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!

March 21-April 24, 2010

Last week we read a book titled Crazy Hair Day by Barney Saltzberg. It was about a boy that dressed up for crazy hair day at school on the wrong day. It was actually picture day. Lili liked the book and all the fun days they had for school in the story. She wanted to make up her own silly days. So this week we had...
Inside Out Day! Lili and I wore our clothes inside out but Gabi didn't like the idea.

Dress Up Day! Lili tried on 3 different dresses before finally decided , she also did her own make up (blue eyeshadow and lip gloss)

Backwards Day! What could be funnier than overalls to wear backwards.

Crazy Hair Day! Inspired by the book. First she wanted to put toilet paper in her hair like one character in the book but after looking in the mirror she changed her mind and went with a 2nd look.

We added an extra day to our silly days because Grandma S. brought the girls matching pajamas so we had to have a TWIN DAY!!!

HAPPY EARTH DAY! Lili was set on going for a walk around the neighborhood to pick up garbage and clean the earth. Grandma S. stopped by to play and Lili asked her to go on the Earth Day Walk to clean up. They came back with a bag of garbage. We have a pretty clean neighborhood but she did manage to find several things to pick up and toss in the trash. Some plastic decorative leaves, plastic rings from a 6-pack, cigarette pack package and even a bow tie. She wanted to keep the bow tie but it was really dirty so she agreed that we could just take a picture of the trash she found and then dispose of the trash itself. Great compromise!

Mommy and Gabi drew this on the drive way while Lili played with Grandma on the swings. It was a fun earth day. :)


I-Week...we learned to measure in inches, talked about and pretended to be inspectors, made ice cream, YUM! And we played with instruments (keyboard, xylophone, drums, tamborine and a recorder.

J-Week...we used jelly beans to add, subtract and make patterns. We had an Easter egg hunt in the house. I filled eggs with small pieces of paper with words written on them. When Lili found all the eggs she could create sentences with the words from the eggs.

K-Week...Talked about and pretended to be kings, read about kangaroos. We mainly read books and took it easy. Monday of K-week Lili had 5 stitches put in her chin. She fell off kitchen chair. So we kept up on bandages and medicine and had some extra tv time this week.

L-Week...we played librarian. This was a hit. We played librarian for several days. Went outside to look at leaves and ladybugs with our magnifying glasses.

M-Week...We played matching games and the hanging monkeys game. Played mail carrier and practiced our address. We played with magnets. Lili went around the house trying to find things that our magnets would stick to. What things are magnets? We made monsters with paper, glue and leftover Easter basket grass. What great timing too, Lili and Gabi watched the movie Monsters Inc with daddy so we made our monsters look like one of the characters from the movie.

We also read lots of books on topics starting with all of our letters of the week. We have slowed down a bit with Lili's level 2 reading books. That is on my list of things to work on in the coming weeks.

We were in the car talking and Lili asked what we were going to do after we finish all the letters for each week. What happens after Z-Week mommy? I told her we would have to think of a topic of the week. She could think of things she wants to learn about and we will pick one topic for each week. So far she wants to learn about...dinosaurs, planets and trees. I will be busy working on those topics :)

Feb. 21 - Mar. 20, 2010 Wow! a month...oops!

Our letter of the week curriculum is going well. Lili and Gabi look forward to the books from the library for each weeks letter. When Robb brings the books home you would think I was throwing candy on the living room floor instead of a stack of books.
Week E: lots of books about elephants.
We made (and ate) macaroni and cheese with Elbow macaroni.
What is an electrician?
Estimating...estimated how many elbow noodles were in a jar and how many marshmallows were in another jar. And then counted them to see how close we came and to finish it off we ate the marshmallows! yum!
Evaporation...we painted black paper with salt water. We came back a few hours later to find that the water had evaporated leaving behind our pictures made of just salt.

Week F included...fish, feet, fox, firefighters, farmers, fractions, freezing fruit pops and the life cycle of the frog art project.

Week G included...

Gardening!! Growing from seeds. What great timing to get our seeds started for our garden this spring/summer. We started a few varieties of tomato and pepper seeds and some unknown "surprise" seeds that came with Lili and Gabi's It's a Big Big World Dvds from Christmas. We'll try and figure out what they are once they start growing. Lili had a blast helping with this project. She likes getting in the dirt and counting out the seeds for each spot.


This week we also had several "G" snacks, graham crackers, grapefruit (Lili took a few bites but didn't like it much), granola bars and green beans. We read about garden friends (bugs), gorillas, grandparents, gardens and grasshoppers. Greater than symbol for math and tried making goop for art but it wasn't as easy as expected and was bit to messy even for Lili. She enjoyed it more when I poured the goop into a ziplock bag and let her mix it that way. It was to hard to mix in a bowl.

H-Week! A great time for a lesson on being healthy for h-week as the girls are both sick with colds and lounging on the couch :( They also experienced the pros (extra tv time) and cons (feeling miserable) of taking a sick day.


