end the girl finds her dog and everyone is happy again. She did a great job!

I have been trying to find a website for math for Lili. Something with games to help her enjoy learning math but I haven't found one that I love yet. She tried out one I found this week and it was okay but she didn't want to play it for very long. It got to be to hard for her to keep up with.

I should take a picture of these. We made paper bag puppets out of paper lunch bags. We glued on googly eyes, yarn for hair, foam and jewel stickers for noses and clothing accessories. Lili and Gabi made girl puppets and I made a boy puppet. Time for some puppet shows!!

Dec. 13th...This started our 3 week Christmas break. I don't know why I am calling this a break. There is no way Lili would let me make her take a break from school for 3 whole weeks. We still read books, I printed a handful of worksheets so I would be prepared for those times when Lili is asking for more school. I printed out the lyrics to some Christmas carols for us to sing. The girls helped me wrap gifts. We painted ornaments for the tree and made paper Santa faces with cotton balls on his hat and for his beard.
Next week will be filled with baking, cooking, finishing up worksheets and reading a Christmas book. "Mary's First Christmas". We'll start our new school schedule on Monday Jan. 3rd. I'd better get to planning. Merry Christmas!!

BINGO!!

Nov. 28th-Dec. 4th... This week I printed out some addition/subtraction Bingo cards and we played math Bingo almost everyday. We used our triangle math manipulatives as counters on our cards and for help figuring out the math problems. Lili loves shouting BINGO!!!
We also read a lot of our own books this week. We took a break from the library. Lili is going back through her reading sets for level 1 and 2 and reading those to Gabi and I. She is doing really well and reading right through most of the them with no trouble. I have level 3 waiting for her for after our Christmas break. We are taking a break from formal school time from Dec. 13th through Jan 2nd. We will still read and I will have some worksheets on hand in case Lili requests more to do (she usually does when I plan a break). I am planning some Christmas craft activities but other than that we will be reading our Christmas books, wrapping gifts, baking cookies, learning Christmas carols, playing in the snow, etc... So there will be plenty of learning going on even though I am calling it a break.
This week we also had a play-doh day. We all looked around the house for different "tools" that could be used with play-doh. We had a brush, cookie cutters, rubber stamps and much more. I found a spanish lesson website with some free trial pages so the girls and I went through that and learned colors, numbers, verbs and restaurant terms in Spanish. They really enjoyed it. I saved that site to go to again. Here is the site http://www.learn4good.com/kids/learning_spanish_online/free_lessons_for_children.htm

That is all for now :)

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Nov. 8-27th, 2010...FIELD TRIP!!! YAY! On Nov. 8th we went to the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. Lili and Gabi both had a great time. Lili's favorite part was the sharks and I think Gabi's favorite was seeing "Nemo", clown fish. I requested a few books about some of the ocean life we would be seeing at the aquarium so that the rest of the week we could use that as our topic. We looked up information about sharks since that was Lili's favorite. She colored a picture of a shark and then wrote a few facts about them on the sheet. She colored a map of the world to show where the oceans are. In addition to our theme of the week we also practiced telling time on the clock and read some of our own books.
Week of the 15th...we colored some Thanksgiving pictures, practiced math with the dry erase sheets from Uncle Tom, read books, talked about and found on the books where the authors name and the illustrators names are and what those people did to make the book, we did a few pages in our workbooks, we got out our crayons, a sheet of paper and some lids, buckets, cups and some square items. traced around the bottoms to make circles and squares of different colors and sizes all over the paper then created a pretty picture from our shapes (clock square and / or circle, tires, balloons, lollipop, flower, etc...). Lili really liked this activity.
Thanksgiving week was a short week. We only had school on Mon., Tues., and Wed. This week we made a big word wall and cut out shapes and pictures of Thanksgiving related things and wrote the word on them and taped them up on our word wall. Some of our Thanksgiving words were...family, fall, harvest, dinner, turkey, gobble, pumpkin pie, November, Indian, Pilgrim and parade. We also read some Thanksgiving books from the library, colored some Thanksgiving coloring pages, made turkeys with by tracing out hands and did some building work with legos and thingamajigs (yep, that is really what they are called) Happy Thanksgiving!!

Fun in the Fall

Oct. 4 - Nov. 5, 2010....WOOOOOOOOOO!!!!! I Knew I was behind but didn't realize it had been a whole month since I posted. YIKES! Well here is our past month in a nutshell...

