Valentine's Day

Valentine's was the perfect day to learn about the circulatory system! We read some books about the heart, and also did some fun exercises that got our hearts pumping. The girls had fun finding their pulses and feeling the difference before and after exercising.

We decorated our "h" cutouts with hearts, of course! We also brainstormed "h" words.

The girls had fun completing this heart pattern worksheet. They had to paste the hearts in the correct spot to make the patterns.

We also made this heart craft. We cut out a heart shape in the purple paper, then we painted paper towels with watercolor paints. Finally, we taped the paper towel to the back of the heart cut out and hung the craft on the window. They look so pretty with the sun shining through! We ended our day reading a book of Valentine's poems.

The Five Senses: Touch and Taste

Today we finished learning about the five senses. After our morning routine, we sat down and read about how the sense of touch works. We then took turns touching lots of different objects and describing the way they felt. We made a chart so we could see all of the descriptive words we used. I also had the girls go find objects that felt different ways. For example, I said, "Go find something that is soft," and the girls had to come back with their own object that matched the description I gave them.

Next we moved on to learning about taste. The girls had fun looking at their taste buds on their tongues and talking about all their favorite foods and why they like them. Then they got to try samples of the three out of the four tastes. We tried sugar for sweet, salt for salty, lemons for sour, and we skipped bitter. Check out Sophie trying the sour lemon! Zoe kept getting stuck on the texture instead of the taste. She said the sugar and the salt were scratchy.
At the beginning of the month we traced Sophie's body. We have been adding the body parts as we learn about them, and we've also added descriptions of how the body works.

We ended our lesson with this idea I got from The Mailbox. We decorated a hat (a la Dr. Suess) with the rime -and. We then added -and words. These will be Sophie's spelling words for her test next week.

The Five Senses: Smell

Our school time starts the same every day. First we say the pledge of allegiance, then we do the calendar, and then we do some type of review, such as counting popsicle sticks, comparing groups of objects, sorting etc. Today after calendar I did an assessment with the girls. I had them get out their white boards and write different letters and numbers as I dictated them. We did upper and lower case letters a - g and numbers 1 - 12. I kept track of which letters and numbers that they need to review and made up some worksheets for them to do independently throughout the week.

After our assessment, we learned about our sense of smell. We read a book about how we use our noses to smell, and then we did a little experiment. I made a chart of different items that we were going to smell. After smelling each item, the girls made a smiley face if they liked it, a sad face if they didn't like it, and a straight face if they didn't care either way about the scent. After smelling all of the items, they picked the one they liked best. Sophie's favorite was the cinnamon, and Zoe's favorite was the vanilla.

Next we made a list on the chalkboard of how our bodies reacted to the good smells and the bad smells. The girls thought it was pretty neat that their bodies responded instinctively to the bad smells by trying to keep the odor from getting into their noses and by trying to dissipate the scent. After that, they went through the house to find something that smelled good to them. Zoe brought back the Tinker Bell bubbles from the bathroom, and Sophie brought her favorite blanket.
Here is a game we got out of The Mailbox - Time to the Hour Lotto. Since learning time to the hour is one of our objectives, I've been looking for fun ways to reinforce the concept. The girls thought this was fun, so we'll be playing it again throughout the month.

The Five Senses: Sight and Hearing

We started our new theme by learning about our sense of sight and our sense of hearing. The girls had fun using flashlights to see how our pupils adjust to the light. They talk about it every time we come inside. Zoe especially loves to point out that our pupils are getting tiny when we go in the sun and then how they get soooo big now that we are inside!

When learning about our sense of hearing, we did a fun activity where the girls sat facing away from me. I had gathered different objects (a xylophone, an egg shaker, some jingle bells, a toy phone and a toy pepper grinder) and had the girls use their hearing to guess what each item was.

One day we did the letter "G", which the girls decorated with gold glitter and goldfish crackers.

We also brainstormed words that start with the letter "g".
Sophie's copy work for the day. She is working on being able to write her full name by herself. She can do her first name no problem, but she still has trouble with her last name - she usually gets the first three letters before she has to look.

God Made Me

Our theme for February is "God Made Me." We are starting by learning about the five senses, then we will learn about the three main body systems: circulatory, muscular and skeletal. The girls are very interested in their bodies so this was the perfect theme for us. We will learn about the heart and circulatory system during Valentine's week. At the end of the month we have a field trip planned for the Tucson Children's Museum, which has an exhibit about the human body.

