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!

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.