We read lots of books and took many trips to the library. We reviewed money and did some worksheets on coins. We read books about different types of tools. Lili completely a unit study on stranger awareness. There were several worksheets and a role playing activity that we did with her barbies. We played out different scenarios of stranger encounters. We took turns playing the stranger, kid and parent. At first the topic of strangers kind of scared Lili since it is sort of a negative topic but once we started the barbie roll play she felt better and had a lot of fun with it. She even asked me a few days later to play it again with the barbies.

We went on our first hayride at the pumpkin patch. Grammy came with too. Lili rode on a pony and went on a little train ride. We all went on the hay ride and picked out our own pumpkins. Lili picked out a really nice one and Gabi got a really cute little white one.


In preparation for a week theme of "seasons/weather" we raked a pile of leaves and the girls jumped in them!


For our seasons week we talked about and wrote down information on each season like...the weather, holidays, fun things to do and eat in each season. Lili drew a picture for each season and on the last day we created areas for each season. I piled up items on the couch for Lili to decide which season they belonged to. Such as...butterflies, flowers, gloves, hats, sun visors, Easter baskets with eggs, beach ball, coats, jackets, trick or treat pumpkin buckets, etc... We put down long sheet of paper in spring to be our sidewalk for sidewalk chalk and bike riding. In summer we put down a big blue blanket for water and set up some beach chairs, a beach ball, sunglasses and sun visors. In fall we had jackets, and Halloween items. For winter we lied out a white blanket with white pillows for snow and balled up white socks for snow balls (Yes, there were a few snowball fights, lol), coats, hats and gloves. The girls played in the seasons all day. Here are a few pics...




We had a week of Halloween fun too. We read lots of books about Halloween, we colored and drew pictures and we made glue ghosts. I thought I had a picture but I can't find it now :( We drew ghosts on wax paper and filled it all in with glue. We stuck googly eyes on them and painted a black mouth. They had to dry for a couple days. When they were dry they peeled right off the wax paper. They were a bit white but also quite transparent. Very cool looking. They are quite durable for just being Elmers/school glue.

Okay, all caught up :) That is all for now.

Take a sick day or two

Sept. 26th - Oct. 2nd.... Lili learned this week that when you are sick you do not have to do school work if you don't feel well. Her and Gabi have been fighting colds and Lili was still asking for school work. I told her she could take a break until she felt better. So our week was a bit relaxed. We read books, finished up our homes week projects (animal homes booklets) and started our money theme. We started by going over the different coins and separating them into groups (pennies, nickles, dimes and quarters). The girls also made me a bank out of an empty oatmeal container. They covered it in construction paper and decorated it with crayons, foam stickers, googly eyes, etc.... Now I have somewhere to put my money :) They both already have one so now mommy does too.

Jobs and Homes

Sept 12th-25th, 2010...Week of the 12th was "Job" week and the week of the 19th was "Homes" week.

Jobs Week... This week we read books from the library about different jobs and kids thinking about what they would like to do when they grow up. We made a list of jobs to pretend throughout the week (doctor, dentist, artist, photographer, singer, construction worker, chef, etc...) We also took a few trips to visit people at their jobs. Lili had already been to see where both Grammy and Grandma work so this week we went to see Grandpa Riner , Daddy
and Aunt Nancy too. Lili got to sit in the new cars on the showroom floor. To bad my battery died on the camera or I would have more pictures. Her favorite car was the red Corvette. We filled helium balloons to bring home and got a tour of the body shop. There were lots of cars getting fixed. Lili loved it! Especially sitting in the driver's seat of all the cars. She also colored a mechanics picture for Grandpa.


Mail day!! Lili got a peek inside a mail truck and even got some mail of her own. We walked the block and saw what it was like to deliver the mail. Lili had fun and thought delivering the mail would be a fun job unless it was cold and snowing. She colored a mail carrier picture for Aunt Nancy.


At the end of jobs week Lili said she wants to be a ballet teacher and a mommy when she grows up. She also colored a picture for our dentist who we will be going to see soon and one for her dance teacher.

Homes week...no pictures of this. The girls have been sick so homes week has been extended. We are working on a booklet of pictures of different homes (our house, homes for dogs, spiders, ants, etc...) and a workbook page booklet about different animal homes. We also got several books from the library about different types of homes.

