Thanksgiving Wrap-Up

We didn’t do much (any) schoolwork this week.  It was a short week and Georgie knew a holiday was coming, so it was pretty useless to try.  We did manage of few Thanksgiving themed crafts.
We made paper plate turkeys.

They also made Indian Corn. I thought they would love gluing beads to a corn and husk cut from paper.  I painstakingly separated out orange, yellow and brown beads into one cup and green beads into another cup.  This is how much they actually did…

So, I handed them some paper plates with the middle cut out and some stickers, pictures and glue and let them make wreaths. 

At this point, I finally accepted the fact that despite their cries of “what are we doing next?” they really weren’t into the crafts. 

They did play quite a few games this week, mostly with Daddy.  They played our Money Bags game, which helps teach coin values.

They played with our USA puzzle.  Daddy directed the building by telling them the piece was from the Northeast, Southwest, etc.  Then they looked at the pictures on the puzzle and discussed the different states.

Georgie also used our wooden ABC blocks to make words.  Even using the blocks, he made them all capital letters.

We decorated a fun Turkey cake for Thanksgiving dinner….

and enjoyed some fun family time.

We finished up the week with two trips to our local Museum for Rock and Mineral Weekend.  More about our fun field trips here.

Weekly Wrap-up: 11/14-11/19/2010

The big girl is very rarely featured in our Weekly Wrap-up but this week I actually have two updates all about her!

Having been a dancer for 12 years and a cheerleader for 3 years (not to mention the fact that she refused to wear anything but dresses/skirts from the time she was two years old until she was six), you would expect Steph to be something of a girly-girl.  Well, you would be wrong (what she is is impossible to define) and she got to prove it last weekend when she played……Football!! 


Her school has an annual tradition where the Senior girls play the Junior girls in Powderpuff Football and Steph was right in there helping lead the Junior girls to a 12-2 loss.     According to TRADITION the Senior girls always win (with a little help from the referees if necessary) but just wait until next year!

Our other piece of big girl excitement was her very first driving lesson with mom.  Steph completed her 6 hours of driving instruction with a licensed driving school a couple weeks ago.  Now, it is up to us to teach her everything else she needs to know and make sure she gets enough practice so she can pass her driving test and get her license in six months. 
 
She did a pretty good job considering instead of the nice compact Ford Focus the driving instructor had (with the passenger side brake pedal) she had to drive our Suburban.  For anyone who doesn’t know – a Suburban is HUGE!!  It took me a while to get used to driving it after my little Honda Civic.  Unfortunately she has no choice since the above mentioned Civic is a manual transmission.  She will eventually have to learn to drive it but I figured there were a few things she should get the hang of  - like straightening out of turns without hitting the curb (how she got a flat tire on the instructors Focus, thankfully not likely to happen on the Suburban) or braking without giving her passenger whiplash or accelerating up hills without pissing off the people behind her – before expecting her to take on a third pedal and shifting.    Learning to drive in a hugely populated area like NJ is not easy.  There are no wide open roads to drive on.  Instead she had to drive on major highways during rush hour with impatient drivers in a hurry to get home.   I’m sure she’s going to do just great (although I may have to take up drinking).

Now on to the little guys.  We had a pretty normal (but light) week.   I was hoping to start some Thanksgiving activities but for a variety of reasons we didn’t.   With the Holiday season coming on strong, I’ve decided to go ahead and modify our workload rather than try and do it all and be depressed when it never happens.

First thing we are going to change is to add a LOT of crafts.  Next week we will be making Turkeys, Indian Corn and Cornucopias.  After that it will be weeks of Christmas and Winter crafts - snowmen and snowflakes and ornaments and trees and stars and candles and.....
 
Second, we are going to read lots and lots of books.  Thanksgiving stories, Christmas stories, Winter Solstice stories, Hanukkah stories, Kwanzaa stories and any other stories we find relevant.

