Rr Lesson Continued: Rainbows

I am so, so, so relieved to have my camera back. As I was unable to share pictures for the Rr lessons when I posted a couple of weeks ago I really want to be able to share them now. We had made rainbow pictures and a rainbow/Noah's Ark cake. For more details please check out the Rr lessons post.

Gluing on suns:

Painting sun's rays:

Gluing on the pompoms for the rainbow:

The gray dots are supposed to be rain drops:

Sorting M&Ms and Skittles

Decorating the cake:

And here Tabitha is all excited about her workbook:

The Homeschool Hop #6

It's time for The Homeschool Hop again, hosted by Kylie over at Our Worldwide Classroom. This week we get to answer random questions, a little peak at each other's lives, what fun!!

1. What time is it right now? 5:40 pm

2. What are you wearing? My peachy orange colored floral dress with my green long-sleeved turtleneck. One of my favorite outfits (and the one I have been taking pictures of my growing belly throughout this pregnancy)

3. What is your mood? Happy and relieved!! I found my camera an hour or so ago. It had fallen down behind the filing cabinet (hubby kept saying he felt drawn to the filing cabinet, but I kept looking in the drawers to make sure I hadn't over looked it, and now my son tells me he dreamed it was back there 2 nights ago). I was quite giddy when we found it, praise the Lord!

4. What is one thing your children learned today? Learned about the sky.

5. What did you (or are having) for dinner? Chicken tacos (not the normal kind, just throwing chicken in the pot in place of hamburger, this recipe was found at allrecipes.com and we love it. You cook the chicken up in a combination of lemonade, lime juice, olive oil, garlic powder, onion powder and Worcestershire sauce. You do have to make sure to cook it all the way down, which means cooking it a bit longer than the recipe calls for, the flavor is so much better. And we love adding mashed avocado to the traditional toppings. Yummy.

6. What's one book you are currently reading? Breaking Dawn (last book in the Twilight Series, also my favorite)

7. What behaviour (in people) is the most common but also the rudest? Burping loudly (like my 13 year old daughter likes to do) and thinking it is funny.

8. What can you see out of your nearest window right now? The car (green Subaru Legacy) we gave to my son and the old thrift shop, which is now owned by Acorn and I believe it is going to be torn down so they can expand)

9. What are you currently praying for? A safe labor and delivery

10. What is your favourite hot beverage? Would have to be coffee with some sort of flavored creamer. I don't have it often though.

STOP: Please DO NOT add your link below unless you have a post published about the blog hop and the current theme, and the McLinky code showing in that post. All links added that do not play fairly are removed.

Postcard Swap Update

Here is a reminder about how this postcard swap works (there have been some changes, the changes will be in blue)

How it works: 50 families (one from each state) will swap postcards over the next half a year. Two states will share a week and each one will send out 49 postcards, one to each state, during that week. We will go in the order the states joined the union. At the end of 25 weeks we will all have received a postcard from 49 other states!

At my house, we plan on putting up a large map of the United States, and connecting each postcard that we receive to it’s corresponding state. We also plan to use the resources at about.com. At this link you can sign up for an email course called "Our 50 great states." This course goes in the same order we will be going (2 states per week in the order they joined the union). I plan on getting the info off this course at the beginning of the week, so we will have info ready to put into a book about the states we will receive postcards for that week.

The postcards will be somehow themed about the state that you live in (I know I see state postcards all of the time at places like Walgreens and gas stations, but you could feel free to make your own, as well!) On the back of the postcards, I was thinking that your family could just write either a fun fact about your state or why you like living in your state.

To join: email Tanya at adventures and gapcswap @ gmail dot com OR peila (at) harbornet (dot) com

If you are interested, but your state is not on the list of states we need, send me an email anyway. With enough interest I will put together a second (or more?) swap. I don't want anyone to miss out!

Here is a list of the states still needed as of today (Tues, March 16th).

Iowa
Kansas
Louisiana
Maryland
Massachusetts
Minnesota
Mississippi
Missouri
Montana
Nebraska
New Jersey
New Mexico
North Dakota
Rhode Island
South Carolina
South Dakota
Vermont
Wyoming

Tanya updates this list as she gets states added and you can find the updated list here.

She is looking to be able to start this swap at the beginning of April, so hopefully we can have all these states claimed.

S lessons

Well this week was far from spectacular. Another week of next to nothing.

Lots of plans+no energy+appointments= nothing done.

We were going to start the letter Ss. I printed out pictures. I had some ideas for projects. Guess next week will be here soon enough.

