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!

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 :)