Our First Week of School: Sept 6-10, 2010

And what a week it was!!  The girls are really excited to have school time.  One of my dilemmas is trying to challenge Tabitha while not boring Amelia, or overwhelming her.  The great thing about homeschooling- observing how things are going and being able to adjust as we go along.

I am so pleased that I got the playroom cleaned and organized.  The last time I had thoroughly organized it was back in January for our Pizza Party.  The discouraging thing about that party: after everyone left, it was clean, but no longer organized.  Then it got messier and messier as I got farther and farther along in my pregnancy.  After Hannah was born cleaning time was at a minimum.  However (and I am embarrassed to share these pictures, but hopefully by sharing I will force myself to remember not to let it happen again) I went from this:

to this:

in a couple of weeks time.  I just wanted to start this year off on a positive, organized note.  I was so thankful that Hannah took some good long naps in the afternoons so I could work on it.  And we bought some crates so I could split the toys up, to store some in the closet ready to change up every month.

Then we rearranged the dining room.  We moved the computer and desk into the living room.  The stereo had to go in the dining room and I finally got off my duff and cleaned my piles of papers and stuff that were on the tables so we could use them for displaying work and for our school table.  Which Tabitha is really excited about, knowing we have a place to call school.

I don't believe I have any before photos of the dining room.  Though all of our lesson pictures in the past were taken while the girls were working at the dining room table, and you usually got a glimpse of the cluttered computer desk and possibly the coffee table.  Now our coffee table holds some of our "work"/"activities" and I am not limited to the small stand I've been using.

Now, onto what we have been doing this week.

Our "curriculum" is going to consist of letter/sound of the week following the order found at
readinglessons.com, a free site I discovered.
"ReadingLessons.com is a free program that uses step-by-step lessons to help teachers and parents to teach children to read, write and spell."
I am following their order, but we are spending a week on each letter instead of 4 sounds a week.
I am also using letter of the week over at Brightly Beaming Resources. We have our poster on which we post our letter/sound of the week and 6 pictures starting with that sound.

We also have corresponding word/picture cards again (word on one side, picture on the other).  I actually use the letter of the week site as more of a guide than as a step by step curriculum.  I tend to find my own words, though I do appreciate her list of books, poems, foods among other ideas.  Just with our resources sometimes I have to substitute.
I have tweaked my schedule as we went along this week as what I had first planned got rearranged.  But I am hoping the following schedule will continue to work with the other lettters:

Monday: Introduce sound using phonemic exercises found at readinglessons.com.  Color, cut and collage our word card pictures onto a capital letter.

Our words are necklace, nuts, nest, nickel, nurse, Noah's Ark

During "circle time" I read one word card at a time (or have Tabitha read it if it is a 3-4 letter phonetic word)  and the girls find the picture card and place it on the poster.

Tuesday: Playgroup, so far no lessons scheduled this day.

Wednesday: Tactile letter activities.  During circle time the word card is read by myself or Tabitha.  This time however the girls go and get the picture and bring it to me.  Then I get the letter to use in our tactile letter basket.  The girls get to use a pipe cleaner to form the letter

we use our sandpaper letter

and our lower case build-a-letter I just found, created by Nicole over at Tired, Need Sleep.

Thursday: Continue the tactile focus.  First, during circle time I placed all the cards on the table.  Word cards in a row left to right and picture cards turned upside down in a row above them.  The girls pick a picture and try to find the word card that matches.  A little bit of a challenge here and Amelia really needs help, she prefers if I just show her the word card quickly so she can go hang the picture on the poster.  Then we make a textured letter.  This week we used green split peas as our color is green.

The girls had painted them the day before using 

blue and yellow paint to make green.

After they dried they helped me put the glue on and tried 

very hard not to get too sticky while placing the dried peas.

Friday: We make our letter craft on Fridays.  A craft that uses the shape of the letter somehow.  I may be using some ideas from Jolanthe over at Homeschool Creations.  Unfortunately I am going out of ABC order so she doesn't have crafts posted yet for 3 of my first 4 letters.  I actually thought I could use some ideas from  the book, Curious George Learns the Alphabet by H.A. Rey, we'll see.  Right now I have crafts planned for n, a, and m but I can't figure anything out for p (the order I am going in is n, a, p, m to name the letters/sounds for the first month).

We made an n necklace.  Here is where I drew the pattern

Then the girls glued the circle "beads" onto the necklace "string"

We will also review the sound of the letter with a sound activity game, not sure how else to describe it.  I am placing pieces of construction paper on which the letter has been written on the floor.  This week we also had 2 blank nothing cards.

As I say different words they will move to stand on a letter.

If the word doesn't contain a n they step on the nothing card.  This worked for beginning sound n, but when I tried 2 words ending in n we hit a wall.  So now I found something I need to work on.  It answered my question about whether Tabitha could do it.  As we add more letters I will place more than one letter down at a time so they have to choose the right letter.