As far as our core subjects are concerned… I don’t want to just ditch them all because I don’t want Georgie to forget too much in the next six weeks.  He is doing so well that I don’t want to lose ground.  But, I also know that with the excitement of Christmas coming, sitting down to do worksheets isn’t likely to happen.  Our extensive list of books to read will help some but I want to do more.  So, I think we are going to play lots of games.   We have a pretty extensive collection of reading and math games that I think will do a great job of keeping up skills.  This will also give me the chance to feature more of our games on here for anyone who may be looking for ideas.
   
I’m also going to add some physical activity to our day.  The weather has been getting colder (and been rainy a lot) so we aren’t taking walks as often as we were, although the littles are still taking gymnastics every week.  I wanted to find something that would be fun for the kids so I made up some exercise dice that we can use along with our regular foam dice.  One die has stretching/warm-up type exercises – toe stretches, big and small arm circles, side stretches, etc.  The other die has more active exercises – jumping jacks, sit-ups, hopping on one foot, etc.  We’ll start with the stretching die and roll it together with two regular dice.  Add the numbers on the dice together and do the activity on the stretching dice that many times.  After a 2-3 activity warm-up we will do the same using the active die.  Of course, I will be doing every exercise right along with the kids.

Does anyone know a good program to add smiley's to blogger?  I think they work great to get across tone and I have a few saved as clip-art but they come out kind of odd.  I do use Windows LiveWriter to do some of my posts.  Thanks!

Weekly Wrap-Up 11/1 – 11/12/10 (2 weeks)

This week’s wrap-up covers two weeks since I never posted about our post-Halloween week.    We did do a few activities from our core curriculum that week but mainly what we accomplished was:

-two kids on Halloween candy induced sugar highs
-one Mommy on Halloween candy induced sugar crash (I never seem to get the energy boost anymore)
-one little girl who swallowed a penny
-one little girl with a cold
-one big girl getting behind the wheel of a car for the first time ever (and hitting a curb and getting a flat tire on the driving instructors car)
-two doctor’s appointments
-one little boy’s last soccer game of the year
-one big girl cheering at the last regular season football game of the year but we’re going to the Play-offs!

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming.

Georgie is still resisting writing lowercase letters.  He insists they are much harder than uppercase.  I am thinking about printing out some paper with wider spaced lines and seeing if that helps.  I’m thinking that since a lot of the lowercase letters mainly use only the bottom half (below the dotted line) of the paper that the writing small is what he dislikes.     He did complete one practice page of all lowercase letters a, b, c, d, e and f and one page of upper and lowercase G’s.  He’s finding lots of ways to make his work more interesting.  He often chooses multiple colors and talks to them, asking whose turn is it next and doing patterns.


All About Spelling is still going well.  We finished up short I words and did the entire step of short O words.  We also discussed what words should be capitalized.  He has a good understanding of it but of course he’s writing everything in capital letters at this point.   We do the lessons using a mix of the tiles, the white board and orally that seems to be working very well for him.  So far there have been very few words he even has to think about before spelling them.

Explode the code is also still going well.  He sometimes whines at the pages that require more writing and he sometimes asks for me to do the writing but I usually insist he do it.  There usually isn’t much and I do let him do his all caps.

Georgie really loves to read books now.  We have a pretty good collection of kids books and he’s started reading them to Vicki.  He can’t always read every word but he seems able to read enough to tell the story and not get frustrated.

We completed Lessons 24, 25 and 26 in MEP. He really enjoys the nice mix of activities.  A lot of our math work I do write for him.   A lot of the spaces are small and the discussion/understanding is more important to me than being able to write the answer down.

We did some addition practice.  He completed a Grade 1 workbook page and played domino parking lot.

In Time, we moved on from time to the hour to time to the half hour.  He had some trouble with the concept at first and kept wanting to point the minute hand to 3 (for 30?) but he seemed to understand it better by the end of the week.  We used to have a digital clock that sat right by our clock face but Stephanie took back her docking bay (that I had "borrowed") ;-) so we need to set up another one.

We moved on to dimes in our Money workbook.  Georgie has a little trouble telling apart the nickels and dimes.  He also had some trouble paying attention and at times just sat guessing the answer.   Once he can do quarters we have the Money Bags game that will help reinforce the coin values.  I may have to take a look at it and see if there’s a way we can adapt it to use just the coins we’ve covered so far.  Games seem to really help him to understand and remember concepts.

