summer fun

One of Gabi's cantaloupe seed that she sprouted. I forgot to take pictures before we planted them outside so the girls wanted me to pull one out for a picture.

Here is one of Lili's sprouted pumpkin seeds. Hers were huge!

Here we are putting them back in the ground. Hopefully we will get a couple cantaloupes for summer and pumpkins by Halloween.



We took a field trip to Brookfield zoo. The butterfly exhibit was awesome. There were so many butterflies flying around you and landing on people. Normally you can't get that close to a butterfly so it was great to see them so up close. They even had a big green one that we searched all over for for Gabi to see. Green is her favorite color.


We also saw lots of animals. Lili likes the zebras and giraffes. Gabi likes the monkeys. We also enjoyed the dolphin show. After our trip we checked out some animal books from the library. Zoo animals and farm animals.


All of a sudden Gabi went from scribbling lines to drawing these cute faces. She is also drawing rainbows.

Hat making center! Lili did a little sewing on her prairie girl hat (aka clean lady hat, has that maid look I suppose)



We have 1 book left in the level 3 set and Lili will be done with it. Next up early readers from the library! And I am working on getting her to let me start reading her some chapter books. She doesn't like anything that is just black and white with minimal or no pictures.

We are also working on spelling rules (such as silent E, when a G is hard and soft, etc...) to help when she is reading and spelling. Many of them she knows but there are several we haven't covered yet.
Lili is learning how to braid.
We read and learned about work vehicles such as a dump truck, back hoe, roller, digger, etc.. And were able to see a couple in action across the street removing a tree.
We made paper windsocks and hung them from our new tree.
We checked out a great music book from the library that introduced musical instruments and what family they belong to. Such as strings, brass, woodwinds, etc... It came with a CD-Rom with music on it to hear the different instruments played alone and with others. Both girls loved it and danced around the room.

Besides that we are just reviewing, reading, practicing math, enjoying the summer library activities and some dramatic play until the end of summer when we begin a fresh start to our next school year. I need a little more time to plan the next year and possibly order some items. And Gabi enjoys getting involved with our school time so I figured why not start some preschool activities with her.

LILI TIED A BOW!!!!

And she was so proud. She has been attempting to tie her shoes on and off for several weeks now. Gabi was wearing a skirt with drawstrings and wanted them tied in a bow. I was busy in the kitchen so Lili tied it for her. She brought Gabi into the kitchen to show me her bow. It was really good too. Next....her shoes :) Now she is asking me to teach her how to braid.

Our new art area of the school room is a hit. I moved a couple shelves down to a reachable level with art supplies that I feel confident in letting them get to on their own. And the corner of the floor is full of paper, markers, stickers, pom poms, googly eyes and items from the recycling bin they have potential to become something when creativity strikes. The girls are having a great time with it. Gabi loves cutting paper. Just cutting and cutting until the floor is covered in tiny bits of green paper. Almost always green because that is her favorite color. Lili has been branching out of her usual drawing and doing more with glue lately. She even got out everything and set it all up for her and Gabi to paint with watercolors.
I even walked in on Lili coming up with her own art/science project. She laid out the towel, found the sponges and made a wise choice for the container to hold the water. She sponge painted with the water and when I attempted to remind her that the water would dry she stopped me and said she knew what she was doing. The next day she brought the now blank paper to me and said "Look it is gone! It evaporated!" Love it!



My little garden helpers hard at work. Today they are starting a project to try and sprout seeds. Lili chose pumpkin seeds, Gabi chose cantaloupe and I was left with the watermelon seeds. We placed them inside folded wet paper towels and placed that on plastic plates and slid them into ziplock bags. We set them in a warm area upstairs and now time to wait.....we have since peeked in our bags and we all have some seeds sprouting but Lili has by far the biggest sprouts of all. She practically has plants in hers. We better get out soon and plant these. Pics next blog of our sprouted seeds and planting fun.


*Lili read book #4 from her level 3 reading set. Once her confidence catches up with her ability she will be off reading her favorite books all on her own.
*We are still using bookadventure.com. Lili recently cashed in more points. One prize was for a lunch date. She chose to have (to my surprise) White Castle with grandpa, grammy, uncle carl, aunt robin, mike and of course mommy, daddy and gabi. Luckily we were all together recently and had our sliders! She also cashed in for the prize of "an hour of playing barbies with mommy".
*I am trying to plan for more writing in her writing journal. We had been writing letters back and forth to each other but the topics were getting repetitive so this time I chose a topic (her favorite color) and she wrote about it. I asked questions about the color to provide more to write. Then of course I had to write about my favorite color too.
*Lili learned about what a collage is. We made collages from pictures we cut out of magazines and the newspaper. It was open to anything she wanted, whether a theme or just whatever she liked. She chose random photos that she liked and then added details with paint and letter stickers for her name.