For math our objectives this month include: telling time to the hour, addition to 5, estimating and the calendar. Our social studies objectives are about how people are alike and different, and we're going to review address, phone number etc. as well as discuss different jobs that people have. For language arts, we will continue to work on sight words, word endings, copy work and spelling. Sophie will have her first spelling test this month! I've also been thinking about a way to track how much reading she is doing.

We will continue to decorate our letter cutouts - doesn't the "F" look pretty with its feathers?

Resources for "God Made the World" Theme

Our theme for January was "God Made the World." I picked this theme because it was the beginning of a new year for us, and the beginning of kindergarten for Sophie. I knew that I wanted to make booklets with the girls, with one page for each of the first seven days. This was not fancy: construction paper, markers and yarn for assembling the book. I printed out text for the girls to glue onto each page, and they decorated each page with foam stickers that we already had in a stockpile (thanks to clearance shelves at Michael's).

In addition to making the booklets, we read lots of stories and listened to music that related to the theme. We read the actual story in Genesis many times and in several different books. One was The Children's Illustrated Jewish Bible, by Lauren Brown and Lenny Hort.
We also read from My First Bible, published by Parragon and illustrated by Andrew Geeson and Sophie Keen. Both of these children's bibles are great because they have simple text and colorful illustrations.
I was pleased find a variety of books at the library that worked with our theme. Some were Christian based while others were from a Jewish perspective. We are still navigating the religious waters as a family, so I chose to teach this theme using resources from both my religion and my husband's religion. Here is a list of other books we read throughout the month:

Creation, by Gerald McDermott

The Story of Creation - A Little Bible Playbook, but Reader's Digest Children's Books

All Things Bright and Beautiful, by Cecil Francis Alexander, illustrated by Anna Vojtec

The Seventh Day, by Deborah Bodin Cohen

Fishy Tales, by DK Readers

Made by God - Spiders, Snakes, Bees and Bats, by Zonder Kids

"Uri Uri"CD, by Elana Jagoda - song #2 Seven Days

We also read from The Torah, which really didn't hold their interest, but I thought it was important for the girls to hear the "original" version of the creation of our world!

Days Six and Seven

I think the girls' favorite day from the creation story is day six. In addition to reading books about different animals, we also went to the zoo to look at the "beasts". Sophie's favorite animal is a lion, and Zoe's is a giraffe. We also learned that God made man to care for the world and rule the beasts. For the seventh day, I had the girls draw a picture and tell me about it. This is Zoe's drawing. She said, "My favorite thing that God made was puppies, the sun and the land."

Day Five

We had a lot of fun learning about the fifth day. We learned the word "swarm" and brainstormed as many creatures we could think of that live in the sky and sea. After decorating our book pages, we played a game where I would say either "sky" or "sea" and the girls would have to pretend to be a creature that lived in whichever place I said.

The "E" got decorated with elephants and eyes.

Day Four

This week we started with the fourth day of creation. We learned about how the sun, moon and stars guide the seasons. We are fortunate to live in a part of the country that gets beautiful sunrises and sunsets, plus we have amazingly dark clear skies at night. We took extra time this week to observe the skies throughout the day.

The girls decorated the D with dinosaurs and dogs.

Creation Day 3

Here is a page from Zoe's creation book featuring the third day. For this part of the creation story we made a trip the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. We went to look at all of the plants that are native to the Sonoran Desert. The girls' favorites were the Teddy Bear Cholla and the Octopus Agave. We learned about how trees help people and animals and why it's important to plant trees.

Here's how the girls decorated their letter C: clouds, cupcakes and candy canes.

This is a center/independent game that the girls played together. They took turns spinning the spinner (not shown here but made with a brad and a paper clip). Whoever was spinning would read the word that the paper clip landed on, then color in a space above the word on the worksheet. The object is to continue playing until one of the sight words' spaces are all filled. They had fun trying to predict which word would be the winner! This is a fun way to practice sight words.

Day Two

It took us two days to complete about half of what I had planned for yesterday thanks to the stomach flu making its way through our family. Before the girls were feeling mostly better, we decorated our "b's", which was fun and distracting for them. We picked blue buttons, blue butterfly stickers and bandaids for decorations.

