School Time: Getting re-motivated

It has been quite a while since I have posted fully about our school time.  We started Five in a Row at the beginning of the school year and made our way through several books (some of which were in the FIAR manual, others I worked in to make my plans go the way I wanted to) only to discover that FIAR was really not for our family. I, and the children, are really more hands on learners. Unfortunately FIAR was way to much sit and discuss while mommy had to come up with her own crafts and such. Not that it is not a good curriculum, it is just not for us, especially not for a mommy with no energy or motivation due to being in the latter half of her pregnancy.  

So we had hit and miss lessons for quite a while. We were still trying to get our Kids and a Mom in the Kitchen time in. And of course we still had muffin tins, but most of the time there was no rhyme nor reason to them, just throw food in the tin and be done with it. Not how I want it to be. 

I am so thrilled to have my energy and motivation back. Granted, having a newborn still makes getting things done tricky, but we are slowly working on making it work. I plan on having us on a decent schedule so we can start kindergarten in the fall (or earlier) with My Father's World. In my "spare" time I hope to get everything organized with our Letter of the Week stuff that I will be working on with Hannah. But for now, we are going to focus on some fun themes, start doing Montessori activities again, maybe do a couple more books in the FIAR manual and just have fun with the baby. 

Since we have been home we have done several different things. Daddy decided it was important for the girls to learn Psalm 23, and mommy agreed it would be a good memory passage to learn. So a few weeks ago we started focusing on one verse a week. For verse 1 "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want" the girls colored a picture of a shepherd holding a sheep and wrote/traced the verse.

Each week we have focused on a subsequent verse, though I didn't have time to get a paper around for them.  During our Bible time before bed we have the girls recite the verses they are memorizing, then as a family we say the entire passage. Tabitha shocked me the other night by continuing on after finishing verse 3. She said the entire passage by herself (with a couple of nudges) after only reading it for three weeks. I still have trouble getting the verses in order!!

The next thing we focused on was our second Pizza week. We had another Make Your Own Pizza tin.

And I, once again, included a dessert pizza. 

That same week we had some sort of pizza every day. 

Monday was the muffin tin with dessert pizza

Tuesday we had homemade pizza

Wednesday we had Southwestern Chicken Pileups (a Biggest Loser Cookbook recipe) because I thought they looked like little pizzas. We also made Fruit Dessert Pizza.

Thursday, being Breakfast for Dinner Thursday, we had a breakfast pizza.

And Friday we had grilled pizza sandwiches.

Then I cut out pizza shapes to make our Word Family Pizza Game. 

The girls wanted their own wedges to make their own pizzas. I didn't tell them what to do, just handed them the paper I cut into the correct shapes. 

Then I played the Word Family Pizza Game with Amelia. Still haven't had a chance to play with Tabitha though.  This game was great for showing me how well Amelia could hear rhyming words. Actually not as well as I thought.

And we celebrated Dr.Seuss's birthday with a muffin tin. 

Then we started focusing on the colors of the rainbow, just like we did last year. First we made finger paint.

Then we started making our paper plate rainbows (that we are going to finish this week because we are having a Rainbow week).

The girls made collages for each color of the rainbow, we focused on one each day.

We also had a muffin tin for each color, like we did last year leading up to St. Patrick's Day.

And on our orange day we made Pumpkin Cookies.

This is a combination of blue and purple.

We ended our two weeks of colors on St. Patrick's Day with  Shamrocks and Rainbows

For the rainbows, first they sorted the cereal.