In addition to our weekly themes we went to the library like usual for the girls to pick out books of their choice. Lili reads 2 of her level 2 blue books to me each day and she is getting really good. Uncle Tom brought over a couple dry erase mats with addition and subtraction problems on them. Lili got out her math manipulative triangles and started whipping right through it.

Hopefully Lili will be feeling better soon and we will start our next theme...money!

Dinosaur Week

Sept. 5-11, 2010...

We are onto Lili's list of topics she wants to learn about. This week she chose dinosaurs. We read several books about dinosaurs from the library, made "fossils" in playdoh with toy dinosaurs and leaves/plants. We even had a meat-eater dine on an herbivore and leave his bones there in the play-doh, such imagination. We went outside and measured the size of several dinosaurs for a visual experience of how large they really were.
Tyrannnosaurus Rex- 45 feet
Triceratops- 30 feet
Brachiosaurus- 90 feet
Apatosaurus- 70 feet
Stegosaurus- 20 feet
Lili did a few math worksheets. They are sort of like a paint/color by number but to find the number in each piece of the picture you must figure out the addition problem. The answer gives you the number to know which color to use. Each worksheet/picture was of a different dinosaur. The first one I helped with and then we got out our math manipulative triangles and then Lili started whipping right through it on her own. She was so proud. We also made dinosaur skeletons by gluing different shaped pasta onto construction paper. I need to take a picture of them and post it next week. Lastly we made dinosaur eggs. We blew up balloons and then covered them in newspaper (paper mache) like you would for a pinata. Once they were dry we began painting them. They are currently drying and still need more painting so I will post pictures once they are done. Here are the pictures I took of them today, not quite finished.




In addition to our dinosaur theme we still checked out other books from the library. Lili and Gabi get to choose their books. Gabi has her own library card now and checks out her own books. Lili practiced writing her name, the letter Ff and the number 6. And of course lots and lots of play time with each other and mommy. See you next week!

On the hour...

Aug.22-Sept.4,2010...

Lili is learning to tell time to the hour. I printed her several worksheets, activities and cut-outs to help her understand the clock. After she finished each page we cut some of them up and made a sort of lapbook/clock folder. She enjoyed it all and colored everything after we were done putting it together. She LOVES to color. Now the folder tri-folds shut and holds the worksheets that were not used in making the clock folder. She can now tell time to the hour and is starting to learn the half hour.


The weather is finally cooling off a bit so we planned a picnic one day. I pulled the girls in our wagon to the bike trail and found a shady spot under a tree close to the park. While we ate our lunch we watched everyone on the bike trail. We kept track of how many bikes, people walking, dogs and people running so later we could make a chart or graph of who was on the bike trail that day. Lili made her bar graph of what we tracked on the bike trail. What we saw the most of were bikes and the least were people running.


Mystery Seed.....I came across this idea and thought we would give it a try. We found some dirt in our yard and put some in an empty yogurt container. We watered it everyday for the last week in hopes that there would be a mystery seed of some kind in that dirt. So far no luck. Looks like there wasn't anything in there but dirt.



Scavenger Hunt... both girls searched for, a flower, a small pebble, a rock with different colors, something green, something brown, a pine cone, a large smooth rock, a clover, something rough, something yellow, a Y-shaped twig and pine needles. They found everything. The large smooth rocks we painted. I need to take pictures of those. The items that could be pressed we pressed and are making scrapbook pages with them and some items (other rocks and pine cones) we took back outside. The girls love filling their buckets with "treasures".




Check out our discovery in the garden! Isn't he cute, to bad he is eating the tops of my carrots. I guess I'll let him stay a while so the girls can watch.


In addition to the above activities we also...
practiced writing Lili's full name, writing the capital and lower case letter E, counting by 5's, read lots of books (one on scavenger hunts and one on growing seeds), read some of Lili's level 2 books and learned new shapes (Octagon, Trapezoid, Pentagon and Hexagon).

