Getting into the Groove

I've started to develop a little system for my lesson planning. Starting next month we'll have a monthly theme. On a manila file folder, I've written the month and the theme (January's theme is "God Made the World" and February's theme is "God Made Me"). Inside the folder I have a blank piece of paper divided into four sections, which are labeled: Language Arts, Math, Science and Social Studies. Under each section I jot down our objectives for that subject. Under the Language Arts section I also make a list of books that we're going to read, vocabulary words, word families, sight words etc. As I come across patterns, worksheets and other resources, I just stick them in the folder. This has worked really well for December. We've met almost all of our objectives and we still have a week to go. When my January plan is finished I'll take a picture of it - and of course I always write it in pencil!

Another thing that I'm excited about is Scholastic! When I was teaching, I loved doing the scholastic book orders. Their prices can't be beat, and teachers get so much back from the students orders: free books, bonus points, posters and more. So I called Scholastic and got myself signed up as a Homeschool Teacher. We're getting ready to send in our first order and I feel like that makes our homeschooling real and official somehow! I also just received an issue of the Mailbox for free. I can't say how much I love their product. I used it in the school system and I find their graphic organizers and ideas to be very helpful with the little ones.

I'm about to make my first purchase for our homeschool from Oriental Trading. We're buying upper and lower case letter cutouts and will be using them as we start the kindergarten scope and sequence. We've been collecting items for decorating them - apple stickers for the letter "A", blue buttons for "B", candy cane stickers for "C"...it's amazing what you can find in the clearance section of any store!

Centers

For the past couple of weeks I've been busy making "centers" for the girls. In a regular classroom, centers are an important management tool, allowing the teacher to work with small groups of students, while the other groups work independently on activities that are designed to be review or enrichment. I'm using the centers as independent work, so while I'm working with the girls individually, the other one has an activity to do. Sometimes the girls do the centers together while I get materials ready for our lesson or deal with the baby.

This is the center I just finished putting together. I got it from The Mailbox. The idea is to match the number words (learning our number words is one of our objectives for December) to the correct gumball machine. This is a self-checking activity. On the back of each gumball machine and on the back of each number card is the numeral, so the girls can check their work by flipping over the cards and making sure the numerals match.

This Month - December

We spent the first part of this month doing activities related to Hanukkah. We read lots of stories, made crafts, did some adding with candles, and talked about miracles! Here is one of the crafts we did - a star of David made out of popsicle sticks and little flames to make it look like a menorah.

Now that Hanukkah is over, I've been teaching the girls about writing letters, specifically thank you notes. We've been working on writing our full names and address, and I also added in learning our phone number. We've been doing lots of work with our map. Since we're done working on the alphabet, we have a new opening routine. We say the Pledge of Allegiance and then we take out our big USA map. We start with Arizona (I ask one of the girls to point to it) and then we find the states where we are sending our thank you notes. We're also learning the states that border ours, and we're looking at some of the landmarks, bodies of water, capitals etc. For math, we're working on sorting, patterns, naming numbers in a set, reading number words and identifying numbers 0 - 25.