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!