Today we reread the creation story from a different children's bible. My objective for this lesson was to teach the girls the word "divide" and to have them demonstrate it in their artwork. They had fun decorating the next page for their creation booklets using cotton balls for clouds and wavy cut blue paper for the water.
We ended our school time by making this fun snack: blue cream cheese frosting (cream cheese softened and mixed with a little powdered sugar) water, marshmallow fluff and white sparkling sugar clouds, on top of a graham cracker.

New Year, New Objectives

After 2 weeks off from our regular routine, it was good to get back on track today. We started our morning using our new calendar. Today we just did the basics of completing the date and weather, but over the next few weeks I plan to incorporate some other activities into our calendar time, especially some math skills like counting by 5's and 10's.

Another new routine of ours is to decorate these large letter cut-outs. I have an upper-case and lower-case set for the entire alphabet. Today we decorated the A's with apple stickers. The girls had a lot of fun doing this. After, we wrote some a's on kindergarten ruled paper and they each picked an "a" word to spell. Sophie picked "apple" and Zoe chose "ant."
Our theme for January is "God Made the World." Today we read the creation story from the girls' Jewish Kids Bible. We talked about the first day and completed a page of what will be part of a homemade book. Today's page had a scratch-art paper on it for the girls to decorate. I also had them paste the text of the story at the bottom of the page. After they completed their pages, we went into our guest room closet, which has the light switch on the outside of the door. So while the girls were in the dark closet, I waited outside. They would yell, "Let there be light!" and I would turn the light on for them. They thought this was so fun that they wanted to keep on playing it while I went and made snack.
It seems like it's going to take us a few days to ease back into our schooling, but I'm excited for this month. We've got some field trips planned and lots of fun activities and projects. I'm noticing that Zoe is content to sit at the table and do pencil and paper activities, but Sophie prefers to be up and about, doing hands-on projects and experiments, so I'm working on finding some appropriate science projects to do. I'm glad to have a good start to the new year and am looking forward to the rest of this month!

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.

Happy Thanksgiving!

We hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. We certainly have much to be thankful for! We took a week off of school to take time to just play and be with family, and I was pleased when both girls kept asking when we would be having school again because they missed it! We've been moving right along with the Pre-K scope and sequence I'm using, and I plan to have Sophie ready to start working towards Kindergarten standards in January. It's so exciting to see their progress. Sophie is reading now, and Zoe and is recognizing more and more sight words.

Of course in prep for the holidays, we did lots of Thanksgiving related activities. I'm not going to post everything that we, but this craft I had to include. We made turkeys by stuffing paper lunch sacks, tracing hands for wings, adding a turkey head and feathers. On each feather the girls wrote something or someone that they are thankful for. They were so thoughtful. Sophie put all people on hers and Zoe included things like toys as well as people. They made great decorations for our table!

The Mailbox

I've been pulling a lot of ideas from The Mailbox website lately. They have a great free resource area, and you can sign up to get daily emails with ideas specifically for your own kid's age/grade level. I still have not spent money on anything except craft supplies (although I do have a wish list going - mostly storage solutions!).
After reviewing the letter "S" and practicing writing our "T's", the girls began working on the above worksheet. Sometimes I think the color by number or letter pages are too easy, but it is really good practice for following directions and working carefully, which Zoe (my "I finished first" child) needs to work on. We did alter this worksheet a little. Instead of having the girls color the leaves, we are crumpling tissue paper and gluing it on. I think they're going to look really pretty. We're also going to write a fall story to go with the picture. I will have them dictate the story and I'll do the actual printing.
We ended our day with the game "What's Your Move". It was fun to see the girls pick movements that we don't usually practice, such as leaping and taking giant steps.

Snack today was pbj triangles (made on those thin sandwich rounds), grapes and bananas.