Vicki did a lot of painting this week.  She still loves the Paintastic pens.  I still love the reduced mess and that the paintings actually dry fairly quickly since the amount of paint distributed is controlled.
She also did a lot of stickers this week.  I hadn’t pulled them out in a while so they were new and fun again.

One of the items that were in her “Tot Boxes” this week were the Melissa and Doug lacing cards.  She has never actually done these by lacing them.  Instead she puts the lace through holes on either side of the neck and drags her “pets” around by their “leash”.

She played on the computer while George and I worked on money.  I did not want anymore swallowed coins and the computer is the one thing guaranteed to keep her attention.  She loves playing on Starfall, Nick Jr and PBS Kids.

Vicki sat down and “read” Brown Bear, Brown Bear to me.   She actually just has the story memorized but she really enjoyed reading just like her brother.

She did two counting worksheets I found at TLS Books, which has free worksheets for Preschool through Fifth Grade.  They were very simple – count the clowns, seals, bears and circle the correct number.   She also played her game where she rolled the dice and filled in the correct number of squares using a stamper.

For our Electives, we did a discussion of History.  We read the “What is History” pages from Story of the World and made a personal timeline of the kids lives.  We started with the most recent events and worked back from there to show events going into the past.  We discussed how we know about what happened in the past and looked through their baby books.  We also read Then and Now which compares various scenes from long ago with how they would look now (horse and buggy versus cars, etc.) and The Quilt Story which was a cute story about a quilt that is handed down.


We pulled out our rice bin and our Fall Sensory Bin this week.  I let the kids add the rice from the Fall bin to the rice bin.  Georgie had fun “feeding” rice to a rubber snake and then having it spit it into a cup.



From now until December were going to concentrate on our Core subjects and some fun crafts and games for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

We’re also going to be visiting our local museum more frequently.  I went to a Tricky Tray with my mother and won a One Year Family Membership!!  I’m so happy since I’ve been wanting to go to the museum more often.  It is the perfect size for these guys with lots of fun interactive stuff.

I also won passes to a local zoo but those are going to have to wait until Spring and warmer weather.

Trick or Treat

After weeks of anticipation it was finally time for Trick or Treating!  Georgie kept talking about going door to door after dark but our first T&T opportunity was actually our town’s Trunk or Treat, where they went from car to car.   There were some very elaborate “Trunks” but Georgie’s favorite was the rocket ship.  Went great with his Buzz Lightyear costume.

Vicki loved her Tinkerbell costume and ran “flying” into the wind.

On Sunday, we drove out to Granny Kaye’s neighborhood and did some more traditional door to door Trick or Treating. 

They had lots of funny playing in the “streamers” from some tp’d trees.

We finished up at Granny Kaye’s house where they got a special treat and pizza!

Happy

     Halloween!!

Weekly Wrap-up 10/25-10/29/10

We had a pretty good week this week.  We did lots of Halloween activities (here) and even some science (here). 

Georgie did a lot of writing this week since I was trying to get back on track from letting it go the last few weeks.   We worked on correct formation of letters Dd, Ee and Ff this week.   He still insists on doing all his writing in uppercase letters for his other programs (AAS and ETC) but we're continuing to work on emphasizing lowercase letters.

AAS is continuing to go well.  We finished up Lesson 6 (short a words) and Georgie has mastered Word Cards 1-10. Vicki pointed out that cat rhymes with hat, so she may even learn something from this program.   We did Lesson 7 (short I words) and I think we have a pretty good routine going now.  The first day I show him the Word Cards and have him read them.  The second day I have him spell the Word Cards with tiles and spell some of the additional words using his wipe board or orally.  The third day I have him spell the Word Cards by writing them down and on the fourth day we finish up any of the additional words we didn’t get to.  Although, when I wanted him to just write the words, he insisted on doing them with the tiles as well.

