Revamping

I made today my "teacher work day." We woke up and right from the start everything started going wrong, the children seemed out of control, I was cranky, I couldn't find several things I was looking for and at that point- I felt beat and made the executive decision to take the day off and revamp our set up. I would like to believe that those who have been homeschooling a little longer than me have struggled a little with some of my issues. Although I have loved homeschooling thus far, I have struggled much with the balance of life and getting school done and I needed a moment to just breath and think through what wasn't working. We have been having schooltime in our playroom which has been working well, but because of the set up, I was keeping all my teacher materials and manipulatives in various places throughout the house. I was fed up with trying to keep track of where things were so I spent the morning moving things around, sorting and cleaning. It was a good feeling when all was done. I feel ready to have some really good productive days that will begin and end with organization that I didn't have before. I really believe that my lack of organization in most areas of my life are why I can't seem to really get control of things around here and why I get easily frustrated. I am going to work on putting a few things in place in the next couple days/weeks that will help me in this area.

Our Bear Unit

Bears, Bears Bears

We spent this whole week learning about Bears, habitats, and hibernating. I plan on continuing this unit into next week because there is so much I wanted to get to but we ran out of time. I am working on including our 4 year old into most of our schooling and this also includes the 3 year old I babysit a few days a week. So in addition to the Bear study I'm doing with Zoe I planned all kinds of fun learning activities to do with all of them.

After our usual Bible Time, we started the first morning out with a song. I had each of my children find a teddy bear for us to keep in our school room all week to play and work with. They enjoyed telling their bears to wake up at the end of the song

Bears are sleeping (Tune: Brother John)

Bears are sleeping.

Bears are Sleeping.

In their Lairs.

In their Lairs.

Soon it will be springtime,

Soon it will be springtime,

Wake up Bears!

Wake up Bears!

We then measured our bears with unifix cubes and discussed whose bears was the longest.

We played a quick game of hide and seek with our Teddy Bears. The loved doing this!

We read the story Corduroy and did a button sorting activity

Our art project for the day was them gluing overalls and buttons on their own Corduroy.

We had a story sequencing activity.

The next day we did a Gummy Bear sorting activity. They each had to sort a handful of gummy bears on a sorting map. Then we each counted how much of each color we had, we made a chart on the wipe board. Zoe had her own chart that she counted them up on.



We did a teddy bear weighing activity. I had several objects that they weighed using teddy bears. Zoe then colored how many teddy bears it took each object to equal out on the scale.


She then cut out the colored bears and placed them in order from lightest to heaviest (in case your wondering this is an AIMS activity)


One of the days we sorted teddy grahams and charted those as well. I don't know if you knew this but you can sort teddy grahams by- arms up, arms down, round tummy, flat tummy, feet together and feet apart.

We finished up bears for the week by reading through the We're going on a Bear Hunt story. After reading through it once and doing the actions, they wanted to hide their bears and pretend like we were going to hunt them. You can find one of the adaptations for this story here

I am going to post on some of the other things we are doing for Bears more specifically with Zoe our kindergartner on another day.

If you are looking for some other great Tot learning ideas check out 1+1 =1

Trying to get the hang of it

Well, we are now through one semester of homeschooling. As a whole I think it's gone well. I feel like we could have done more and been more productive but I'm not beating myself up for it, I know that we are still further ahead then where she would be if she was at an away from home school. But still I had hoped for more. We are using Sonlight as our curriculum but to be honest thus far I'm not loving it. I think I'm willing to give it another year before I completely ditch it, but I am leaning more toward a unit study approach. I love the Five in a Row curriculum, but I also feel like I need just a little more than what it offers. So I'm playing around with a few ideas. I have always wanted to write curriculum, planning was always my favorite thing to do as a public school teacher, so I might even put together my own curriculum for next year- who knows? Right now my focus is on trying to make school more fun while still maintaining a learning atmosphere. We won't officially start this next semester until This coming Monday- I need to get to work!

As we were reading together yesterday we read a book called The Christmas Cobwebs, the book was about a cobbler whose home and business catches on fire and they have to move to a new home before Christmas. I asked my kinder girl if she knew what a cobbler was, and she said "someone who cleans up cobwebs? " Makes perfect sense to me :)

Book Club

One of the things I love about homeschooling is that it gives me an excuse to read great children's literature. Right now we are reading The Family Under the Bridge. It's a great little story that takes place in Paris about a hobo names Armand and a family who recently became homeless. Their worlds come together when Armand discovers the family has moved into his spot under a bridge. Armand is a self proclaimed loner and is struggling to keep his heart from becoming too attached to the children he refers to as starlings. We are only 5 chapters into it but I'm loving the story.

Stump the Teacher

We have started a new game for Bible time in the morning. It started with the story of Jacob's ladder. After I read the story I drew a picture of a ladder on our white board and made a sticky note with a picture of an angel drawn on it. For each question about the story that they got right the angel moved up a ring on the ladder. They thought this was great fun, and have wanted to play this game everyday with our stories. Today the tables were reversed. After I read the story, my kinder girl wanted to be the one to ask the questions, and move the angel. She did such a great job that I think we will continue with this way of doing things. It requires a higher level of thinking and forces her to have to really listen to the story.

Kindergarten Corner

We took almost two weeks off in November due to birthdays and Thanksgiving, so we are not going to take too much time off from our regular schooling in December, Although we are going to add in lots of fun Christmas activities, Especially baking and crafts. I have decided to move our school time from the kitchen into the Playroom. I'm doing this mostly for me, I have such a hard time staying focused on getting school done when I am surrounded by things that I think need to get done ie. laundry, dishes, etc. But the playroom is such a fun and bright place to be that I am really enjoying our time there, plus it's easier to keep the other children entertained.

Here are a few pictures from the day.

We use Handwriting Without Tears, for our writing curriculum. After we do our lesson the wood pieces always end up as roads for Zacks matchbox cars :) We were working on Math with the Geoboard. Right now I'm using Saxon Math, I don't know if I will continue to use this curriculum I really love how it uses the spiral method, but I'm looking for a more hands on approach, and because the lessons are so easy we breeze through several a day.

Zoe is working on a word sorting activity here.

We ended the day by making gingerbread cookies. Even the baby got in on the action.