Sharing links and materials we like and use

We spent a lot of time outside of the "classroom" this past week.  We had our first field trip of the year with our home school group.  Also our local library offered two events this week, a story hour and Lego club which the girls loved.  To finish off the week we have a park day with our home school group on Fridays and then we head to the library to get movies for the weekend and books for school the next week and some just for fun reading.  We did manage to get everything on my lesson plan done even with all the extra fun stuff.

On to sharing some resources....

When Lili was learning to read we had great success with a book set called Now I'm Reading.  Lili went through level 1, 2 & 3.  I am hoping Gabi enjoys them just as much since that is what I am getting reading to work on with her.  The fact that it comes with stickers that you get as you read the books on your own should be good incentive.  Gabi LOVES stickers!  I found each set either on amazon or e-bay for a great price.

Lili is reading chapter books now and really likes the Junie B. Jones series by Barbara Park.  They are written in a silly way that has kept her attention long enough for her to realize that she really could read those "big kid books".  We recently started our first book from the Magic Tree House series and she really seems to it.  The chapters are quite short which I think is good for starting chapter books since there is a feeling of accomplishment after each chapter.  I am reading the first one and hopefully she will be up for reading the next.  The stories look to be full of adventure and imagination.  Compared to Junie B. Jones I think the Magic Tree House would appeal a little more to both boys and girls.

We are using bookadventure.com again this year.  It is a fun way to keep up with reading comprehension.  Their prizes are not great but we just use the personal incentive program where I get to create certificates for prizes that I will provide as she reaches her goals.  Not all prizes need to be a physical item, some are as simple as quality time together with mommy playing barbies or cooking.

I did some searching for online games and worksheets to use this past week and found some nice sites and thought I'd share them.
  For anyone learning to read music,  I came across these printable worksheets.  I was looking for something to use as a fun refresher.  Lili started playing the recorder and piano last year and I didn't get on her about practicing during the later part of the summer.  I wanted to see how much she remembered before we jump back in.  Her main goal is to be able to play Jingle Bells on both instruments for Christmas this year. 
   We haven't started working on times tables yet but we have started introducing multiplication so I found this site and thought I would save it for later in the year.  Looks like it might be good for testing out times table knowledge.   It is a simple website, more for drills not exactly a game.
   We are working on root word, prefixes and suffixes.  This site was a bit tough for Lili so might be better for older kids.  There are games for learning and practicing root words, suffixes and prefixes.  I am saving it for future use.  I then found this site which was more on her level for the same topics but not as games just printable worksheets.  But this site also has a lot more to offer on many other subjects so I will be back to see what else they have for us to use.  I love having a lot of resources for free printable worksheets.

The 2nd week of school has come to an end.  It was a fun week with beautiful weather and time spent out of the house with friends.   The girls are enjoying school and most days are willing to get things done without much, if any, fuss.  That leaves a happy mom who is ready to put in some work to get the lessons planned for next week.




Too often we give children answers to remember rather than problems to solve.
~ Roger Lewin
 
 
  

We're Back!

I am back from my one year hiatus!  After only one year of blogging too, talk about commitment.  Well, I started missing it a few months ago and thought if I can get our plan and goals for the school year ready to go before the first day then I will give this another try.  Looks like I met my goal.  Previously this blog was private and only available to those I invited and then I found out they had to have an account to log in, view and leave comments.  With all those hoops I ended up with 4 viewers.  Not that they are not worth writing for,  those 4 viewers are very important people in our lives but well I was hoping for a larger audience.  So now I have taken off the private lock down and here we are.  Now on to the good stuff......

Our first week of school went great!  Lili is in 2nd grade and Gabi is working on K-4 which is pretty much kindergarten but if she doesn't get to a first grade level by next year we do Kindergarten again from where we left off.  I mainly do a K-4 because she has gone through all the preschool level and is ready to move on even though she is only 3.  Oh sorry, 3 1/2 she won't let anyone forget she is 3 1/2.

For most of the summer the girls have been watching this show in the morning called Signing Time.  It is on at the time I am normally making breakfast so they get to watch while I cook and clean up the kitchen.  They really enjoyed this show and were learning a lot.  They were teaching me all sorts of sign language.  The alphabet, numbers, colors, animals, foods, etc...   I had planned on adding a foreign language to our curriculum this year but after Lili made it clear that she really didn't want to I thought why not sign language.  Both girls are enjoying this show and they can both learn it this year.  We were all in agreement so on the first day of school we came downstairs I headed to the kitchen and the girls turned on the tv to the channel for signing time and..............Word World?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
They were so bummed.  We emailed PBS/LakeShore Kids to ask if they will have that show in another time slot.  It has been almost a week and no reply.  I checked their program schedule and looks like that show is done for now.  BUT, our public library TO THE RESCUE!!!  They have several volumes (older version) of this show that we can get.  So I requested Vol. 1 and we will have it for school this week.  YAY!! 