Here is what we did get accomplished, minus pictures because the camera has not yet been found :(

I took 4 books out of the library and we did read them quite a bit. We even took one to playgroup, along with The Rainbow Fish, this week. It is called "The Biggest Snowball of All" by Jane Belk Moncure. This book focuses on sizes: big, bigger, biggest and wide, narrow to give a couple of examples. They start out with a teeny tiny snowball and it becomes big enough to turn into a house, but returns to teeny after the sun comes out. We also read "The Snowy Day" by Ezra Jack Keats. Little Peter wakes up to find it had snowed during the night. We followed him on his snowy adventures and grieved with him as he discovered his snowball he had wanted to keep had melted. Seemed appropriate that we had too books that brought up melting snow, as that is what the snow has done around here the last few days. We were even able to take walks a couple of times this week. We discovered melted snowmen in one yard. Also very convenient as I had found a great idea at someone's blog for Melted Snowman Soup. You take:

Cream of Potato soup (prepared as directed)

Mini carrots (I had already cooked them to soften them a couple of days earlier)

and Peas

When these ingredients are combined it really does look like a snowman has melted right there in your bowl. I made sure to position the girls' veges so there were 2 peas above a carrot and some below to make it look like the face. Unfortunately, the girls weren't too fond of the soup. I did get Tabitha to eat some of her veges. I don't think the carrots were soft enough for Amelia though because I found the one I thought she had eaten chewed up on the plate. (Sorry if tmi).

(Please if you see this post and you have posted about Melted Snowman Soup let me know. I have searched and searched and can't for the life of me figure out where I saw this recipe)

We also made suns. I traced a 3" circle onto white paper and 2" high isosceles triangles (8) around the circle. I wrote the word "sun" in dots under the sun. Then I photocopied it onto light blue paper to represent the sky. Then I cut the same shapes out of yellow paper and the girls glued them on to the pattern. Wow, was Tabitha ever so precise. Amelia struggled with the triangles but did well with the circle. And Tabitha did a great job tracing the letters.

I almost forgot. We also read 2 other books (and will continue to read for the next week). "Sam: the sound of 's'" by Alice K. Flanagan (a simple phonics book about a sand crab and, once again, the hot sun) and "The Very Busy Spider" by Eric Carle (a book about the spider spinning a web in the barnyard surrounded by friendly animals and a pesky fly. It's fun to see the spider's web take shape and be able to say the animal sounds). I'm sure most of the people reading this post know this book, but I thought I would share what I like about it. I think this is one of my favorite Eric Carle books. I like that you can actually feel the web too.

Anyway, the girls wanted something else to do after finishing their sun, and Tabitha specifically asked for more dots to connect, so I made a dotted spider for them to trace. An oval body and 8 legs made out of dots with a dotted line to represent the spider's silk. Then we sang "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" a couple of times.

The Montessori activities remained untouched this week. I hope to change up a few and start some new activities this week. Hopefully I will find my camera, because it will be easier to explain things with pictures.

Speaking of pictures, our word cards for this week are: sun, sled, snake, snail, stop and squirrel. All of which I was able to find sign language signs for.

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

Homeschool Hop #5

The Homeschool Hop is hosted by Kylie over at Our Worldwide Classroom. Come join in and have some fun checking out other's homeschool blogs. So far we have met each other and the families and also found out why we are homeschooling. This week the theme to share is "Style." What style or approach to educating your kiddos are you using?

I remember when I first learned about homeschooling over a decade ago and the only thing I could picture was a school-at-home approach. When I started to really research homeschooling as a "real" option for my "babies" I was surprised at how many different approaches there are. I looked into Charlotte Mason and liked some of her ideas, such as dictation, narration and living books. When I read about unschooling I was intrigued. But I can't see me, with my personality, being able to stick to such a radical approach. I find myself leaning more towards a relaxed approach with the girls. I want to make sure they are learning the basics. I want to make sure I have some sort of plan to go by to make sure we are doing something. Right now we have 5 years before we have to be official. The plan right now is to use the "curriculum" I can throw together, though sometimes this seems a bit too overwhelming as I found a bunch of stuff at the thrift shop for really cheap, but of course it is not complete (most of it was Abeka) and I am not sure how to combine it all. I have several different books for beginning reading/phonics. Always felt I could see if one approach worked, if not try another. But now I am wondering if that will frustrate the children. (Just for an example of why I am a mite confused) Right now all we are really doing is a letter every week or two using some ideas from Letter of the Week. Mostly I get some ideas for books, poems and theme words from this site and I try to come up with craft ideas, because I love doing crafts with the girls. Some are out of my head, others are from ideas I've seen. But we also review word cards and play "I hear 'ssss' when I say 'sun'" (for example). I make sure to focus on the sound the letter makes instead of the name, though I do share that too. Something I learned while working at the Montessori and that was reinforced when I read the book by Barbara Curtis called "Mommy, Teach Me to Read!" She is trained in Montessori and has homeschooled her children. I have also included Montessori activities, some of which the girls seem to enjoy others just sit on the shelf. I would love more room to be able to have more activities out at a time. I try to teach from what goes on during the day. When I have energy we have done baking and I try to teach math concepts from that. And while we eat. We read lots of books too.

Anyway, while the girls do not have to be officially homeschooled we will definitely be throwing things together. When they are old enough I have toyed with using the Weaver Curriculum, not sure what that will make us. I like that I can work through that curriculum with the girls together and they can each learn the same thing just at their level.

Not sure if this is really sharing my style or not, but this is what we do. Check out the links below to see what others are doing.

