Week in Review: Halloween & Flexibilty

This week, we continued with our Halloween theme, making decorations out of a neat old activity book from the 80's.

We did a little Candy Corn math, which was a hit, particularly the subtraction part, since it meant L got to eat the candy.

We read and re- read our favorite Halloween books, with an ever increasing amount of help from L, as he learns to read more and more words.

Other than that, we did a lot of workbook work again, at L's request.

Although I did virtually a whole year worth of planning over the summer, I think it's time for me to re-evaluate our lesson plans in light of what we're actually doing here. I planned the year with minimal workbooks, and lots of fun hands on stuff. As it turns out L loves doing workbooks, and isn't much into a lot of the things I thought would be fun. I have to keep reminding myself that part of the reason we wanted to homeschool was to tailor the learning to his interests. Although we're not going to only do workbooks, it looks like we are going to be doing a lot more of them than I had planned, and lighter on the "fun" unit studies.

So that's our week in review, and somehow I didn't manage to take any pictures of us doing anything fun this week, but we did have fun. Just not the kind of fun I'd planned.  

Week in review: Sick

This week wasn't very fun or productive. We had doctor and dentist appointments on three out of five days, and I've been sick and miserable most of the week.
We managed to have school 2 days. We continued with the fall/pumpkin/Halloween theme.

Here are a few of the activities we did:

*L made Halloween cards for some of his favorite relatives. He dictated the message, which I wrote. He then signed his own name, and decorated with drawings and stickers.(The messages were precious, by the way. "Dear Nana, you're my greatest of all.")

*We attempted a messy paper mache project, which L essentially refused to do, even wearing the gloves I provided for him. (Too "sticky" he said.)

*We made torn paper jack-o-lantern collages. (As shown in picture.)

*We made "pumpkins" out of Play-Doh, which basically meant practicing rolling balls.

*We made Play-Doh "cookies", using a set of tiny Halloween cookie cutters I got on sale, at Hobby Lobby last week.

*We did a couple of Halloween themed worksheets.

Week in Review: Pumpkins/Fall/Halloween

I've decided that for the month of October, we'll be studying fall, pumpkins and Halloween. It seemed sort of arbitrary to divide our activities into a week for each, since there would be so much overlap.

Anyway, we did our usual non themed stuff, like Bible reading and Spanish.

Here are some of the theme related activities we've done:

We read some good books. Here were some of our favs:

The Pumpkin Book, by Gail Gibbons

Pumpkins, by Ann L. Burckhardt

Fast Food, by Saxton Freymann (Totally not related to the theme, but an awesome picture book. I'm going to be looking for other books in the series.)

We made paper bag pumpkins.

Did some Halloween worksheets. (Incidentally, I'm finding lots of worksheets, file folder games etc, at http://www.childcareland.com/. )

Experimented to see whether pumpkins floated, and discussed bigger/smaller, and lighter/heavier. This has sparked some discussion about what other things might sink or float, a topic we'll be following up on.

Practiced writing letters: h for Halloween, p for pumpkin, etc.

L dictated a story about bats, which I wrote for him. L enjoys this process.

Next week: more of the same. I have several bigger messier craft projects in mind to do, but have a hard time doing them unless dad is around to watch baby V. She's old enough to want to be right in the middle of everything, but not really old enough to do a lot of things. Hopefully we'll manage to get them done before Halloween...

Preschool Week in Review

I wasn't feeling great this week, so we had sort of an "unschooly", nonstructured week. Instead of sitting down and doing everything in one sitting, we did things in little bits and pieces throughout the day.

We read mountains of books, which was nice. L discovered a new favorite, Pigeon finds a hot dog. We've read it at least a half dozen times every day. We read some Shel Silverstein poetry, which L enjoyed. He's been very much into rhyming lately.

He's been talking about volcanoes a lot, so we read several books about volcanos, and then did the old baking soda and vinegar volcano. He loved that.

We practiced Spanish with Boca Beth. Baby V even joined in trying to say some Spanish words.

We also did some work in a Pre-k workbook.

Our theme for the month of October is going to be fall/Halloween.

Week in Review: Apples

Last week our theme was apples. In addition to our usual non themed activities, here are a few of our projects:

Paper plate apples (With LOTS of glitter.)



Apple finger painting



Painting with apples...traditionally and abstract





Paper bag apples



We also ate lots of apples, played some neat apple games that I found on the net, and now can't find in my bookmarks, and read several apple related books. (The Giving Tree, Ten Apples Up on Top, and several others.)

