GABI IS READING!!!

Gabi has read her first book, yes we video taped it.  She was so excited.  She read the 1st book in the Now I'm Reading set titled  Fat Cat.  Now she has read it over and over again and I think has it memorized.  Time to move to book #2.... Rat Naps.  She wants to read them all right now so she can get the stickers that go inside after she can read each book with no help. 

Time to pull out those math counters.  Well our math counters are some little foam triangles I found in the dollar section at Target.  I don't know what their intended purpose is but they are great for teaching math.  Gabi is working on basic addition and subtraction and is catching on very quickly using those colorful squishy triangles.  I love those $1 bins!

Well after having it bookmarked for about a year I finally did some browsing around at spellcity.com and it is a really nice site.  You can choose your grade level and spelling word list from a themed category.  The first week Lili chose a beach theme so all her words were beach related, such as sun, ocean, seashells, sand, umbrella, etc... Lili can then throughout the week play games that use her spelling words and also the vocabulary for those words.  She really likes the hangmouse game which is just like hang man but it is a mouse that gets caught by a cat if you do not figure out the word in time.  Then for us on Friday we have our spelling and vocab test for the week.  They both can be done on the website but Lili prefers the spelling test on paper.  Here is the site if you want to check it out....    http://www.spellingcity.com/

Lili has been in a hurry so we are already through Zz for cursive.  Time to practice and start writing words!  She is so excited and even challenged me to a race to see who could write the whole alphabet, both upper and lower case in cursive the fastest.  Well I won but not by much she was only about 3 letters behind me the whole time.  And to be honest I had to cheat and look at the board for a few letters.  I don't know when the last time I wrote a z in cursive was, probably in 2nd grade, lol

We are all enjoying our human body study.  We are playing a few games that I bought on Amazon.com.  We have the Magic School Bus: A Journey into the Human Body and Someboday board game.  Lili is also coloring a Dover coloring book on the human body which is I love.  I want a Dover coloring book too.  They are very detailed books for older kids. 

Our homeschool group is going well and staying busy.  We have a hayride coming up next week and working on more fun field trip ideas.

I have also signed up for daily emails from clickschooling.com  They send a web based curriculum idea everyday.  So far I believe they have all been free.  I have been saving these emails and am starting to filter through them and see what we can use right now.  Each day is a different subject as well, Monday is math, Tuesday is science, Wednesday is language arts, Thursday is social studies, Friday is a virtual field trip and Saturday is music, art, foreign language.  I think it is well worth the daily email so far.


“When the atmosphere encourages learning, the learning is inevitable.”
― Elizabeth Foss, Real Learning: Education In The Heart Of The Home

unpacking sweaters and learning the seasons

What a great time to teach Gabi more about the seasons when we are getting out sweaters, jackets and jeans.  We played a fun dress up game.  I filled a laundry basket with items from all seasons.  We had umbrellas, rain jackets, sunglasses, swim arm floats, sun visors, baseball style hats, hoodie jackets, a couple Halloween masks, winter hats and gloves.  I called out a season and both girls had to hurry and dig through the basket and put all as many things they could find that would be worn in that season. 
    We also did a little art with Gabi about the seasons and weather.  We drew a picture of each season and Gabi's were fairly common with rain, flowers, a pumpkin, but her picture of winter puzzled me.  She drew paw prints.  I asked her to tell me about her picture and she said "they are rabbit prints in the snow."  It was a very creative idea I thought.  For weather we drew on index cards, one for each common weather condition.  We have a card for sunny, cloudy, raining, snowing, storming.  Now each day Gabi can look out the window and pick which card fits the weather and tape it to the window.
   I try to overlap topics with both girls, it makes creating a lesson plan easier since some things they can do together.  So Lili spent time this week learning about the different types of clouds, what clouds are made of, what creates thunder and lighting and about tornadoes and hurricanes. 
   We also made a weather vane or wind vane this week.  We made one just like this.  Both girls enjoyed taking it out everyday and checking the wind direction.

We started using an online source for some of our math last year and are continuing to use it this year.   It is khanacademy.org   I believe it is mainly just math and science.  They keep you practicing until you have mastered the skill you are working on.  So Lili currently started adding negative numbers.  On her page that skill will not change to mastered until she completes all practice problems without missing any.  We both enjoy using this site and it is FREE!

I never thought Lili would enjoy learning cursive writing so much.  She asks almost daily if we will be practicing and learning a new letter.   And she is picking it up quickly and pretty easily.  I wasn't sure if I was introducing it to soon but she was interested so we gave it a go.  Here are her papers from today.

I need to send a big THANK YOU to a friend of ours for telling us about a website to check out.  It is ABCya.com  They have games for Kindergarten through 5th grade so both girls are enjoying it but I am mostly excited for Gabi.  I have been trying all sorts of ideas to get her to practice her letter sounds and they have a letter sound BINGO game that she really enjoys playing and as a reward after that she gets to play a fun game on the site as well.  Great games for practicing skills through games. 

Lili has weekly spelling tests and this year I am using spellcity.com  They have games as well which we have not tried out yet but plan to.  So far I have just been using their sample spelling word lists for 2nd grade and choosing her words for each week from that list.

Another week under our belts.  On my list of ideas is to find some ways to take our school work outdoors.  Not just taking books outside but incorporating learning with outside activity since it won't be long before it is to cold to spend as much time outside.  I'll be saving and posting what we find.

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!