And although this Mother's Day bouquet is my favorite color Lili learned that dandelions are actually weeds. All the better reason to pick every single one she could find and give them to me.

Hello Spring....

What a rainy spring we are having. Lili is collecting a lot of rain water in her jar. We are at about 3 1/2 inches in there so far. There has also been a lot of spring planting going on in our front yard. The girls planted bushes with Daddy and in the process found bugs and a worm. To my surprise Lili picked up and held the worm and even got Gabi to touch it while she was holding it. Daddy also planted a tree. We planned on planting it on Earth day but due to the cold and rainy weather we bumped that to the day after. Lili also got to look around the yard and pick up a few pieces of trash that had blew in.






We learned about fire safety. We read books about preventing fires, what to do if there is a fire and many safety rules. Stop! Drop! and Roll! Stay low, 911, etc... After the stories and talking about fire safety we made a firefighter craft by cutting out of paper a head and hat for our firefighter and drawing on the face and gluing it together. They turned out cute, sorry no picture of them.

The girls helped me plant some seeds in the garden. We read a book about planting seeds and how they grow. We talked about roots and what they are for. To see a root at work we put a carrot in a jar with colored water and let it sit for a few days. Then we cut the carrot in half lengthwise to see that the carrot and pulled the colored water up through it's center. Lili was surprised that a carrot is a root and that she EATS ROOTS! lol

We took a field trip to bella boos, no pictures uploaded yet. The girls loved it! They had a water play room that they went to twice and had a great time. Gabi really liked the train room. They both loved shopping in the play store and cooking in the pizza parlor. There was a face painting room, reading room, dress up room, house/kitchen play room and a ball pit/slide room. Gabi lost her sock in the ball pit, yay daddy for finding the lost sock. We spent some time in the art room making a pirate ship out of a cardboard box, string and paint. Gabi painted a couple pictures and we brought the art and ship home. Since then Lili has added some stickers and a treasure chest made from a box from butter. For earth day we worked on the treasure chest and also pulled some stuff out of our recycling bin to possibly use for a project. There was a small cardboard box in the pile and although we didn't use it that day I left it in our school room. A couple days later Lili was in there cutting away at this box. She asked me for help with a couple things. She designed and had started working on making the box into a space ship. It came out really cool. We painted it and she gave it to daddy. Some creativity has been sparked!

long time, no blog.....

My last post was in February, wow! Well we have had a busy couple of months here but between fighting colds and 2 funerals we managed to still get our school plans accomplished. Here is a brief overview of some of what we have been doing...

• Reading - we are still using and enjoying bookadventure.com. Besides earning points to redeem for prizes for Lili I like using this site to find books for us to read that I otherwise probably would not come across. We have found some great books that we really enjoyed. And I can already see a great improvement in Lili's comprehension skills. She is doing great answering the questions about the books.
  
• Reading - Now I'm Reading level 3 books. Lili has gotten her sticker in a couple for reading them on her own. Her reading speed as recently improved as well.
• Math - addition, subtraction and telling time using the white board, worksheets, flashcards, math mat floor game and a couple online games. I am still searching for a great online math game. I have found a few but most are either to easy or to hard for her right now.
• Science - Let's Learn About Science book series from the library. We are still using these and drawing and righting in Lili's science journal. Now that spring is here there are many books that would be great to go along with some outdoor adventures and investigations.
  
• Science/Health - topics include healthy eating and eating the colors of the rainbow. One day we drew a rainbow and filled in each color with foods of that color. We then pointed out which foods we like and which new ones to try.
• Writing - letter journal back and forth with mommy.
• Shapes - new shapes including...octagon, trapezoid, hexagon, pentagon, cylinder, cone, sphere and cube.
• Lang. Arts - breaking down words...adding and taking away the s, es, ed and ing from words. Also, compound word...lunch + box = lunchbox. Lili loved this! She likes to call it word math.
• We are currently working on a rain project for the month of April. We have a jar we put outside to catch rain water. We check after each rain and mark on the jar with a black marker and measure the water level with a ruler. Lili drew a picture of the jar in her science journal and we are keeping track of the amount of rain in the journal as well. We'll see how much rainfall we have this month. We also read a science book about rain, water vapor, evaporation and clouds. An addition activity to go along with the evaporation topic was...we put 2 tbsp of water each on two plastic plates and put each of them in a different place in the house. We checked on them daily to see how much water had evaporated. One plate was on our kitchen counter and the other was on my bedroom floor next to the heat vent. Both plates were completely dry after 3 days.
• We have started going back to the library weekly and also attending the story / activity hours for both girls. They LOVE going!
  