Word World Unit Study, Week 2

This week we continued with the Word World theme. Due to a whole host of issues, we didn't get as much done as I would have wanted.
(Husband's unfavorable schedule? Check. Multiple church activities? Check. Church committee deadlines? Check. Uncooperative preschooler? Check.)
At any rate, we did what we could.
We finished making our poster, (shown here, in the picture.)
We made Play Doh letters and words.
L finger painted, much to his horror. (Sensory issues.)
We made the Word World lapbook, which I found here: http://lapbooksbycarisa.homestead.com/TotBooks.html. (By the way, she has tons of cool toddler/preschool lapbooks to download. I've bookmarked several for future use.)
L made a darling self portrait. It was sort of a big deal for me, because he has a hard time using appropriate pressure when writing, and as a result, most of his work consists of faint scribbles. (I'm trying to think of a way to incorporate his picture into the grandparents' Christmas gifts.) We practiced writing the letter W.
We started reading the first series of Bob books.
We watched lots of Word World movies, and practiced spelling along with the show.
We used alphabet rubber stamps to "build words."
We read our Bible.

So that's our week in review. Our theme next week will be Apples.

Word World (Our Week in Review)

Our theme this week and next week is Word World. Although my son has known his alphabet and the sounds the letters make for some time, I credit Word World with giving him an interest in, "building words."
This week, in addition to our usual, every day activities (Bible reading, reading story books, Boca Beth lessons on Youtube,) we did a number of Word World related activities. I found many activities at http://www.wordworld.com/toolkit/. We also played Word World games on pbs.org, and rented several Word World movies from the library.
Additionally, we "built words," using foam letters, letter stickers, and letter stamps. Basically, this consists of L telling me what word he wants to spell, and me sounding it out for him, while he spells it using whatever manipulatives we're using. This is good practice for him in the area of phonics and spelling, but it's also fine motor practice, which L could use a little extra work on.
Next week, we'll be continuing with this theme. I found a Word World lapbook online, have requested several more movies from the library, and am planning on spelling with wiki sticks, and possibly with Play Doh and alphabet cookie cutters. I'm also planning on re introducing the Bob books to him.
L has had a lot of fun this week. He wakes up and asks to do school every morning. His daddy was able to watch him to more of his work this week, and said it was "exciting to watch him" learn.

R is for Robot (our week in review)

This past week was our first week of school, and the theme was "R is for Robots. " We had a good week, and a lot of fun. I definitely feel like unit studies are the way to go for us at this point. I thought I'd share what our week looked like:

Tuesday was our first day. We started out by reading the Bible, specifically the Beginner's Bible by Zondervan, which I love. We then read several books, unrelated to Robots. (Truthfully, I didn't find a ton of robot books or materials to use for the week. In the future, I'm hoping to read mostly books that relate to the theme.) We did several robot related worksheets, and made a poster of things that started with the letter R. (I saw this idea on another mommy's blog, but I can't remember where.) We then made paper plate robot masks. Here's a picture of L wearing mine, and one of me wearing his. (Yep, I know I'm missing half of my head. L took the picture.)We also played some games on the pbskids.org website.





Wednesday: Started off the day again by reading the bible, and then several picture books. We watched videos of robots on youtube. L was amazed by the lego transformer videos, and somewhat less interested in the videos of robots constructing cars and so on. We did several more robot worksheets, and L dictated a robot story to me, which went as follows:
"Once upon a time, there was a robot inside a factory, and he couldn't find a friend. He tried to find a dolphin robot under the sea. He tried to find somebody else, but a whale caught the dolphin robot. The dolphin robot was trapped in his tummy. He was stuck in the drain, until he came to the dark tunnel of sharks.."
The story seemed sort of like a combination of Taro Gomi book we recently read, and the story of Jonah and the whale to me.
We also made paper bag robot puppets, and finally, we practiced our Spanish with Boca Beth videos on youtube.



Thursday: Yep, you guessed it, more Bible and story reading first. We spent some time practicing writing R. L seems to have a hard time holding the pencil no matter what. His handwriting is going to take some work. We did some non robot related math worksheets that dealt with the issues of less/more, and bigger/smaller. We drew some robots, and then made robots out of toilet paper rolls. Finally, we watched the Letter Factory video.



Friday: Bible, and reading again. More practicing the letter R. Several more math worksheets. We built robots out of K'nex, and watched more youtube robot videos. L especially liked the videos of toy robots, like Robert the Robot and Mr. Machine. We played some more games on pbskids.org.

Each day we worked together about an hour to an hour and 15 minutes. After that, L went back to his regularly programmed destruction of the house.