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!