I had the opportunity to sign Lili up for Book-It where you read books and track how many minutes or how many pages you read and at the end you can win a free personal pan pizza from pizza hut.  Well, I like the idea of the whole program but I don't necessarily like the prize.  So instead we used some of the printables for tracking how many pages Lili reads and when she meets the goal she gets a prize that is mommy approved.  We have decided on 3 prizes.  When she reaches her first prize goal she will be cashing in for a trip to Zig-E's Funland, the next prize will be a sleepover at Grammy's house with some type of outing while we are out there.  She wanted a double sleepover (2 nights, 3 days but poor Grammy would be wiped out, lol) so we compromised with the outing (a movie, back to Zig-E's, etc...).  Prize 3 will be a pizza and movie night with a few friends over.  Boy those prizes sure beat a trip to Pizza Hut in my opinion.  Below is her tracking sheet for September and the first book to be read.  Her and Gabi both LOVE Gerald and Piggie.  They are very cute and funny books by Mo Willems.

YARD SALE SCORE!!  I wanted to get Gabi and set of these and for Lili to use along with a tangram set.  They are not really expensive but you can't beat .50 cents.  Both girls love it and we use this for independent work if I am busy with the other during school.  This is a really nice set, I may have to take a look at Discovery Toys and see what else they have to offer.

Thanks again for our library, we get to use this for music class for 2 weeks.  The girls will get to learn and listen to the different instruments and what instrument family they are in.  Families include String, Woodwind, Brass and Percussion.  They love dancing while we play the CD, my graceful ballerinas.

Gabi is doing pretty well sitting for school each day.  Her attention span is that of a 3 yr old so she doesn't sit for long but when she does she is quite productive.  Here is here printing practice.  She is in love with markers and uses them for everything.  I slip a piece of cardboard under her sheet as to not ruin several sheets of paper underneath due to her love of markers.  This is a nice small tablet of handwriting paper we picked up at Dollar Tree.

Lili is moving on to cursive this year.   She likes to call it fancy writing.  We are doing a few letters at a time and so far very little frustration on Lili's end.  She is catching on well and enjoying it.  I tried to make sure we get a couple vowels in each lesson so we can actually write a few 3 letter words with what we have learned.  Putting the letters together "all fancy" is fun.
 I don't know where this dry erase cursive mat is from,  it was given to us but it is great.  We also have a couple math ones.  If I come across them somewhere I will pass it on, in the meantime I bet Amazon would have them.

This past July, during our library's summer reading program they had a stuffed pet sleepover.  Lili was planning all summer long on which pet she was going to take.  All the kids were able to bring in a stuffed animal/pet and during the program the children's librarian read them stories, the kids made little blankets for their pet and signed them in for the sleepover.  The children left their pets overnight and picked them up the next day.  Well, this mom was a bit busy that week and completely forgot about this event.   It was 9:00pm on the day of this sleepover when out of no where it popped into my head that we had missed it.  The girls took it better than I expected but I had to promise to host my own pet sleepover for their pets of choice.  The girls enjoyed sending their pets with me for the night when they went to bed.  I took pictures of all the fun things their pets did that night and we put together this little scrapbook of all the fun, just like the librarian did for their event.   I learned my lesson for forgetting about the library that week.

This fall we are working on this Election activity book.  It is for grades 1-3 and since we have a presidential election going on I thought this would be a great year to use this book.  It comes with a large poster and lots of reproducible activity pages, such as an election mini book, election time line, wheel of presidents, white house lift-the-flap tour, an election scrapbook and many more.  We also found a book at the library with all of the presidents in it including pictures.  The girls loved looking at all the pictures and how weird they thought the men looked.  A few presidents were even compared to some of the Three Stooges, we are talking appearance here.  Gabi at all of 3 1/2 years old yells out, "that guy looks like Larry from the Three Stooges!"  Definitely Daddy's girls.

Time to start week 2, I hope it goes as smoothly as week 1.  I will be sharing links for products and freebies soon.   Thanks for visiting and have a great week!

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.