Miniature Golf

Our last day in Myrtle Beach we decided to take the kids to play Miniature Golf before our final trip to the Beach.  There are a ton of really elaborate mini golf courses in Myrtle Beach so it was hard to chose one but we finally decided on a really outrageous one called Mount Atlanticus Minotaur Goff.  The course wound up and down stairs, among waterfalls, rivers and ponds, and beautiful flowers.


Vicki ended up getting 4 holes-in-one (with a little help from Daddy).  Each time she finished a hole she would throw her arms in the air, jump up and down and scream “I did it!!”.  There were a couple of teenage boys playing behind us (and usually waiting for us to finish).  Vicki told them all about it…”I did it boys, I got the ball in the hole, I won!!”
Georgie’s style resembled hockey more than golf.  He would drag the club along the ground and into the ball.   He explained to me that it was all about leverage and when I tried to help him (and it didn’t go well) he was upset with me.  “Mom, you messed up my leverage!!”.

His style was interesting but actually pretty effective.

We could see the ocean from the top of the course.

  It ended up being a fun way to spend an hour or so.    The most important thing was to not pay any attention to the score.
 

Art Part I - Primary/Secondary Colors

We started our Art Unit by talking about Primary and Secondary Colors, and color mixing.   We read the stories A Color of His Own by Leo Lionni and Mouse Paint and discussed how red and blue make purple, red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green.  Then we did a dabber paint rainbow (from Making Learning Fun) using only the Red, Blue and Yellow dabbers.  The only bad thing about the page was there wasn't a arch for purple. 

Then we made pictures using only Red, Blue and Yellow paints.  Georgie painted..."a dancing alien.  That's why his foot is up, he's doing a dance with one foot up then the other.  Like a penguin.  He's a penguin alien."

We used color paddles I had from Oriental Trading to make different colors (red paddle and blue paddle make purple, etc.) and also to view different parts of the room and see how it looks.

We watched Magic School Bus Makes a Rainbow which discusses how white light shines through a prism and is separated into all the colors.  It also shows how light will bend when it hits a mirror or reflective object and how objects are different colors because only that color is reflected for us to see.

We played with a prism trying to make rainbows on different parts of the walls and table.  It wasn't easy to shine it in a specific place since we were using the sunlight from a skylight but we were able to shine it so we could observe the rainbow.  We discussed how many colors we could see and what order they were in.  We discussed whether the order of the colors changed when we moved the prism around.   Georgie kept sticking his hands (and face) in the rainbow.

We finished up by doing a science experiment from Science Experiments for Young Learners about categorizing objects based on how much light shines through.  We looked at: a clear plastic cup, a light colored plastic cup, a dark plastic cup, aluminum foil, plastic wrap, waxed paper and tissue paper.  We held each item up to the light and decided whether it let through a lot of light (transparent), a little bit of light (translucent) or no light (opaque).  We then looked around the room to find other things for each category.  Transparent (windows, fish tank) and opaque (just about everything) were easy.  Translucent was harder.

I'm trying to make sure we do Math and Reading everyday.  I reviewed greater than and less than with Georgie by playing a slightly modified version of War.  We each had approximately half the deck of cards.  We'd each put one down and then he would choose which symbol would go between them =, < or >.  He did really well with this so we moved on to finishing up our MEP Lesson 7.  Instead of having him write on the worksheet I let him use stickers on a large piece of paper to do the assignment.  He had to put the correct number of stickers in circles to make the symbols true.  He did really well with this also. 

For Reading, I took some of the sentences from our current Progressive Phonics book and made a poster to hang on the wall.  We will be able to review these frequently throughout the day.  We also played our Short A sounds UNO that I downloaded from Kellys Kindergarten.

Our final activity for the day was Physical Education.  After 4 straight days of rain, we had a gorgeous sunny day so Daddy took the kids to the park.   I found the first crocuses popping through the mud.

To see more fun Preschool Ideas visit Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.

Another Snow Day!

