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Scrapbird

New facebook freebie!!

More freebies to come as we celebrate

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Stuff to Scrap is closing at the end of this month.

We are so sad to loose this great site in the digi-scrapbooking community.

Arizona Girl's STS store will be 65% off until the end of the month when the site closes down.

There are exclusive items at STS that may or may not be put into Arizona Girl's other stores, but either way you will not see prices like these again.

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.