Next week is....DINOSAUR WEEK!! Lili's choice :)

Our Week :)

August 15th-21st,2010...Here is the run down of our week...
*More practice of writing Lili's whole name. She still has trouble with Louise. It is a tough one.
*Learned what initials are. Figured out her own initials along with many family members initials.
*Lili likes doing our word lists on the board so we made a list of "og" words this week (dog, fog, frog, log, etc...)
*Using our bodies to show opposites. Such as taking giant steps across the living room and then the other person has to do the opposite, take tiny steps across the living room. And so on.
*Started a recipe book. Lili drew a picture on each page of a favorite meal or snack and then wrote the ingredients. I added in any cooking instructions at the bottom. So far we have a page for...peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hard boiled eggs and pizza.
*We read a stack of books from the library, including one about feelings. So for art day we divided a sheet of paper into 4 squares. In one square we drew something that makes us happy, another square for something that makes us sad, another for mad and the last one for scared. Lili drew...happy-coloring with Gabi, sad-when Gabi is mean, mad- when Gabi is not sharing and scared- when daddy says...BOO!!
*Lili has started speeding through her level 2 reading books. She read one on her own with out any help from me. She sounded out any word she got stuck on and figured it out. AMAZING JOB!! She has been reading to Gabi a lot more lately and helping teach her to sing her ABC's and count to 10. Gabi is doing both but the alphabet is not completely clear yet. But for being 22 months old I think she is doing GREAT!! I guess I'll need to start adding in Gabi's school accomplishments here too. She is getting involved with some of our lessons. She loves painting with Lili too.
*Had a couple outings this week with friends/family that will be going back to school soon. Tuesday we went to Jump Central and inflatable jumpy place. The girls had a pretty good time. Then Wednesday we went to Aunt Robin's house to visit and play with Jake.

Another fun week with the girls!

Another Week of Fun!

August 8th-14th, 2010...
Lili is learning to write her full name. She is learning about estimation. She estimated how many of several groups of objects then counted them to see how close she got. One group she was only one away from estimating the right number.
We went to library of course. Even though the summer reading program is over and there are no prizes the girls are still managing to bring home close to 20 books each week. Although my library bag is quite heavy I don't know if I see any other reason to limit how many books they can get. They LOVE the library so why mess with it :) It has been a relaxed week, we have been playing a lot inside since it has been so hot and humid out. We have been playing tons of board games and coloring, painting, etc... Pretty much having FUN!

Time for Kindergarten!!

August 1 - 7, 2010... We hit the back to school sales on Monday morning. The girls loved picking out their supplies. We bought notebooks, paper, folders, markers, glue, a ruler and a set of math manipulatives. After our morning shopping trip we came home and got started. Gabi got a notebook to draw and color in and she loved playing with the triangle math manipulatives. Lili got a few notebooks (a black one for whatever she wants, a green one for her science/activity journal and a purple one for her writing journal-she writes to mommy or daddy and then we write her back in the journal). She also got a couple folders. She loves worksheets and activity pages so I am keeping some in one of her folders so she always has some available. The rest of our Monday consisted of...writing practice (Lili's name, capital and lower case Bb and the number 2. We also played a rhyming game with color words and made a list of words on the board that we could make with the -ick sound. We also read books from the library.
The rest of our week was filled with...alphabet games, math worksheets, a painted turtle art project, learning to use our new ruler/measuring things/making a graph to show our measurements/which item was the largest? smallest?, lots of reading and we finished it off with a trip to Lili's favorite park in Schererville.

Laid Back Summer School

July 25th - July 31st, 2010... We sort of homeschool year round but during the summer I think it is nice to have some weeks that are not completely free of school but more laid back. Before we get into a lot of new stuff I think Lili needs a review on writing her letters and numbers. She has started writing some of them backwards. So we are taking these last few weeks of summer to practice writing the alphabet (upper and lower case) and numbers. Since we have the time we are also spending a little more time on math. We have been so busy ready and keeping up with the summer reading program at the library I feel more attention to math is due. This week we practiced addition and subtraction of the number 1. We also read...
Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day / Judith Viorst
Aunt Minnie McGranahan / by Mary Skillings Prigger
Just a school project / by Mercer Mayer
Arthur's Mystery Babysitter by Marc Brown (we get a lot of Arthur and D.W. book from the library. Both of the girls like them.)
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin
Dino-Baseball by Lisa Wheeler
Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup
My Food = Mi Comida by Rebecca Emberley (You are interested in learning Spanish. I found a free site online where you can learn
spanish. You have looked at it with me once. More time on Spanish is on our list for Kindergarten this year. This book teaches the names of foods in Spanish.
We also made a list of "at words" on the chalk board and you wrote them all.
We made sound patterns by clapping our hands and slapping our legs.
You learned how to set the table. How many plates, cups, forks, etc... do we need?
We made more sock puppets. Now we have the dog and a new pig. You also want me to make a cat and a priness with long hair.

