Her Baby

Abby has an incredible love for Baby. And I love that fact! She wakes up with Baby and goes to bed with Baby. When it's time to go to sleep, and if Baby isn't in her bed, she screeches and points and generally gets her point across that Baby isn't there and Baby should be. When she wakes up Baby comes downstairs with her...along with her diaper (burp cloth) and a pipe. Sometimes two pipes. This girl comes with a lot of accessories!


I think she was trying to feed Baby. With two Duplo shovels. We have play utensils, but when William was little John took them away due to them being a chocking hazard. I'm not sure he knows where they are...so...she uses shovels. Quite ingenious, if you ask me.


She never forgets about Baby's bottle. Shoves that thing right up Baby's nose like a pro! It's quite cute, actually - she gives Baby a sip then she gives herself a sip. I think she's learning to share quite nicely!

Songs

We sing tons of songs everyday. William is quite the medley-maker, as a lot of his songs start out one way and end with, you guessed it, Take Me Out To The Ballgame. Anyway...here are a couple we've been working on.



My cuz wrote me and suggested looking into Zoo Phonics. I did, and have been hooked. It's quite expensive, though, so...no buy as of yet. However I did print off the motions to the sounds and we know Allie, Bubba, and Catina. He has SO much fun doing these motions that I wish it were more economical to get the whole program. (Magnets, flash cards, etc.) Anyone else heard of this program?

Lil Sis

Abby is starting to rid herself of her morning nap. (Did I seriously just write that?!?) I actually looked forward to William quitting the morning nap, as it gave me time to get groceries, go to the mall, etc., but during Abby's nap is when I like to work with William on his "studies". When she is up she is into everything. She touches everything, she moves everything, she tastes everything. So I've had to get creative. You know, involve her somehow. I got out my unifx cubes and let her have at it, at least while William and I did our Bible lesson.

William dutifully showed her how to play with them. By the time we finished with David's Anointing (yes, IknowIknow...we just covered Moses and the 10 Commandments, but this Bible book moves fast!) the cubes were all over the school room and just about everyone had been tasted.

I never really taught early elementary school, so I wasn't sure if it was time to introduce scissoring. It wasn't. We'll be waiting a bit longer to try these babies out again.



Check out this cool sepia picture! I like to call this time outside with the water "Playing with the sensory table".

This picture just cracks me up! What in the world is William trying to eat? I think he's taking a bite from the hand exerciser. Who knows!

10 Commandments

I realize that some of these blog posts are mainly for me, so I can remember what we're doing throughout the week...so bare with me!


We are up to the 10 Commandments, so I thought I'd venture into the world of lapbooking. I had never heard of lapbooking until I ran across it on various homeschooling websites. I felt like I had been left out of an entire creative world. Okay, not really, since I'm NOT creative, but I thought this might be of some interest to William.

Since he's only three there's a bit (okay, okay, lots!) of prep work that I had to do ahead of time to make this activity go smoothly.

• I took a file folder and cut it into the shape of the 10 Commandments' pillars of stone.
• Found pictures of each commandment that represented their meaning and cut them out
  
• Found 10 Commandments Song and printed it out (this was for me, so I could teach it to him). Seriously - does learning the 10 Commandments get any easier than this? I love this song!
• Found a coloring page of Moses holding the 10 Commandments (forgot the link, sorry!)

There is SO much more that I could have done with him for this lesson, but...that will wait until he's older. For now I think he got the point!

Pony Spike!

Abby's hair is getting a teeny tiny bit longer. Some days I think it will never get to the pony tail stage, but for now we've got a pony spike!


She will NOT wear a bow in her hair, so I bought some tiny hair bands and then stuck a bow in. Magic. She didn't try to tug it out at all. She actually sat very still while I brushed her hair, wet it down (she has the most amazing cowlicks, and when she gets older she can fully blame her Daddy for those!), and then twist it up in a spike.




Yes, we are still experiencing incredibly hot weather here. Today was humid (I'm from Michigan, so I have some experience in this) and quite unpleasant, but that doesn't stop the littles from wanting to get outdoors and play!


I had to throw this picture in...it's a great shot of our beautiful front lawn. It was a disaster when we moved into this house, and with our hard work is really starting to look great. I put some weed-n-feed on it a few Saturdays ago (John's foot is still in a boot, so he couldn't do it) and it's perking right up!

Moses, Letter B, Numbers

Here's William doing a push-pin trace of the letter B. He did this on the carpet.


Here's a fun craft we did - Butterflies! In hindsight they look more like Bees...but either way you look at it, both flying creatures start with the letter B.

We are up to Moses leading the Israelites across the Red Sea. After he colored it I cut it out and he pasted it on construction paper. This has been his favorite story so far, since we have a fun song that goes with it. I thought the Ten Plagues song was fun, but with 10 verses he lost interest quickly.

Yesterday I took the kids to story time at the library. Let's just say it was NOT a hit with William ("too scairwey!"), and Abby...well, I couldn't drag her away from the librarian and other kids! I tried to get pictures, but William flat out refused to leave my lap. Oh well...with several hundred new books in our schoolroom we won't be hard pressed for new reading material! I think we'll try it again, though.


Moving on...we are continuing with number recognition with numbers 1-5. Here's our number wheel and he has to match the clothespin (with the number written on it) to the corresponding section of the wheel.

Another way I'm trying to teach him to learn his colors is by making unifix sticks of the colors that match each animal in Eric Carle's book Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I think he's slooowly getting them. (Personally I think he's just pushing my buttons by calling everything green, since when he wants to do something he usually can!)

I'm still learning my camera. So far the blurry pictures are user error. I wish I could figure it out, because it's driving me nuts!

Learning

William is three now so I thought that I'd start teaching him letter recognition, and maybe letter sounds. I finished painting the schoolroom, and even have a bit of it decorated, so now when we want to "study letters", as he calls it, we go into the schoolroom. I don't have a work table/desk for him so we're just using the picnic table.

This past week, in our Bible lessons, we learned about Pharaoh and the 10 plagues God sent. Here is William making a little book with pictures of all the plagues. This was his first time pasting, too.

Here's our letter tree, and William is putting up the letter "A". I'm debating whether or not to just run through all the letters alphabetically first, or pick them strategically. So far alphabetically is winning out, since I just don't think he's ready to start with the letter sounds. Besides, I don't want to frustrate him this early on.

I found this fun M&M activity here. The trick was to keep both eyes on him, as he was constantly sneaking little bites of chocolate morsels! Oh well...he had fun.

I'm also trying to teach him number recognition. He can count quite well, but actually knowing how many are in a group is another story. If there are three apples on the tree, and I ask him to count them, he'll just keep counting and counting until he doesn't know any more numbers.

We also did a bit of Home Ec. He simply wants to be involved in whatever I'm doing, so I happily let him help me.

We'll hopefully be learning a few more letters this week, along with reading many, many new books. His current fav is Eric Carle's Brown Bear, Brown Bear. I have crafts that go with each animal, and so far he's made a toilet paper roll brown bear and a red colored/pasted bird. I'm not sure how long we'll keep going with this book, but he asks for it to be read to him every day. He's actually staring to learn his colors with the help of this book!

These pictures were taken with my phone. I now have a new camera, so hopefully the picture quality will be much better in the upcoming posts.