I also printed out some worksheets from www.beginningreading.com.  There are many different ones to choose from; I chose alphabet set 1 (trace and write some letters) and alphabet set 2 (search, find, and circle the letters)

We will have a Bible Verse each week to go with our letter.  This week's is:
Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. Genesis 6:8

Of course we've been reading the story of Noah all week out of different books.  We really like the Alice in Bibleland series.  I purchased them for my older children years ago and when they got older donated them to the church.  I hadn't planned on having anymore children after all.  Now I am borrowing them occasionally from there and from my friend who hosts playgroup.  I really like the accuracy in these stories.  I will have more of a review for the Noah's Ark Alice in Bibleland book come Saturday (or soon after) when I link up to What My Child is Reading over at Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns.

We are participating in Muffin Tin Monday this year and most of the time it will be planned around what we are doing that week while fitting it in with Muffin Tin Mom's theme.

On Wednesdays and Thursdays we will be focusing on our geography/postcard swap lesson.  This week's state was Delaware.  You can see what we did Wednesday here.  Below are the finished state pages for Delaware.  We finished coloring, cutting and gluing on the state outline, state bird, state flower and state seal.  And they traced the nickname of the state.  We will be creating a book of all the states in the union in the order they joined.

Unfortunately the computer decided to rotate 

a couple of pictures on me.

Friday's will be our bird book lessons.  I was going to use the bird listed at letteroftheweek.com, however I remembered I had a Wildlife Explorer binder (which I snagged up at a yard sale last year. It is a completed book and it would have cost a fortune to get all of those cards sent to us in the mail however often they would have sent them.  Now I am starting with a complete set, yay!).  So we will substitute birds, probably more often than not, that I can find in the binder.  For example, instead of nightingale we are learning about the Common Nighthawk for n.  These cards really have some interesting trivia and lovely pictures.

Like the United States of America book we are making, we can add information as the children get older.

I also plan on using the book Counting on Math: Activities for small hands and lively minds by Pam Schiller and Lynne Peterson.  I really like the way this book is set up.
Chapter 1: Exploration of Materials
Chapter 2: Spatial Relationships
Chapter 3: Classification
Chapter 4: Patterning
Chapter 5: One-to-One Correspondence
Chapter 6: Ordering
Chapter 7: Numeration 1-5, Plus 0
Chapter 8: Shapes
Chapter 9: Numeration 6-10
Chapter 10: Fractions
Chapter 11 Measurement
Chapter 12: Time and Money

I love how they explain the Developmental Sequence (from pages 13 and 14):
"Math builds on itself.  Children take what they learn from one concept and apply it to the next.  "

"When children are allowed to explore many objects,
they begin to recognize similarities and differences of objects.

When children can determine similarities and differences,
they can classify objects.

When children can classify objects,
they can see similarities and differences well enough to recognize patterns.

When children can recognize, copy, extend and create patterns,
they can arrange sets in a one-to-one relationship.

When children can match objects one to one,
they can compare sets to determine which have more and which have less.

When children can compare sets,
they can begin to look at the "manyness" of one set and develop number concepts."

Granted Tabitha is beyond some of this already, but I can move ahead with her if I feel it is necessary.  They have a schedule listed for each of 4 age groups to take you through a whole year.  I will probably follow the 4 year old schedule.

For our number activity this week I took masking tape, numbered 5 small pieces for each girl and put them on their fingers while we counted.

Then we put them on a tracing of their hands.  

Simple 1 to 1 correspondence activity.  Once again, something that wasn't planned but came to me late yesterday.

For science we will continue to do our little experiments/observations that life brings us. We have been linking up to Science Sunday over at Adventures in Mommydom, most recently with our tadpole and frog observations.  I also plan on using the book Science is Simple:Over 250 Activities for Preschoolers by Peggy Ashbrook when I can find ideas that go with our letter of the week.

I also created my very first sensory tub this week.  As we were doing n I made that my theme.  We had shredded newspaper, nickels, noodles and egg noodles. The girls seemed to enjoy it.

(I loved the way Tabitha was sitting)

Off our shelves, the most popular activities this week have been the dry pouring, which I changed from macaroni to green split peas, the tactile letter basket,

 the clothespin number match

(I printed this printable out back in February and I really can't remember where I found it. If you know where I got this from can you please let me know, I do NOT have time to go searching right now and I want to give credit where credit is due.),

Thanks to Kylie from Our Worldwide Classroom for reminding me where I found the count and clip cards.  You can find these and lots of other great printables at Nicole's blog, Tired, Need Sleep.

and Amelia is still really into putting the beads on the pipe cleaners.

To see what others are doing with their toddlers and preschoolers head on over to 1+1+1=1, Homeschool Creations  Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers 

And check out The Ultimate alphabet craft collection for unique craft ideas for every letter of the alphabet over at The Attached Mama