13 Words

We read the book "13 Words" by Lemony Snicket this week.  In it the author adds a new vocabulary word every page or so ... despondent, haberdashery, baby, scarlet, etc.  On Wednesday night I went out for a bit after dinner and came home in time to help tuck the kids into bed.  Elizabeth told me that dad had given her a time out that evening and while she was in her room she felt despondent ... AWESOME!!!  I was so excited that she used the word properly!!  Today she pulled out a very red crayon from her desk and excitedly exclaimed, "I found the color scarlet!"  What an amazing little sponge!

It is so incredibly exciting to see my children grow and learn.  Tomorrow (hopefully) comes a new blog post about what they did and learned this past week - stay tuned!

first week of school accomplished

It's Sunday night and I'll be starting a new week tomorrow for school but wanted to give an update on how the rest of our week went last week.  On Wednesday we played with water!  Elizabeth and Josiah transferred water from a tub into measuring cups with various items ... medicine droppers, scoopers, small measuring cups and teaspoons.  They watched things float (plastic egg) and sink (marbles). We also put bubbles with food coloring into the water and swirled it all around.  I got my ideas using the Montessori at Home ebook by John Bowman.

 Having fun scooping the water

 scooping up marbles with a teaspoon ... great for hand-eye coordination

BUBBLES!

Here is Josiah picking out his "fishes" (marbles)

On Thursday we did a bit of math ... I had Elizabeth get more familiar with shapes by using the Melissa and Doug Shape Sorting Box!  She is learning parallelogram, octagon, hexagon and pentagon.  Then we went to the library and read lots of books together and with friends.

On Friday we cleaned the house in the morning and then Elizabeth and I went to meet up with a co-op group that a fellow homeschooling friend of mind started.  We will be meeting every Friday afternoon for 2 hours for us to spend some time in fellowship and for the kids to spend some time playing!  We are using the curriculum, 5 in a row for 4 - 8 year olds.  The children enjoyed their first lesson!

This Saturday Elizabeth asked to do a project so I grabbed the rice and bean box that I had made for them along with a the tweezers and they had fun picking the small items up, looking at them with their magnifying glasses.  Then they got out  their own toys and buried them in the rice!

1st day of P-K

Today was our first day of pre-school!  Since we had started last year with My Father's World Kindergarten curriculum I decided to continue with it.  Today we reviewed the first 5 letters that we had gotten through last year.

S for Sun:  made sun tea
M for Moon:  "Does the moon have it's own light?"  "No." Replied Elizabeth, "it reflects the sun".  Good job Elle!
L for Leaf:  made leaf prints
A for Apple:  made apple sauce
N for Nest:  just talked about nests, nothing special :)

After we finished up we went had lunch and went outside to play on the plastic water slide.

I've decided to move away from the normal printing of the alphabet and will be using the Cursive First Curriculum beginning in the next week or so.  I'm a little nervous to make such a big change but I've been doing some reading on teaching children to write in cursive first and I feel really good about my decision.

Tomorrow I'm planning on doing some hands on Montessori activities from the book, Montessori At Home by John Bowman.