Some days this week the girls felt up to school so we did get to do some H-week stuff. This week included...honey to sooth Lili's cough, books about honey, hair and hiccups. Counting by hundreds. And fun on Saint Patrick's Day! We wore green of course! For our morning snack we made shamrock shapes toast with green sugar sprinkles, for lunch we added some green with raw broccoli and a glass of green kool-aid and after dinner we made green pudding for dessert. Who knew green could taste to good! We read a book about Saint Patrick's Day and made drawings of shamrocks and a rainbow with a pot of gold at the end.




Happy Saint Patrick's Day Everyone!!

Jan. 17-Feb. 20, 2010

Here is Lili on her 1st day of dance class! This was on Tuesday, Jan. 5th She is taking a dance class at The Promise Dance Academy in Crown Point. She LOVES it!! They will have a recital in June. Lili likes her teacher, Miss Gina and there are about 11 girls in her class. Gabi also enjoys the class. She sits in the doorway between the dance room and the waiting room and watches the class while we have a snack. She gets up now and then and does her own little dance.



The girls experienced their first live theater show on January 23rd. We went to see Curious George Live. It was a gift for Lili's birthday from Kris, Janic and Ben. They came to the show as well. Lili and Gabi both enjoyed the show and sat so well through the whole thing. Gabi surprised us and was really interested in the show and payed more attention than the older kids. They also enjoyed some popcorn, cotton candy and a snow cone. Gabi really liked the snow cone.


Here is Lili showing Gabi how fun the computer is. They love the games on PBS and NickJr online. Lili also likes starfall for reading.


 Lili loves all the activity/workbooks she received for Christmas and her Birthday. She has almost finished a couple of them already. And Gabi is getting the hang of Lili's Leap Pad and kids laptop. She too will soon be using mommy and daddy's computers just like Lili does.


More of Lili flying through her activity books and Gabi is LOVING crayons! Lili isn't a big fan of coloring but Gabi seems to like it for now.


Other fun stuff we have been up to...

• Right after Lili's birthday she made an All About Me Book. Page one lists her age, weight and height. Page 2 is a tracing of her feet, page 3 is a tracing of her hands. The next page has info she wanted me write about the books we read from the library about the body. We learned about skin, bones, muscles, blood, brain, etc... We also have a page with a list Lili made (and I wrote) of all of her favorite things. Then there is a page with a collage Lili and I made from magazine cut outs of things she likes and some of her favorite things. During the "All About Me" week we also made two family trees. One with us and the grandparents and Uncle Carl and then a large one that also had aunts, uncles, cousins and great-grandparents.
• We have started learning about clocks and telling time. Lili gets the hour hand but I lose her on the minutes and how the 3 is for 15. We'll get there :)
• January 25th we started our first week of Letter Of The Week program. Every week we concentrate on a different letter. Lili learns to write the letter in uppercase and lowercase. We learn new words that start with that letter. We talk about and pretend with jobs starting with that letter. We do some kind of science activity related to the letter and look up science stuff on the computer with that letter. For example for letter B we looked up online information and pictures of Bird- bluebird ; Flower - buttercup ; Mammal - bison ; Ocean Creature - beluga whale. And on Fridays we do an art project based on the letter of the week. Lili is enjoying it a lot so far. And if we dont have enough to do with the Letter Of The Week I will also add other topics and activies in the week for us to do.
• We also do some kind of math activity everyday. Math with manipulatives (usually food, lol), addition, subtraction, math workbooks, board games, etc...
• Lili is learning about the calendar as well. She received a Disney Cars calendar for Christmas and everyday we check of the day before and she keeps track of her dance classes and family birthdays on it.
• Lili is still reading books from her level 2 Now I Am Reading set. She is doing well. The books are getting harder so we are moving a little slower with this set.
  

Dec.13, 2009 - Jan. 16, 2010

I took a little break from the blog. The kids and holidays kept me really busy so no late nights on the computer. I finally caught up with Lili for our school schedule and I think I have enough to keep her busy now and am working a few weeks ahead on the calendar planning stuff for her. Although we were busy with Christmas parties and Lili's 4th birthday party we still had some kind of school activity everyday. As you know if I try to take a day off Lili calls me on it, lol So here is the recap of past few weeks.

Trying out some of the "STart" projects...

We read Owl Babies by Martin Waddell and made an owl puppet with cut-outs of her hand prints and a paper bag.

We read an all time favorite book....The Very Busy Spider by Eric Carle. Then for our "STart" project we made puppets of all the characters in the story and put on a puppet show of the story.


Another "STart" project. We read Mr. Cookie Baker by Monica Wellington. Our first activity was to make a giant puff paint cookie. We made the puff paint with shaving cream, white glue, and brown paint. Put 3/4 cup of shaving cream and 1/4 cup of white glue into a bowl and mix
Add in some brown paint, Mix well. We made a chocolate chip puff paint cookie.



Our 2nd activity from the book was to be bakers and open our own bakery. We rolled out our cookie dough (paper cut into cookie shapes), cut out the cookies, baked and decorated them. We took turns being the baker and running the store while the other was the customers buying cookies. We also got in some math with counting cookies for the order and counting money to pay for the cookies. Both of these activities were big hits!


I never would have guessed this but Lili actually likes worksheets. She is doing really well with her math worksheets.