R lessons

Well, we got a little more done this week than we have recently. Though I am upset that I was unable to get the felt roses made. I had felt cut out, but I couldn't find my sewing kit. Finally found it packed away in the closet. So I kept the same activities up on the shelf for the girls to work with. But they really didn't seem interested this week. Amelia did use the tonging once, and she used the tongs correctly to pick up 2 of the pompoms on the build-a-snowman tonging.

Sorry to say I only have some pictures for the projects this week. As I came to write this post I realized my camera grew legs and walked. GRRRRRR! Tabitha said something about them having it in the playroom closet, but as yet I haven't found it. Needless to say, mommy is a little frustrated. I will share the additional photos that are still on the memory card when I find the camera. Which had better be soon.

Our words this week were: rat, rainbow, rabbit (these 3 we found sign language signs for), robot, rolly polly (the potato bug) and radish (which I couldn't find signs for). I think we will be doing Rr again next week as I still have project ideas we haven't started and some we could do more with. But here are the projects we were able to complete:

We made rainbow fish following the instructions found here. The girls painted a paper plate (out of which I had cut a wedge to make the mouth and the tail), then they glued on tissue paper scales and foil scales.

Here is a picture of what the finished product should look like.

The girls enjoyed the book The Rainbow Fish.

We made robots out of "junk" found around the house. The heads were made out of their Valentine candy boxes. Once I cut off the curved portion that had made them look like hearts I had nice little square boxes. The girls wrapped them in aluminum foil. Then I hunted through the closet and decided to use half of a top flap of a gray cardboard egg carton for the torso. We glued pompoms inside to represent the robot's switches/buttons. I made notches in two toilet paper rolls for each robot and the girls colored them with markers, they became the legs.

The eyes were made out of milk jug caps and the ears/receptors were those mini cupcake papers. Then we used pipe cleaners/chenille stems for the mouth, to attach the head to the torso and for the arms.

I just made holes in the egg carton so the girls could poke them through. Oh and the nose was a pompom.

I finally found the song about a robot that I was looking for. I remembered the song from Barney and Friends (back when the older children watched), but could only remember the first line. The girls enjoy the song and playing with their robots. Here is the link for the words to the song.

We also made rainbow pictures. We got to use paint and glue.

We started out by sponge painting clouds on blue paper.

Then the girls glued on a wedge shape of yellow construction paper for the sun. The girls then painted the sun's rays. We used gray paint to dot on raindrops. And then we glued on pompoms for the rainbow. I also asked Tabitha if she could figure out which color started with "rrrrr." At first she said orange, which is close, and then she told me red starts with "rrrr."

As we were on the subject of rainbows I decided we would read the story of Noah and the Ark. I found some coloring pages at dltk-teach.com and we talked about and sang songs of God telling Noah to build the ark and the very first rainbow. We even made a cake. I got the idea from dltk-teach.com, but changed it a bit. The recipe called for round pans and I don't have round pans. So, I baked the cake in my normal 10x13 rectangular pan. We modified the frosting recipe they have on the site because somewhere there must have been a typo. I used marshmallows for a cloud and Tabitha helped me put M&Ms on for the rainbow, after we sorted them by color. And then I added a graham cracker Noah's Ark and animal crackers.

Tabitha really enjoyed her Brain Quest cards this week. She wants to keep going and going and going, even when mommy needs a break. We also worked in her Brain Quest workbook. We are up to the letter E in the workbook. She has 2 pages of recognizing the letter and 2 pages of writing the letter. This week she also wanted to do some number pages. She had to trace the number on the one page and then circle groups of that particular number. We went up to the number 4 in one sitting. She really shocked me. She can recognize groups of numbers up to 3 without counting them. She did get carried away and try to circle other groups. So we are working on following directions.

The girls get to watch one show/DVD/video after lunch, before naptime. Lately they have been watching VeggieTales instead of the Dora or Elmo. Tabitha is always singing songs from the show or bringing up words she heard, like today she was suddenly talking about dungeons and I couldn't figure out where she had heard the word until she explained it. It amazes me how much sinks in to their little brains. (One reason I am now forbidding Animaniacs after my oldest son took it out of the library and after sitting in the room for two minutes I heard them use the word idiots.) Anyway, the other day Tabitha was building what I thought of as a tower with their Duplo blocks.

I discovered she was building a wall and then she proceeded to hold it and walk around it and let it fall over.

She was pretending to be Joshua. One of the VeggieTales videos they enjoy is Josh and the Big Wall.

Our Bible verse is Rejoice in the Lord always. Phillipians 4:4

Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice (clap, clap)

Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice (clap, clap)

Rejoice, rejoice and again I say rejoice (clap, clap)

Rejoice, rejoice and again I say rejoice (clap, clap)

Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice (clap, clap)

Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice (clap, clap)

Head on over to Homeschool Creations and 1+1+1=1 to see what others are doing with their preschoolers and toddlers.

Indestructibles Giveaway

Yes I found out about another giveaway. I found this one at Giveaways 4 Mommy. Unlike the last giveaway I posted about, this one is not going to end until the end of the month.

Anyhow, Indestructibles are durable wordless picture books by Kaaren Pixton. You can check them out on Amazon here. There are several to chose from and they are supposed to be extremely durable and safe for baby. They look adorable to me. Go check them out for yourself.