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.

Crafty August

It all started with the Clothesline Busy Bag and thus was born our quest for being crafty at least once a day. The kids sat with me as I cut out each clothing piece, then we went outside and set it up. They had such a blast! Elizabeth hanging each piece of clothing in order of color first and in order of outfits on top of that. Josiah barely getting his hung and definitely not caring about the order in which they were hung! The next day, while I hung out my clothes, I had them do it again. This time I gave them a bucket of soapy water to 'wash' them in and a bucket of fresh water to 'rinse'. It was a success! As a reward for when it was all over I let them play with their squirt guns in the leftover water.

The next day was Wednesday and Elizabeth was begging for a craft so I grabbed my instructions for the Cupcake Busy Bag and went to work! The kids sat around the table while I cut out the various pieces. As they were cut out I handed them to the kids and they got to work immediately putting their creativity to work. In the middle of all this fun I remembered how Elizabeth wanted to make a card for her Uncle Paul's birthday. I grabbed a couple pieces of cardstock, folded them in half and let them each decorate a card for them. They loved doing it and I really wished I had taken some pictures of their finished work!

On Friday I stopped at Kohls with a $10 off coupon. I ended up getting Melissa & Doug's Lacing Beads. Elizabeth and Josiah enjoyed playing with them that evening!

Today we created our own houses out of paper bags. They were both very creative and although they needed a little help with the gluing and cutting process the end result is the process of each of their own creativity!

Elizabeth's house
Josiah's house ... set up nicely with all his cars

Check back in at the end of the month with an update on how getting ready for school is actually going! Maybe I'll even post some pictures of the kids "school area" as well as the cabinets which are going to hold all of my organized craft stuff!

looking ahead and Bible Story reading

I am really looking forward to September when I'll be starting pre-school with Little Miss and Little Mr. I haven't yet decided exactly how it will look. I do know that I'm interested in pursuing some of the ideas found on this WEBSITE, visiting the Botanical Gardens on a weekly basis, taking the kids on a field trip once or twice a month and reading, reading and reading some more!

As a family we having been reading the book, The Child's Story Bible by Catherine Vos in the evenings before bed. It has been fun to watch the lights go on in my children's mind as the stories of the Bible come to life for them. Chris and I have been enjoying reading it too ... it's one of the most well done story Bible's I have come across. I love that the stories are not watered down in any way ... just re-told so that young minds can comprehend them!

A Visit to Gull Wings Children's Museum

The kids had a lot of fun exploring and imagining at Gull Wings Children's Museum this past Wednesday in Oxnard. They are playing w/ Ellie's friend, Grace. They also got to touch a sea star and other sea animals, dig for dinosaur bones, play doctor and paramedic and ride in a space shuttle (I think that was their favorite). We went w/ a group from their school and we look forward to checking it out again!

Charlottes Web

We finished reading Charlottes Web this past weekend. Elizabeth found a copy of the book on my shelf and asked if we could read it. Of course! We tried to read it with Josiah as well ... that didn't go over to well. He just wouldn't sit still long enough! So we read most of it after he would go down for his nap. It was great for her and I to have some mommy/daughter time.

After each chapter Elizabeth summarized what was read back to me as I wrote it down in her journal (as suggested by Carol Joy Seid). It was interesting to hear what she took from each chapter. More interesting to me was being able to see that she needed the pictures (few, though they were) to jog her memory of what had happened in the story. Only hearing the story was too abstract for her little mind! Below I will share a couple of the journal entries as dictated by her to myself ...

Chapter 1

About the pig. Her father tried to kill him. Her father gave her the pig that he was trying to kill. And then her brother, Avery, came down and then the little girl fed the pig.

Chapter 3

Wilbur ran away and escaped and he saw some people and he said to himself, "what should I do?". Then a man came with a bucket full of food for the pig and then he went back into the barn and then the duck followed the man into the barn. The duck said to the man, "he has to run out and do his tricks." Then the duck ran out of the barn.

Chapter 11

The little boy sometimes tries to kill spiders and his mom puts him to bed without any breakfast. (Did Charlotte do anything, I asked?). She made a web and the web had words on it.

Chapter 13

It was about making terrific words on the spider web. The pig woke up. the rat took a piece of paper and it had silly words on it with uppercase letters. The pig twisted and misted and turned and did a flip and blasted on the ground and went to sleep with a thump.* Then the spider told the pig a story about her cousin who caught a fish in her web and then ate it. then his favorite friend (Fern) tucked in herself and went to bed.

Chapter 19

The spider made an egg sac for her eggs. Then the rat had a big fat tummy. Everybody gave hugs because the pig was a famous pig!

Chapter 21

The spider - the big one - was going to die - but not the little ones. The rat was going to get the web that had eggs in it that was all covered, covered with strings from her web.

Chapter 22

The rat ate some of the pigs food and he grew fatter. The the spiders grew balloons and floated up into the air. One talked to the pig. Then 3 of them went on the door.

*That was my favorite sentence out of her whole narrative!

Carol Joy Seid Seminar

Since my last post I did one more full lesson with Elizabeth and then went to a seminar by Carol Joy Seid. From that seminar my outlook changed and we have taken a break for the past 2 months from doing anything structured. The following (in no particular order) are the few valuable things I took away:

1. Late is not bad (I plan on reading a book called, "Later is better than early" by Dr. Moore)
2. They will be judged by how articulate they are ... not at what age they learned to read.
3. Train your children's palatte for quality ... read, read, read - in front of them, to them, alongside them!
4. History is the logical core of our curriculum - teach it by using Classical History, of which she gives a list of books one can read for study.

- this can be (and has been) done with a library card, the Bible and a Good Math book

There was SO much more that she spoke about . . . much more than I can effectively articulate in the short time I have in front of this computer screen. I really must get back to cleaning my kitchen and getting ready to take care of the kids again once they are finished with their quiet times/naps!

All in all I would say that because of Seid's seminar I have decided not to be so focused with structured learning ... at least for right now. Ellie is only almost 4 and she just needs to be loved, played with and read to A LOT. I plan on continuing in that and giving her more "formal" teaching when she asks for it! Which just in the last week she has - I've decided that we will do that on my days "off" from watching Jonathan - in the morning ... a field trip here and there, library visits once a week and projects pertaining to something she is interested in as it comes up!