We did slow things down for some extra fun around Christmas. We baked cookies and decorated them. We of course ate a "few" but saved some for santa. Skills used in baking with mommy...measuring/math, motor skills (pouring/stirring) and following directions, that definitely counts :)


A fun art activity...making our annual ornaments. Gabi painted the tree, daddy painted the snowman, mommy painted the reindeer, and Lili painted the mitten.


Our 1st gingerbread house was FUN! And delicious! :)


After Christmas we started doing sound-matching sheets. I bought a book called Irresistible sound-matching sheets and lessons that build phonemic awareness from Scholastic.
First story book we used was Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse. Very cute story! Then we matched Rhyming words to main words from the story. Then we matched beginning sounds and syllables. Lili caught on real quick to it except for the syllables. That was tough. We will continue with these activities to build her skills.

On January 5th Lili started her first "out of home" class. She is taking a dance class at Promise Dance Academy. She loves the class! They have a recital in June as well. She did really well on the first day and had no problem leaving me and Gabi in the waiting room and listening to her teacher.

Lili received several preschool-kindergarten workbooks for her birthday and enjoys doing them so we have done a handful of pages already. They help us figure out what concepts she completely gets and which ones we need to work on.

We have been discussing jobs. We made a list of different jobs people do. What daddy does, what mommy does and many others like a...doctor, dentist, chef, waiter, police officer, fireman, mail carrier, nurse, cashier, teacher, etc...

Jan. 13th Lili turned 4 years old!! and that day she finished books #19 and #20 in her level 1 reading program. yay!! I printed her an award for reading all those books and we will be starting level 2 soon.

We recently made an art project about the moon. We first covered our black paper with glittery stars and then a big round moon. We also cut out a black circle to cover the moon to show a half moon and a cresent moon. Lili has an interest in learning about outer space now. Note to self to add some planet activities to our schedule.

With all the snow we have been getting we decided to make a cotton ball snowman for our art project last Friday. We covered our snowman in fluffy "snowy" cottonballs and dressed him up with a hat, scarf and pipe. We also got a chance earlier this month to get out in the snow and build a real snowman. We had a blast! I haven't built a snowman in at least 20 years, wow! We also made snow angels and threw some snowballs. Finished it off with a cup of hot cocoa, Mmmm....

Nov. 30 - Dec. 12, 2009

I guess I am on a roll with the 2 week posts. I have been catching up on sleep instead of staying up late blogging but it is working out well so here we go again :)

Here is the run down of the last 2 weeks here at L.G. Academy :)...

• I have a money puzzle that my mom saved. I am not sure if it was mine or my brothers but either way, it is Lili's now. She is catching on to the different coins and that there is a number on dollar bills that tell you how many dollars it is. The puzzle has some advanced features with adding money (we will get to that eventually), but for now Lili likes to pick out the different coins and put them in the puzzle.
• LILI KNOWS HER PHONE NUMBER!!! YAY!!! I wrote our phone number on paper and put it next to one of her play phones so she could practice dialing it and it didn't take long before she knew the whole thing. I now have our home address on the wall in her room, it isn't sticking yet but she will get it.

Lili was losing interest in what I had planned for school most days so back to the drawing board I went, well back to google actually. I have been reading tons of homeschooling blogs and getting some great ideas. I came across a new concept of a combination of a story and art (STart). You read a story and then do some kind of project based on that story. Lili loves books and projects so this has been a hit!
So far we...

• read...Bear in the big blue house book about feelings (played with Lili's bear feelings puzzle). I have a few of these activties for next week too.

• To my surprise Lili likes worksheets. We did a few math worksheets and she did great. There were count sheets, sizes, etc... and she gets to write her name at the top :) She likes to write her name whenever she gets a chance. We started a sheet where she writes her name every month for a year to see the progress in her writing skills.I

• Lili likes the show Sid the Science Kid that is on PBS (Channel 11) and one day last week they made applesauce on the show. Lili asked if we could make applesauce too. She knew what went in it...apples, water, cinnamon, sugar. Can't turn down that. So we made some delicious chunky applesauce. Mmmmm.....good!
• We have been getting Lili in the habit of brushing her teeth before school and to teach her about the importance of brushing regularly and eating heathly meals I found a printable board game to print and play with her. She loved it! We played a several times.
• I am trying to see if she in interested and ready to draw beyond a scribble. She hasn't ventured into this on her own yet but is at the age for it. So to get her motivated and feeling proud I made a few connect the dot pictures so she could draw an object, recognize it and like that she was able to do it. We drew a candy cane, a Christmas ornament, and wrote the work CAT. She liked it! Then we moved on to her watching me draw and object (example...a sun) then she would try and draw a sun. She did an awesome job.
• We painted wooden Christmas ornaments with Gabi and daddy. Lili painted a mitten, Gabi painted a Christmas tree, daddy painted Frosty the snowman and I (mommy), painted Rudolph. We hung them on the tree :) Every year Lili (and now Gabi) makes an ornament. Some years I buy one for them also based on an interest of theirs that year. The plan is, when they grow up and have their first Christmas tree they will get a box filled with these memorable ornaments.