That is what we have been up to for school lately.

points are rolling in....

Lili has been using the website http://www.bookadventure.com for some of her reading work. I talked about it our first week back in January. She has been saving up her points and finally reached 1500 to cash them in for the dice game she wanted. Now she is patiently waiting for it to come in the mail. Now she is down to a little over 100 points and will be working on earning more. The problem is she has looked over the prize page on the site and there isn't anything else she wants. I like using the site and I have seen improvement in her reading comprehension. She is retaining more of what she reads now and will even refer back to a book a few weeks later. Luckily this site has a great plan just for my problem. A parent or teacher can sign in and create prize certificates for any prize they want to provide. Then when the child earns the prize the parent or teacher provides it. Could be a physical prize or an outing of some sort, endless possibilities now. I made up several certificates for her to work towards such as...ice cream sundae, puzzle, stickers, toy, lunch date, music cd and the BIG prize is a sleepover at Grammy's house. She has been asking to do this for a while. I wonder what she will decide to save up for first. They are all worth different point amounts. Will she go for what she can earn the quickest, a low point prize or save up for the big prizes? We shall see.

In addition to all the reading and point earning we have also been....

• spelling and math assessments. We are finished with them for a while now. Lili did really well on them and I don't like the constant "test" atmosphere and she got tired of it too. So periodically I will do a few assessments on the previously taught subjects and see how she is doing but not so often.
  
• practicing writing lowercase letters.
  
• writing numbers beyond 10. We went just past 100.
• weekly science books on various topics. These are once again from the "Lets Read About Science" books from the library. It is a very cool set of books for young students. They talk about science is an easy to understand way. We will continue with these for a while. I definitely recommend them.
• more practice with addition, subtraction, telling time and money. All of which Lili is doing great. I can't believe how quickly she picked up on counting out money since our previous attempts didn't turn out that well. Whether it was just timing or the way it was taught, it was much easier this time and she is doing great.
• we made more math "mats" (sheets of paper with a number written on each). Before we had them up to 10 now our set is up to 20. For math practice I call out an addition or subtraction problem and Lili runs, jumps, skips, etc... to the "mat" with the answer on it. It is fun and she loves it since it keeps her moving and I like it because it lets her practice doing the math in her head and not always seeing it on paper. A different way to practice math facts.
• introduced root words (dances/danced/dancing = dance)and compound words (beach+ball=beachball). The root words she still needs some help with but she caught on real quick to the compound words.
• review of food groups and what goes in each food group. Eating from the rainbow, we drew a rainbow and inside each color section wrote foods that were that color. Then pointed out which foods we like and which ones we have not tried yet.
• We have picked back up on writing to each other in Lili's writing journal.
• We have been watching a live hummingbird cam online. There are two baby birds and the mommy. Lili loves watching the mommy feed the babies. It is very cool. She will yell for me whenever the mommy bird comes to the nest.

And last week we enjoyed A LOT of snow! The blizzard of 2011. It wasn't good snow for a snowman but we had a huge mountain of snow (almost as tall as mommy) so Lili went sledding for the first time in our front yard. She LOVED it! It is getting really cold out now so this week we will probably be stuck in the house and only venture out for dance class. Lots of extra playing and getting ready for Valentine's Day.

new routine is runnin' smooth.......

Jan. 9-15th... Since we started back up in January I switched our routine for the day around and it is going smoothly. We are getting everything done with extra time to play. It is great!! This past week we...

• read "Mort and Sport" a book from the level 3 reading set.
• wrote out some words from the book for spelling and writing.
• math games - math bingo, telling time, and counting money
• rolled, cut, decorated and baked cookies for Lili's birthday to take to dance class.
• read a science book titled - Sleep is for everyone by Paul Showers. Then we did a page in Lili's science notebook. Lili drew a picture in her science notebook of her sleeping on her pillow pet with her teddy bears (mini teddy & teeny). Then she dictated as I wrote thing she learned about sleep from the book.
• quick Friday assessment on math, spelling and writing. We did subtraction today and Lili got all of them right. She only misspelled 1 of the spelling words and wrote all of her letters really well.