We didn't stick with our new plan for very long.  Thursday and Friday it was snowing pretty heavily and Daddy didn't go to work.  Even though we don't need to take Snow Days when homeschooling, with Daddy home the kids weren't too interested in doing too much school.  We did manage to do a few readings about ants, watch The Magic School Bus Gets Ants in Its Pants, Go Diego Go It's a Bug's World and color a Fact File from The Learning Page, but that was about it as far as our theme went.  So, we pulled out some games.....

I recently downloaded some learning games from Kelly's Kindergarten.  We played Cliffords Words, where you match the words on bones to a mat, and Word Uno.  Her files are Word documents which makes it very easy to customize them.  I changed the words she had on the Uno cards for the short A words we are working on. 

We had a lot of fun playing both games.   The rules were left behind pretty quickly for Uno.  I ended up removing the Wild and Draw 2 cards and Georgie just kept reading the words and putting cards down.  For a while we matched (like your supposed to), then he began just putting words down, then we started trying to find rhyming words.  Since he was reading the words and having a great time doing it, I didn't emphasize the rules.  

When we play Candyland, Chutes & Ladders and some of our more traditional games, we emphasize playing according to the rules much more than with the learning games.  We played Candyland for a while, using plastic bugs as game pieces to go along with our theme.

After Candyland ended, Vicki played one of her foam games - this time it was shapes.  She would jump on the shape I called out.  After a while, she just jumped from one shape to the next.

Then Daddy finally took them out in the snow to play.  We finally (after how many snow storms??) had some snow that was decent for building a snowman.  He ended up with tomato eyes and a celery nose (which disappeared within an hour of them all coming inside).

If it looks like the kids snow pants are huge, it's because they are.  They had so much fun in the first snow storm we had back in December that I broke down and bought snow pants, boots and gloves for both of them.  Since I didn't want it to be a total waste of money if we ended up not getting any more snow, I bought them big for both of them.  Of course, that ended up not being a worry at all.

Bugs and Insects - Day 1

Our bug/insect unit is a long one and I'm planning for six full days of activities.  We're starting off with general bug/insect information, then will spend a day each on Spiders, Ladybugs, Ants, Bumblebees and Caterpillars/Butterflies. 

We started off our Bug/Insect unit by going on a bug hunt.  I hid small plastic bugs around the living room and the kids had to find them.

 

While they played with the bugs they found we began discussing "what is a bug?" and "what is an insect?"  Georgie already knew that insects had 6 legs but at first still said that a spider was an insect.   We did a bunch of worksheets and activities from The Learning Page on insect anatomy and distinguishing an insect from other animals.   We also read the emergent reader Bugs from Hubbards Cupboard.  We're going to read this each day so George gets familiar with the words.

We used water colors to paint a bug shape and make our own bugs.

We made a sticker collage using bee, butterfly, ant and flower stickers.  They were plastic scrapbook stickers on a clear plastic backing and they were very hard to pull off the backing.  I began taking them off for Vicki and sticking them on the edge of the table for her to use but she decided that the table was where they belonged.  It was supposed to be a sticker scene but Georgie lined his up in neat rows, as usual.

While we did our unit I played some of the kids music I finally downloaded.  They loved a real peppy version of "the Itsy Bitsy Spider" that I think is done by Little Richard, and "Ladybug Picnic".   Vicki loved dancing around to the music but for some reason started doing the chicken dance.   After hearing "Ladybug Picnic" Georgie pulled a blanket out of the bedroom and requested a picnic lunch.

They used markers to do some worksheets and coloring pages.  This is what happens when I leave the room for too long while the markers are out.

We played some Scrabble Jr and I realized that Georgie goes right for the short three letter words so he can collect triangles faster.  When he didn't have a "P" to finish APE right away, he started to pout a little.   The game ended shortly afterward.

Today's resources included: Science Encyclopedia, Magic School Bus Explores the World of Bugs and Your Big Backyard magazine from July 2009.

