Farm Animals

Two weeks ago the theme for school was farm animals. I honestly barely remember what we did, because the last week has been kind of crazy. I didn't do everything with Kate that I had planned since we were both sick, but below are some pictures of one thing she liked. We read a book titled Mrs. Wishy-Washy, which is about an old lady who washes her farm animals when they make a mess in the mud. I bought her some plastic farm animals, it was called a Farm Animal Toob. I thought it was weird! Anyway, she made a painting with her farm animals and some mud, aka brown paint. After the farm animals were dirty, she cleaned them all just like Mrs. Wishy-Washy. I was finally brave and just let her paint on her own that day. She actually did really well, no messes!

We read some other books about farm animals, she really liked one called Barn Dance by Bill Martin, Jr. She also learned the letters N and O. I was planning on taking her to the zoo, because they have a farm section and they added a new Little People Farm area. It didn't happen since it was still too hot and we were sick. Hopefully soon!

Next

This last week I have been reading a book that my friend Ruth told me about called The Well-Trained Mind by Susan Wise Bauer and Jessie Wise. It is a book about homeschooling using the classical education approach. I had never even heard of this, which is sad since I was an education major. It is an approach that the US education system has gone away from, which I now believe is one of the major problems with our society today. It makes so much more sense then what is being done in schools now. I feel that I was given a pretty good education at College Heights. I never knew exactly why what they did there seemed to work, but now I know it was because they were somewhat using this system. I have no idea if it was intentional, but hopefully it was! I would love for my kids to learn this way, so I'm thinking about teaching them myself. We'll see!

For Kate's preschool I have lessons figured out until the 2nd week of February, and then I wasn't sure what I was going to do. I wanted to do something more literature based, but I wasn't sold on any of the programs I had seen for her age. Then I found a book called Storytime from A to Z. I haven't ordered it yet, but it seems like what I was looking for. There are 26 lessons, one for every letter. Each lesson is based on a book and then there are different activities that go along with the letter and the subject of the story. I think Kate will like it!

September

September was a busy month! Not only did I start doing preschool with Kate, but volleyball started as well. Kate loves "doing school". She asked to do school as soon as she woke up this morning. Apparently I need to have things for her to do even on Saturday. I enjoy planning everything we're going to do, but it is time consuming since most of the things we do involve quite a bit of prep work. As she gets older, I imagine the prep work will be less.



After "apple" week, our theme was safety. Most of the theme ideas I'm using are from a book called Themes to Grow On. It's a book for 4 to 6 year olds, so I have to adjust some of the activities, but she is able to do most of them. For safety week, she learned what different signs meant, and we talked about fire, water and home safety. I don't think this was her favorite subject, but it's always good to talk about these things every so often.



The next theme was teddy bears. We read a lot of books about teddy bears, and did quite a few sorting activities. Luckily, she has way too many stuffed bears or this wouldn't have worked. We had all of her bears out and she had to sort them from smallest to largest. She did this pretty well, she did need help when she was doing the smallest bears. One lesson that I liked was math with Goldilocks and the Three Bears. It's easy to teach sizes and sorting with this book.




At the end of the week I try to come up with an activity or a "field trip" that goes along with the theme. At the end of teddy bear week, we took her to Build A Bear. She loved it! She was very funny interacting with the people who worked there. They were a little strange and overly outgoing, so she would just stare at them whenever they asked her anything. It took quite awhile to finish her bear, because they have a ridiculous variety of bear clothes. She finally settled on a princess outfit complete with pink shoes, a crown and a wand. She wanted to just name it Bear, but eventually she agreed to name her Giselle.


Every week we go over two letters of the alphabet as well as one number. She already knows her abc's and numbers up to about 14, but she is learning the letter sounds. I am not teaching her to write, but when she was learning the letter E she actually wrote her first letter! On her white board she made a lowercase e. I had left to go get something, and when I came back she said "Look Mommy, a little e!" It was so cute!!!

I'll write about what we did last week on a different post, because this is really long already. I have more September things to write about, so maybe I'll actually have more than one post per month!

A Good Monday

I think I mentioned in my last post that I was starting "school" with Kate. Each week we have a theme and we do different activities and workbooks covering language arts, math, science, social studies, cooking and art. We are doing pretty basic things, I'm not too crazy! This week our theme is Apples. Today I put apple cutouts all over the house, and she had to go find them all and put them in a basket. I figured she would like this, but I had no idea how much. I ended up having to do this many, many times. We also made a book about apples, after she listed her favorite things about apples. I was not really sure when I chose what we are doing if she would be able to, but she is always surprising me with how much she understands. It's been really fun so far being her teacher!



Everett is coming more "alive" everyday! He smiles all the time and is such an easy going little guy. I love the little noises he makes, and he is always moving. That's kind of scary actually! He goes for his 2 month check up later this week, and I'm excited to see how much he has grown. I'm pretty sure he'll be in the 90th percentile or higher. Kate always is and he seems bigger to me.



Tonight we had dinner with our volleyball team. It's something the team does every week. Thirteen girls between the ages of 14 and 18...it made me happy that I don't have a teenager. No matter how hard it is to have a toddler, I was thinking tonight how much harder (in a very different way) it will be to have teenagers.



Well, it took me a few days to write something again, but at least I did :)

Try Again

It has been almost a year since the last time I posted anything, so I am going to try this whole blogging thing yet again. I'll basically just be writing about what our family is doing, and anything else that I find interesting.



Life has changed for us since last September, mostly because now we have a little boy! He's almost 2 months old now, and he's soooooo cute!!! He is a really good baby, and I know I am very lucky for that. He already sleeps well, but he is starting to be much more demanding. Kate is almost 3 now, and she is everything you expect a 2 year old to be. She is very sweet and smart, but she is also so exhausting and obnoxious sometimes. I will be happy when this stage is over.



I started doing preschool with her this week. She really likes it, but she has a hard time focusing after awhile. I started spacing it out more throughout the day so that there was a break between each thing that we are doing, and that seems to be working better.



I am going to attempt to write everyday about the kids, what new things they are doing and how they are changing. Hopefully I will be diligent about it, because I know when they are older I will be really happy that I did this.