Park Days

Now that Angel Girl is in Preschool in the mornings, we are finding that we need to fill up our afternoons. 

So we have been park hopping!

Each afternoon that it is not raining we are checking out another park in the area.

We have found a couple of favorites....and a couple that are outside mom's comfort zone.

Sept 12 - 16

Sweet Boy
Itsy Bitsy Spider
Naming Farm Animals (we used the book Barnyard Dance from last week).
Washing Face
Throwing Bean Bags

Angel Girl
This week our book was Brown Bear, Brown Bear.  We did a bunch of activities from Homeschoolshare.com.  It was an interesting week because Angel Girl knows this book well and so by the end she was "reading" it to me.
I also set up a Montessori work that had her using tweezers to sort 2 colors of pom poms. 
We played with pattern blocks (and made a birthday cake for Auntie with them).
We tried to make homemade Kazoo's from toilet paper rolls, that was a bit of a fail.
We put together a junk box for her to keep her "special" things that she finds outside and around the house.

Sept 5 - 9

Sweet Boy
Pat-a-cake
Painting with paint brush
Kumon Tracing with our finger
Brushing our teeth (Montessori Practical Life)
Clapping to music
Read Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boyton and named the animals in the pictures.

Angel Girl
Our Before Five in a Row book was Goodnight Moon.  We did art, animal classification game, memory practice using the pictures, learned Hey Diddle Diddle, and read Goldielocks and the Three Bears by Jan Brett.
Montessori work this week was opening and closing doors, especially the front door because Angel Girl told me she didn't know how to close it the other day.
We did free play with our C-rods.
We made popsicles and talked about liquids and solids.
We also made some shape cutouts that we traced to practice our shapes with.

Pre Pre-School

We have been on vacation and now we only have 2 weeks before school starts.  So for this 2 weeks I will be doing Before Five in a Row activities with Blueberries for Sal and otherwise just getting everyone on a schedule for waking, eating, napping and going to bed so that we will all be ready to wake up early for Angel Girl's Pre-k.  I am hoping to do a weekly post about our mommy school experiences but we shall see how it goes.

Plans for 2011

First hopefully I can keep up with this blog but I need to spend time with my kids so if my choice is blogging or my darling children...well my children win.  So I have high hopes but we shall see lol.

So on to the school year starting in Sept 2011.
Angel Girl (age 4) will be attending a SpEd. pre-k program in the mornings so I will be afterschooling her.
So we will be using:
Before Five In a Row and Homeschoolshare for reading aloud, basically we will read a book for 5 days and do 1 activity a day.
Montessori at Home I will be introducing 1 activity a week from Montessori at Home which she can then have on her shelf to work on when she wants.
Cuisainare Workbook we will be alternating free play with activities from this little workbook.
The Complete Daily Curriculum for Preschool we will do 1 theme a week from this book as we did last year.
More Mudpies to Magnets I will be introducing these fun science activities 1 a week.
Slow and Steady Get Me Ready we will do the activity that is planned for her age at that time.

Sweet Boy (age 2)
Hands on Homeschool I got this for Angel Girl when she was 2 and am going to adapt some of the activities for Sweet Boy this year doing 2 a week instead of the whole program.
Slow and Steady Get Me Ready we will do an activity each week for his age.
Montessori at Home I want to start getting Sweet Boy ready for doing Montessori officially at 3 so I will be working on some Practical Life activities adding ideas from Montessori Mom.
Story Stretchers for Infants and Toddlers we will be doing 1 activity a week so  most books will take about 3 weeks to get through.

As a family we are working through the Read Alouds listed in the Great Books Academy, right now we are doing the Nursery books.

Blue

We learned about the color blue this week (she gets it mixed up with green and purple).  It think the painting was a success!

We also did a "treasure" hunt for items that were blue and we read Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey. 

Montessori At Home

Chasing Cheerios posted about this book on their website...so I checked it out.  I LOVE it.  It is truly an easy way to start Montessori in the home.  So check it out.  It is available as an instant download!
http://www.montessoriathomebook.com/Welcome.html

New and Different

I am now mommy schooling a child with special needs...we kind of knew that from the beginning but now it is official.  She is on meds and getting services to help her and now I am finding we are able to learn more effectively.  So we are kind of starting over...or rather reviewing what we have done to see what stuck and what did not.  We are using the help of a great website called abcmouse.com.  They are an interactive site that lets kids play while learning. 
So I use what they are doing as the jumping off point for the rest of our week...so this week we did:
Memory Work: Little Boy Blue
Letter Work: Letter A (and she totally got it which surprised me)
Religious Work: Reverence
Read Alouds: Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear using ideas from Homeschoolshares and Before Five in a Row
Jesse Bear is going to be our book for a couple of weeks while we do the homeschool share lapbook and other fun activities with it.

What We Did Last Week

We learned about the letter N.  We read The Napping House and felt the sandpaper N.
Then we read Your Ears Can Hear and Polar Bear Polar Bear What do you Hear and talked about ears and their uses.

What We Have Been Reading

The Tale of The Flopsy Bunnies by Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse by Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Timmy Tiptoes by Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Johnny Town-Mouse by Beatrix Potter
The Tale of Mr. Tod by Beatrix Potter
(we are trying to read all of Beatrix Potter's books)

K is for Kissing a Cool Kangaroo by Giles Andreae - we looked at each page and tried to find things that started with the letter on the page

The Red Hen by Judith Bauer Stamper
The Little Red Hen (Makes a Pizz) by Philemon Sturges - we talked about helping and being happy when we helped, then we made some muffins