That is our week. Soon it will be time to hit the back to school sales for supplies for this coming school year.

Z-WEEK!

July 18-24, 2010...This was the last week of our "Letter of the Week" theme. Twenty-six weeks actually went by really fast. For Z-Week we read books about zebras, zippers and the zoo, how to make zero in math a created a zoo in our living room. Lili found every stuffed animal that you could find at a zoo and set them up in the living room like it was a zoo. Then she pretended to be the zoo keeper. She pretended to go around feeding and checking on all of the animals. She even helped Gabi (playing little girl visiting the zoo) feed some of the animals. We also played some new games outside with sidewalk chalk, an alphabet game and another game called "London". It is kind of a cross between hopscotch and hangman. Lili also learned how to play a few new board games. We played Guess Who, Connect Four and Hands Down. She really loves Guess Who! We have been playing it everyday.

Time to move on to new topics to learn about and Kindergarten work.

Y-Week

July 11th-17th...I am finally posting within a week of my last post...amazing!! I figured I was all caught up so better to keep it that way. Our Y-week was pretty laid back. We have been enjoying the summer before it is over. We still spent time each day on school and we are finishing up the summer reading program at the library. It ends at the end of July. The girls are having a great time turning in their books for prizes every week. I have already warned them that soon the prizes will be over. We will still get books every week but no prizes for reading them besides the enjoyment of the book.

Here is a look at what we did for Y-week...
We read books about yarn and how wool yarn is made from sheep's wool, yo-yo's and yawning. Strangely enough while trying to read the book about yawning I yawned at least 3 times. I tried to show Lili that sometimes when someone near you yawns it will make you yawn too. She saw me yawn all 3+ times and never yawned. She said, but mommy I didn't yawn. Hmmm.....
We also talked about the word yesterday and what it means. We told each other everything we did yesterday. We also talked about what a year is and how it takes one year from her 4th birthday until she will turn 5. This next activity was a huge hit. We will definitely be doing it again and again. I brought out a few magazines (Family Fun mag. mostly). We each took a magazine and found a picture in it that we liked. Then we made up and told a story based on the picture. Lili had a great time and got pretty creative.

June 6th-july 10th

T-Week...books about teddy bears, trains, trucks, triangles, and telephones. Practiced time/clock. Reviewed using the telephone and calling 911.

Project this week...Ice Magic!
"Fill a glass with water and add one ice cube. Let a child lay a piece of string across the ice and try to pick up the ice with the string. Sprinkle a little salt over the ice cube, count to 10 and have child try again. Show child how the salt melted the ice just enough to bond around the string." This took us a few tries but worth the time for the excitement when we finally picked up the ice with string. Very cool!



U-Week...books about umbrellas, uncles and up. We talked about uncles and what makes someone an uncle. Uncle Carl! Couldn't find much to do for the letter U so we filled our time with workbook pages (Lili loves them), extra reading for the summer reading program at the library and fun with daddy (he had 2 days off this week).

V-Week...books about vegetables and volcanoes. Learned what a vertical line is and the difference between vertical and horizontal.
We made our own volcano!! "Place an empty baby food jar on a tray. Surround the jar with playdough. Form the dough to look like a mountain. Put a drop of red food coloring and a tablespoon of baking soda in the jar. Then add some vinegar to it to make it erupt." Lili and Gabi both thought this was FUN!! Especially all the bubbles when it "erupted." Next time I will stir in the red food coloring better. It all sat at the bottom so our lava wasn't red. The girls didn't mind though.

For our Friday art project we made sun visors for V-Week. We decorated them with lots of foams animals, hearts and their names.


W-Week...books about wagons, winter and wacky Wednesday! We reviewed the days of the week. Played with water outside in our water table. Lili and Gabi "painted" the driveway with paint brushes dipped in water. Then watched the sun make their art disappear. Daddy was home Friday again and joined in on the water fun. All three of them were soaked and smiling.

The girls also enjoy helping mommy water the garden.


Gabi is enjoying the summer fun too.



X-Week....not much starts with x so we went with words that have an x in it. So our books were about boxes, foxes, exercise and a taxi. Not exactly using the letter x but ideas were limited so here is our project this week..."Inclined plane.. slower and faster... do above.. except roll the ball down an inclined plane that is very steep vs almost parallel to the floor.. which ball rolls faster?" It was a hit! The girls continued to come up with games using their "ramp" while I made lunch. For art we each decorated a large letter X with stickers, markers and crayons.