Georgie does tend to go off on tangents when we do AAS.   When we did “big” he observed that he knew other words with ig and spelled “pig” and “dig” on his own.  He also talks to the tiles - “go away ‘h’, it’s ‘t’s turn to come over”  I have decided to relax a little and give Georgie the chance to play his little games with the word tiles.  In between him setting up his games, I asked him to spell or read some words.    His most recent game was to put up a word ending (he did –ish, –et and –un), then he would pull out three other tiles and ask which one goes in front of the word ending.  He says he likes playing these games because he gets to be the one in charge.

We did the short i lessons in ETC.  I’m trying to match these up with our AAS for as long as we can.  Once we finish the short vowels I don’t think we will be able to anymore.

We read a couple of emergent readers from Hubbards Cupboard for the short i word families.  Georgie likes these short little readers.  I like that they put the words we are working on into some context and throws in a few high frequency words as well.   In addition to these readers Georgie is reading any of the books we have that he can.  So far he's done Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Hop on Pop, Great Day for Up, The Nose Book and That's Not My Puppy all by himself.  It is very exciting for him when he can read a whole book.

MEP math is continuing to go well.  Since Georgie did so much writing this week, I did a lot of the writing for him with our math programs.   In MEP we are working on understanding, adding and subtracting 0, 1 and 2.

We continued working on nickels using our money worksheets.  Georgie understood this much better this week.  He was able to give the correct value for various combinations of nickels and pennies without any problem.  I think this was helped a lot by the fact he could already count by 5’s.

This week in Time our worksheets covered digital clocks.  Georgie has been fascinated with our digital clock for a while but it was good for him to learn how the digital clock relates to the clock face.  We are still doing time to the hour but I think we will need to move on soon since he is finding it very easy.

We played a Math game using craft sticks this week.  Each stick had a number on it and was placed in a cup.  Georgie picked two sticks, added them together and looked for the sum on his board.   After a while he became inpatient and drew 3 or 4 sticks at a time.  He added them together by re-grouping them.  When he pulled the numbers 1, 9, 8 and 1 he solved it by saying 9+1 is 10, 8+1 is 9, 9+10 is 19!  I don’t know where he learned this since even his extra games and worksheets don’t go beyond adding two single digit numbers.

We played another game that was just for Vicki this week.  She seems to be having trouble being consistent with counting objects.  Sometimes she does okay, sometimes she jumps all over.  So, I printed out a simple grid and we played a game where we rolled a dice and then stamped the correct number of spaces while counting them out loud.  I made the grid small thinking she would get bored quickly but the 15 spaces I did were not enough.  I think I may print out some more interesting game board type sheets for this – ones that wind around and have a start and finish.

In addition, Vicki did a letter C search page using a bingo dabber.

She glued C pictures to a letter C.  She covered it so well you can no longer see the C.  (The C is from Confessions of a Homeschooler.)

She also put together a caterpillar and we saw a real live caterpillar on our trip to the pumpkin patch.  She put down a loop of glue and for some reason didn’t want to use more so she had to squeeze her caterpillar onto the glue.  I don’t remember where I found the caterpillar but I think it was also from Confessions of a Homeschooler.


I may have to rethink the filing system we set-up.  I love having everything sorted and ready to go but there are too many things where Georgie is moving faster than I expected him too.  I don’t feel the need to do the 30 pages our workbook has on Time to the Hour if he already has it figured out but this is how I have it filed.  If I pull from later weeks, I will have to keep rearranging, something I’ve already had to do for ETC and AAS.  I may have to change and sort by subject – MEP math, Time, Money, AAS, etc.  This way if he moves faster it’s not a problem and if he gets stuck and needs to move slower, we can do that too.

Pumpkin Science

After our trip to the Pumpkin Patch (more on that here) we did some pumpkin science that didn’t go quite as planned. 

First we took two of our pumpkins and numbered them 1 and 2.

Then we discussed which pumpkin we thought was larger and which we thought weighed more.  We were going to predict which one we thought had more seeds but we had so many other messy, fun things to do we never got the chance to rip the guts out of our pumpkins.

We measured the pumpkins circumference by wrapping a string around them and holding it against a ruler.  Pumpkin number 1 was 18” going around vertically and 17” going horizontally.  Pumpkin number 2 was 19” both vertically and horizontally.  At this point we discussed again which one we thought would weigh more.  We all agreed that Pumpkin number 2 should weigh more.
 