Back to Community Helpers

We don't have any pictures of us actually doing our work from the rest of the week since George Sr. took my camera with him to India. 

We ended up not getting much done Friday.  The kids weren't feeling well and ended up napping all afternoon (despite neither of them being nappers in the normal course of things).  We did discuss Firefighters using activities from Teacher Book Bag (available on http://www.currclick.com/) and watched Elmo Visits the Firehouse video.  I think we'll need to return to this topic in the future with a Fire Safety unit.

Since George Sr. was away in India and it was way too cold out to go anywhere, we decided we would continue to do school on Saturday.

First, we read The Berenstein Bears Learn About Strangers  since Georgie loves to talk to everyone and anyone he sees.  We discussed who you should call if you get lost or need help.   Then, we did our Teacher Book Bag information on Police Officers.  Turns out Georgie was afraid of police since "they put you in jail" so I'm glad we discussed this.  We took our fingerprints and looked at them under a magnifying glass.  We tried to look at them using the Eye Clops they received for Christmas but the magnification was too strong.  We did end up playing with it for awhile looking at other things - skin, hair, stuffed animals, feathers, etc.  It's really neat but works best on things that are relatively flat.  We watched a Sesame Street video on police.

We read the Teacher Book Bag information on Mail Carriers and made collages out of stamps we printed off.   We used this for cutting practice since the stamps printed out with 20 on a sheet of paper.  I cut them into strips and then let the kids separate them.   We discussed the post office - which we visit fairly frequently since I belong to Paperbackswap.com and have to go mail books.  When we do Valentine's Day, I'm planning to have them make valentines to mail to the grandparents and we'll talk more about the post office when we go there to mail them.  We finished up watching a couple of Sesame Street videos on the post office.

Our last Community Helper was the doctor.  Georgie absolutely hates going to the doctor, whether its for a check-up or a sick visit.  He fights it every inch of the way.  I'm hoping by discussing it and playing doctor, it may help.  We did the Homeschool Share "Taking Care of Me" booklet and discussed how to stay healthy.  We watched a few Sesame Street videos on going to the doctor (can you tell I recently discovered the online Sesame Street videos?) and then played doctor.  The kids have a Fisher Price doctor kit and we went through each item discussing how it was used by the doctor and why it was important.   Then the kids played with the kit, some dolls and some bandaids.  This was a big hit.  They had a great time playing, especially with the bandaids.  I guess I won't know if it helped any until the next time we need to go to the doctor but I'm hopeful.

We finished up by doing Lessons 3 and 4 in our Math Enrichment Programme.  Georgie really likes these activities.  So far, its all pretty much review but I'm hoping he'll continue to like it when it gets harder.  It has a nice mix of physical activities, discussion and writing that seems good for him.

We also did a review of our -at word family since we haven't done much phonics since before the Holidays.  I'm trying to use a mix of stuff so he doesn't get bored.  We read In My Hat from http://www.hubbardscupboard.com/ and he was able to read the whole thing himself.  He did a fill in the letter worksheet from http://www.kidzone.ws/ and a tracing page with the words: at, bat, cat, fat, hat, mat, pat, rat and sat.  He seems to have these down pretty good so next week we're going to start with the -ad word family, with sight word activities added in as we have time.

I've been trying to really mix up our activities so that the kids aren't bored and they are learning in different ways.  Both of them love to play games but neither of them are good at following the rules.   We did find a game that works really well for both of them with little modification.  They recieved the game Sequence for Kids for Christmas.  The idea is to draw cards with animals on them and match the pictures to those on the game board until you get four in a row.   I removed the unicorn (free space) and dragon (take another players space) cards and we didn't stop at four in a row but filled in the whole grid.  Vicki ended up knowing a lot more animals than I would've thought.  Georgie may end up getting bored if we play this a lot so I may make it so he has to answer a question or read a word before putting a card down, or do them in ABC order, or something. 

Next week:  Monday and Tuesday we're going to discuss Groundhogs Day and hibernation.  The rest of the week we are going to discuss Chinese New Year.