Our Letter of the Week is approaching its end. Lili started writing her own list of topics to cover next. Time for mommy to get busy planning.

May 23 - June 5, 2010

I finally took a picture of our monsters from M-week. Lili made the boy monster and I made the mommy monster. They were inspired by the movie Monsters Inc. Which is a new favorite of Lili's. She is already talking about having a monsters cake for her birthday.


Our 1st family vacation!!!!! May 24th we went to Indiana Beach for the day. The girls had so much fun. Lili's favorite ride is pictured below...the race car!! She loved screaming when it went down the hill. She also liked riding the airplanes, cars and motorcycles. Gabi's favorite ride was the boats.  She also liked the train "choo choo" ride. She talked about the boat, choo choo and her ride bracelet the whole way home. She tried the merry go round and the fire truck ride but didn't like those.


Grandpa R. came with too. Grandpa introduced Lili to the yummy treat of elephant ears!! We played lots of games and the girls came home with arm fulls of prizes.


R-Week...Reduce, Reuse, Recycle! We did a couple recycling projects this week. Turning items from our recycling bin into something new and useful. First project was to take all of the broken crayons we had been saving and make them into new crayons. We put the crayon pieces into piles by color and then filled our muffin tin with the groups of crayons...


Next we put the muffin tin out in the sun for several hours. When the crayons were all melted we brought them in and put them in the refrigerator to harden. Now we have fun new crayons with swirls of color.


For our next recycling project we took a empty orange juice carton and washed it out. We cut it open to make a bird feeder.
Next we painted it and punched a couple holes in it to put string through so we can hang it in our yard. Here is picture of it finished with a bag of bird seed. Now it is time to go outside and hang it. We hung it in our backyard and to our surprise the tree we hung it from has a nest of birds in it and we could hear the babies chirping.

Some other things we did for R-Week were...
Books about robins (birds), the velveteen rabbit, little red riding hood, rain, ribbit (frogs) and robots (Wall-E).
Lili did several pages in her workbooks.
Rehearsal for Lili's recital

S-Week...Lili made a space ship! This was made out of an empty paper towel roll, a piece of card board cut from an empty cereal box and formed into the cone shape for the top, duct tape and stickers for decorating it.

More for S-Week...books about sand castles and snow and subtraction for math. We talked about jobs starting with S, like a scientist, salesperson, seamstress and a singer. Lili really liked the singer one and pretended she was a singer and sang for me and Gabi.


Lili's 1st dance recital was great! She had so much fun. She loved being on stage and watching the rest of the show in the audience. She has a couple weeks off and then summer classes start. She is moving up to Combo 1 and gets a pair of tap shoes. She is so excited!

April 25th - May 22nd

N-Week...
We read books about nests, neighborhoods, necklaces and more. We practiced math with money, which coin is a nickel and how much is it worth? And pretended to be nurses. We also went on a nature walk. Instead of keeping all the things we found we took pictures of them. The picture will last much longer than the flower. Here are the pictures that Lili took on our walk. Mostly items from our own yard, even a shot of the middle of our compost pile.





For art on Friday we made necklaces. The girls picked out their own beads and Lili strung her own.

O-Week...we read books about octopuses, otters and ostriches. We talked about and found opposites. We practiced drawing an octagon. We practiced the names of the days of the week and the meanings of today, tomorrow and yesterday. Lili went to an activity class at the library. They listened to a story, sang songs and made a craft...a mothers day card!! I need to take a picture of the card. It is really cute! And to top off O-Week we made obstacle courses in the living room. Here is a picture of one of them.


Lili is working in one of her workbooks! She has a new one for writing and one of those preschool/kindergarten fat pencils. She is doing really well writing all her letters and even writing lots of words and sentences.


P-Week...Weather wasn't great so we had our picnic in the living room for p week. We read books about saying "please" and thank you, parades, pizza parts (fractions!), puppies, pumpkin soup, picnics and more. We made patterns and categorized toys in different ways (size, shape, color, etc...). We pretended to be police officers. Practiced money, we have been working on this for a while now. Still practicing coins and how much they are worth. We talked about and looked up pictures of types of plants we eat (fruits, veggies...). And played with play dough!!