We took Thursday off for Lili's birthday. She wanted to play barbies with me all morning, go out to lunch with daddy, mommy and Gabi, play with Grandma and Grammy in the afternoon, enjoy her dinner request of pancakes and eggs and watch a movie with daddy and Gabi before bed. It was a fun and full day.

1st week back

Jan. 3-8, 2011.....Our first week back to "the grind" was great. I made some changes to our daily schedule and found some new websites to add to our curriculum for the rest of the year. One is http://www.bookadventure.com/ You can search for books based on grade level and interest then how I do it is search for those books on the library's website. Then after they read each book they log into the bookadventure.com and look up the quiz for that book. For every correct answer they get points. Once you get enough points you can cash them in for prizes. There are some games, magazine subscription, candy bar, etc... Lili has a goal to redeem her points for a dice game. It is 1500 points. She currently has 280. It is 100 pts per book if you get all of the quiz questions correct. She was a little discouraged by how long it was going to take to cash in her points so I agreed to add some of our own prizes as she collects enough for the game. So at 500 points she gets some kind of candy and at 1000 points a small toy. She is excited!
We are also reading science books from the book list on the website http://www.letteroftheweek.com/science_of_the_week.html So far the books have been really good at teaching about science in a way that is easy to understand at age 4-5. Lili has a science notebook where we work on making charts and things so after we read a science book she gets her science notebook and either dictates information for me to write or writes herself or draws a picture about what she has learned from the book. This weeks book was called My Pet Hamster and was about hamsters, nocturnal animals and what you need to take care of a pet hamster. It was a great book. I also just realized they have a country of the week page as well. I think I will be checking that out soon.
We are practicing writing lower case letters. Lili has been great for a while now with all capitals but struggles with some of the lowercase letters. I am also showing her that most of the time you use the lowercase and also when to use the uppercase. It helped get her to try to write some lowercase letters for me. At first she said "I just like making the capital letters".
We are reading the books from her new Now I'm Reading level 3 set. First I read one of the books to her and then she works through it with me and sometimes even works on reading it by herself. Then I have her try to read it to me on her own. After only two times through book #1 she read it to me straight through. These books are a pretty big jump up from the level 1 and 2 sets. The stories are much longer and a lot more sight words and longer words to sound out.
We are also back at dance class this week. Her teacher, Miss Jessica announced that they will be doing Sleeping Beauty for their recital this summer and showed them a picture of their costumes. It is a beautiful pink dress. Lili is the leader and comes out on stage first. She is so excited!
Aunt Nancy came by this week to visit with the girls and bring them their Christmas gifts. Lili received a Disney Princess keyboard and it came with the music sheets for a few songs. A few hours later she was playing twinkle twinkle little star. She wants me to teach her to play more songs now. I pulled out my old sheet music from when I took piano lessons. I think I am going to need a little (a lot) of refreshing.
We have been working more with math (addition/subtraction), telling time and money and it is all sinking in, yay! I sometimes wonder how much of what we do sticks, how much will she remember. So since she liked the idea we are doing a weekly check or we could call it a quiz, although for some reason I don't like that word. Lets call it an assessment, yeah that sounds better. I give her several math problems and several words to spell for now. I will be adding some weeks an assessment on telling time and one on money. Just 2 subjects on Fridays. We tend to have a shorter school day on Fridays, I leave time at the end for Lili to choose an activity. We are calling it Lili's Day. This past Friday she chose to play on PBS Kids on the computer.
This really sounds like a lot but we only spend about 45 min to an hour on average each day for everything. Well that's all for now. Thanks for visiting :)

A Wonderful Christmas Break...

Our break was actually more of a break than I had expecting. I thought for sure Lili would be bugging me for some actual school time but reading our Christmas books, coloring, baking and games was enough to keep us plenty busy. And on top of that daddy found some new computer games for Lili for math and learning to tell time so she played those almost daily and is doing great with time, addition and subtraction. We also painted wooden ornaments for our Christmas tree and attempted a gingerbread house (it tasted much better than it looked). So we will be back to our normal schedule tomorrow (Mon. Jan. 3, 2011). I am organized and ready!