Community & Community Helpers

This week we are going to continuing studying Communities and begin on Community Helpers.

We started by sorting pictures of different objects (cars, buildings, people) into different types of communites - Suburban, Urban and Rural (town, city and country).  This project came from Teacher Book Bags (available from http://www.currclick.com/).  We colored in maps showing the streets and buldings in a community.  We read On the Town by Judith Caseley, which is a wonderful introduction to places and people in a community.

We've started a new Math curriculum with Georgie.   We are using a free program developed in England and Hungary called the "Mathematics Enhancement Programme".  So far Georgie likes it a lot - it has a nice mix of elements - physical activities, songs, writing pages, and discussion.

I'm trying to add a lot more games into our program.  We have a bunch of file folder games plus we received some new games for Christmas that should fit in nicely.  This week we played:  Winter Dominos (printed from DLTK-cards.com), Dr. Seuss ABC Stretch (similar to twister with letters and letter sounds), Picture/Letter match (file folder game), Fishing with Rover sight word game (file folder game from Frogever Smart Games) and Vicki played a color matching game with Smily Faces.

One of the things the kids received for Christmas was a chalkboard to be mounted on the wall.  I'm trying to find ways to allow them to be creative more often without having to worry about crayon and marker all over the walls, furniture, etc.  We ended up picking up a second one since they are currently not capable of sharing a 2 foot by 3 foot space without fighting.   The two boards are mounted underneath the bulletin boards used to display their school and art work.  The bulletin boards are high enough that they can't reach to pull things off.

Thanksgiving Part I

Things have been a little light the past few weeks.   We're shutting down our campsite so there's been a steady influx of stuff that places need to be found for and laundry to be washed so it can be stored.  I've also been reviewing some of what we're doing since Georgie seems to be getting bored a lot.  I've decided to take a break from The Reading Lesson.  He already knows most of the letter sounds so the concentration on a few letters at a time wasn't interesting or challenging enough.  We're trying Progressive Phonics which is a free program that uses simple readers.  So far, Georgie seems to like it much better.  We're starting with the first reader (short a sound).We're also doing more games.  I found a generic board game online and modified the cards to emphasize what we're learning.  So, Georgie will roll a dice and pick a card.  The card will have a word to read or something to act out.  For example, I'll tell him he needs to read and act out the phrase "I am a big duck".  He's having fun with it but, of course, Vicki also wants to play.   We're managing but it definitely doesn't resemble any traditional game-playing I've ever seen.  Vicki is learning to give Georgie the dice when its his turn so I guess that's progress.

We've also talked about getting a more structured Math program after the Holidays are over.  I've looked into a lot of them and Math U See seems like a good fit for Georgie.  He's already counting to 100 and doing simple addition problems.  Since he's a very visual learner I think the manipulatives and DVD's of Math U See will be fun and educational for him.

We're studying Thanksgiving (including Native Americans and Pilgrims) for the next few weeks.  So far, we've read The Very First Thanksgiving Day by Greene, The Very Last First Time which is a story about a Inuit girl, and a few Native American legends.   We discussed totem poles but our attempt to make some didn't go too well.  The kids had trouble gluing their images to the paper tubes so we ended up putting them on paper.  I didn't really expect Vicki to line them up but Georgie also decided that a pole wasn't what he was shooting for.  I have to remember that Georgie really, really prefers more open-ended crafts.  He doesn't particularly like following directions in his worksheets so why would he with his crafts?  We may end up with some very interesting looking turkeys in the next few weeks.

Our Totem "Poles".  Vicki's is actually the more complete one, Georgie doesn't like getting his hands sticky from the glue.

Attempting to play our board game. 

Vicki has been playing a clothespin color matching game.  Each index card has a color name on it written in the correct color.  Each clothespin is painted with a color.  She matches up the correct clothespins with the correct index cards by clipping them on.  She did two of them, decided they made great wings and "Mommy I'm flying".