Q-Week...not a lot to do with the letter Q. We read books about quilts while cuddling under my teddy bear quilt from when I was young. We read about quarters and queens. Divided a paper pie in quarters. Lili was given a pink watch from Great Grandma W. so we made a larger paper version of a clock (watch) to start learning to tell time. And we learned that a string quartet is made up of four instruments...2 violins, 1 viola and 1 cello.

Only 9 letters to go an then we will be on to new fun topics. Lili is helping me with the list still.

Lili is now on book #7 in her level 2 reading set. Yay!! She now likes coloring with crayons and so does Gabi. We love to sit and color together.

Lili's dance class is also coming to an end. We just had pictures taken with her class and we will be starting rehearsals soon for the recital. We bought tickets last week for the recital for me(Mommy), Daddy, Grammy, Grandpa R., Great-Grandpa R., Aunt Robin, Jake, Aunt Laurie and Great-Grandma W. Wow! A lot of people are coming to see Lili's 1st recital. Lili wants to take a summer class next. Her teacher has said she can move up to the next class level...combo 1. So Lili got a pair of tap shoes!! She was so excited. She loves to watch the class after hers, which is the combo 1 class in their tap shoes. Time to get ready for next week...R-Week!

March 21-April 24, 2010

Last week we read a book titled Crazy Hair Day by Barney Saltzberg. It was about a boy that dressed up for crazy hair day at school on the wrong day. It was actually picture day. Lili liked the book and all the fun days they had for school in the story. She wanted to make up her own silly days. So this week we had...
Inside Out Day! Lili and I wore our clothes inside out but Gabi didn't like the idea.

Dress Up Day! Lili tried on 3 different dresses before finally decided , she also did her own make up (blue eyeshadow and lip gloss)

Backwards Day! What could be funnier than overalls to wear backwards.

Crazy Hair Day! Inspired by the book. First she wanted to put toilet paper in her hair like one character in the book but after looking in the mirror she changed her mind and went with a 2nd look.

We added an extra day to our silly days because Grandma S. brought the girls matching pajamas so we had to have a TWIN DAY!!!

HAPPY EARTH DAY! Lili was set on going for a walk around the neighborhood to pick up garbage and clean the earth. Grandma S. stopped by to play and Lili asked her to go on the Earth Day Walk to clean up. They came back with a bag of garbage. We have a pretty clean neighborhood but she did manage to find several things to pick up and toss in the trash. Some plastic decorative leaves, plastic rings from a 6-pack, cigarette pack package and even a bow tie. She wanted to keep the bow tie but it was really dirty so she agreed that we could just take a picture of the trash she found and then dispose of the trash itself. Great compromise!

Mommy and Gabi drew this on the drive way while Lili played with Grandma on the swings. It was a fun earth day. :)


I-Week...we learned to measure in inches, talked about and pretended to be inspectors, made ice cream, YUM! And we played with instruments (keyboard, xylophone, drums, tamborine and a recorder.

J-Week...we used jelly beans to add, subtract and make patterns. We had an Easter egg hunt in the house. I filled eggs with small pieces of paper with words written on them. When Lili found all the eggs she could create sentences with the words from the eggs.

K-Week...Talked about and pretended to be kings, read about kangaroos. We mainly read books and took it easy. Monday of K-week Lili had 5 stitches put in her chin. She fell off kitchen chair. So we kept up on bandages and medicine and had some extra tv time this week.

L-Week...we played librarian. This was a hit. We played librarian for several days. Went outside to look at leaves and ladybugs with our magnifying glasses.

M-Week...We played matching games and the hanging monkeys game. Played mail carrier and practiced our address. We played with magnets. Lili went around the house trying to find things that our magnets would stick to. What things are magnets? We made monsters with paper, glue and leftover Easter basket grass. What great timing too, Lili and Gabi watched the movie Monsters Inc with daddy so we made our monsters look like one of the characters from the movie.

We also read lots of books on topics starting with all of our letters of the week. We have slowed down a bit with Lili's level 2 reading books. That is on my list of things to work on in the coming weeks.

We were in the car talking and Lili asked what we were going to do after we finish all the letters for each week. What happens after Z-Week mommy? I told her we would have to think of a topic of the week. She could think of things she wants to learn about and we will pick one topic for each week. So far she wants to learn about...dinosaurs, planets and trees. I will be busy working on those topics :)