Then we attempted to weigh them.  This is where things didn’t go quite according to plan.  Our plastic balance scale could not handle our pumpkins so we ended up having to use our digital bathroom scale.  Unfortunately it was unable to handle weights as light as our pumpkins.  So, I had each kid stand on the scale alone and then holding a pumpkin.  By subtracting the two numbers, we should have been able to get the weight of the pumpkin.  Notice I said should. 

First we did pumpkin number 1.  We did two measurements.  First Georgie alone (42.4 pounds), then holding the pumpkin (39.8 pounds) for a pumpkin weight of 2.6 pounds.  Then Vicki alone (35.8 pounds) and holding the pumpkin (33.4 pounds) for a pumpkin weight of 2.4 pounds.  Not too much of a difference.

On to pumpkin number 2.  This time we did three measurements because they weren’t coming out quite so close.  First Vicki alone (34.6 pounds – not the same as before maybe due to wiggling?) then with the pumpkin (35.6 pounds) for a pumpkin weight of 1 pound.   Then Georgie alone (41.0 pounds – hmmm) and with the pumpkin (38.4 pounds) for a pumpkin weight of 2.6 pounds.  Big difference from 1 pound.  So we gave Vicki another chance.  This time Vicki alone weighed 33.4 pounds (???) and with the pumpkin 37.2 pounds for a pumpkin weight of 3.8 pounds.  Pretty big range of weights for one little pumpkin.  So we discussed what could have made our weights inaccurate.   We decided that not holding still, putting our hands on the nearby table, having extra little hands on the scale and not waiting to see if the number changed could have messed up our readings.

Instead of cutting open the pumpkins to count the seeds, we pulled out our dabber paints and roller paints and decorated them.


For more Halloween Fun, check out this post.

Halloween Fun

We ended up giving up on our scheduled History study this week to concentrate on Halloween.  Partially because we ended up with way more activities than I thought and partially because the kids wouldn’t have it any other way.

We started the week with a trip to the Pumpkin Patch for the perfect pumpkins.  More on that here.

Then we did some easy science using a couple of our pumpkins.  This didn’t go quite as we planned but we were able to learn something about measuring (more information here).

We then did a ton of Halloween Crafts.  

We started with a kit of foam pumpkins and masks.  I bought it on clearance after last Halloween and I have been torturing the kids for the last week by leaving it out where they could see it (so I wouldn't forget I had it, the big disadvantage of buying things a year ahead).  The kids had a great time dressing up their pumpkins.  Georgie made his into a game – which pumpkin is different and why?  (the bottom middle pumpkin has no costume on and is a different type of pumpkin than the others).


We made ghosts with folded paper arms and legs. Georgie saw these in the window of a local elementary school when we went to the Homecoming Football game and was eager to make his own.  I don’t have a picture of these but you can see them in the final picture showing all (or at least most) of our crafts.
We also made spiders with folded paper legs.  We drew eyes with yellow crayon and then painted them with watercolors so the eyes stood out.

Granny Franny had given us packages of foam shapes – ghosts, cats, bats and spiders that we decorated using foam stickers, stampers and glitter glue.  Vicki’s favorite by far was the glitter glue.


We made paper plate pumpkins.  I put big dollops of red and yellow paint on their plates and they used paint brushes to swirl it together to make orange.  They then added eyes, nose, mouth and stem.

For our last project, I gave them large sheets of paper, Halloween cookie cutters, a stamp pad and Halloween stampers.   Both kids decided they liked using their hands better.

Our (almost) complete display of Halloween crafts.

We had borrowed a couple of Halloween books from the Library.  The kids loved Halloween Spot-It – an I-Spy book with very busy pictures where you look for specific objects.  At first I thought it was going to be too hard, but they kept wanting to go back to the book and look for more stuff.

We also borrowed The Story of Jack O’Lantern.  This book wasn’t as well received.  It was pretty creepy with talk about death, evil and ghosts (I skimmed through parts of the book instead of reading the whole thing).

For the actual school work we completed this week, check out the Weekly Wrap-Up.