Overwhelm Sets In

I didn't post any of last week's lessons because I just couldn't seem to find the time or energy to do it. We did do school all three days last week, but it was a challenge. The baby (now 8 months old) has been this little angel from heaven since the day she was born, and last week she decided to try on being a little devil! The fussing and crying and non-sleeping through me for a loop, so one of the things that got dropped (as happens when survival mode sets in) was this blog. I was beginning to think that I would have to start posting the whole week's lessons at the end of the week, because I just didn't see how I would manage to do it after each day's lessons. But now my baby girl is back to herself and I realized it was just one of those glitches and it will probably happen again in the future. I'm just rolling with it!
I didn't want to blow off all of my posting from last week though. On Election Day we did a lesson about voting. It was a fabulous lesson, not just because of the topic, but because both girls had one of those "aah ha!" moments during the phonics portion. I asked the girls why we say "vote" and not "vot", and Zoe said, "Because there's a silent "E" at the end.", and then Sophie said, "And the silent "E" makes the "O" say it's name!!" That right there was enough to keep me going for the next few weeks! For the voting portion of the lesson, I made up a story about a King, a Queen and a Princess that lived in the Kingdom of Colorful. One day the princess decided that everyone should wear the same color clothes. She declared that there would be a vote and that the people could choose either red, purple or blue. I elaborated about how the people talked for days about which color they would choose, and then the voting day came and the people lined up to cast their votes. At this point the girls had their papers ready (see above) with red, purple and blue squares. I had already gotten a bunch of Candyland cards ready, and now I let each girl take turns pulling a card. Whatever color they got, they had to put a tally mark under the correct square. We did talk about tally marks and what they mean, but I did not teach them to strike through the four tallies when they got to five. Once the votes were all tallied, we discussed which color won, which came in second and which came in last. We also talked about why people voted the way they did (they already had a lot of clothes that color so they wouldn't have to go out and buy more, they have shoes that match that color, they think that color is pretty, they think that color looks good on them....) We ended the lesson by talking about the election that was taking place that day. We also checked the news throughout the day and watched as the results came in. It turned out to be a fun lesson for all of us, even if some of our local results of the election were disappointing!

Pumpkins Everywhere!

With Halloween just days away, it seems like there are pumpkins everywhere! Today we did some pumpkins worksheets that I got for free on The Mailbox website.

The first one had pumpkins of different sizes on it. I had the girls color and cut out the pumpkins. Then I instructed them to paste the pumpkins onto the green construction paper starting with the smallest and going in size order. After that, I asked them a series of questions such as: which is the biggest/smallest, which is first, second, third etc., which one is in the middle...We spent a little extra time discussing the ordinal position of each, and then I had them label the pumpkins ordinal position with the smallest being first. This worksheet gave the girls practice with their fine motor skills (coloring, cutting, pasting) and their number sense. It was also fun and makes a great fall decoration!
The next worksheet was about practicing visual discrimination. Initially this paper looked too easy for the girls, but then I thought that it was still good practice. Noticing the differences between the different pumpkin faces and being able to match them is an important prereading skill. Think about the subtle differences between a lower case b, d, p and q. So we decided to do the sheet and the girls thought it was fun, and I extended the lesson by having them tell me about the pumpkins. I asked them questions such as: how do you think this pumpkin is feeling right now, what is this pumpkin thinking about, is this pumpkin scary? why or why not? etc....

Snack was in the car again - on the way to the zoo this time! It was Chloe's first visit to the zoo and she loved it. Hope everyone has a fun and safe Halloween!

The Teachable Moment

While getting ready this morning and packing up our stuff to take Chloe (almost 8 months) to her first baby storytime at the library, the big girls decided to dump out their piggy banks and combine all of their money. Initially I wanted to be annoyed with them, but then I realized that they didn't care that Sophie's bank had a year's worth more money than Zoe's, or if they ended up with more or less than they had before dumping out the money. So I scrapped the lesson I had prepared for today and capitalized on the teachable moment at hand.

We all sat down and sorted the coins and paper money. I had the girls identify the different coins by name, and then I showed them that 5 pennies and 1 nickel are worth the same. We got out their little cash register and they took turns "buying" erasers. I told them the erasers were worth 5 cents. They had fun choosing whether to pay for their erasers with nickels or pennies.

Next we worked on getting all of the money back into the banks. We started with one pile of coins and I asked the girls how we could divide the pile in half (this ties back to our lesson on fractions). Sophie suggested that she get 5 and Zoe get 5, so we counted out 5 for each. Then we counted out the leftover coins until they were all gone. For the next pile, we decided on the "one for me, one for you" method of dividing. For the pennies (which there were a lot of), Zoe came up with the idea of "drawing" a line down the middle and pushing one side to her bank and the other side to Sophie's bank. We discussed that to be fair, we should count the pennies in each pile to make sure they were the same.

Overall, this turned out to be a fun lesson for the girls. After the storytime (which Chloe loved) I took the girls to the store to buy something with their $5 that they took out of their banks. They were surprised at the cost of the different toys and items they were interested in. Zoe picked a lollipop and a book. Sophie picked a lollipop and some bunny costume accessories to add to her dress up collection.

No snack today - the girls snacked on crackers in the car on the way to the library!