Month 3, Week 3: All about the letter I.

Here, we have come to the end of our third month homeschooling and wrapping up our monthly theme with continuing to learn about giving thanks, Thanksgiving, vegetables, and the letter I. As our previous weeks this month we started by adding what we are thankful for on our table runner and by this point it is starting to look full. This is definitely a tradition I am going to be repeating in the upcoming years as an easy reminder of all we have as a family to be thankful for. Since this week falls on a holiday and we have multiple Thanksgivings this year with our families, our learning week is going to be a little shorter than our typical weeks. That being said lets dive into our week:

Since this week is a bit of a short week for us because of the holiday we were able to take our learning with us as we traveled to and from our different families for Thanksgiving. We brought along many of our hands on learning tools with us like our lacing cards and our miniature puzzles.

 

This week we left things rather short and sweet as we covered all our workbook lessons early on to give us plenty of downtime for all the hustle of the rest of our week. As most of you know I like to incorporate our toddlers in every aspect of everyday responsibilities as much as possible. This often means that our preschooler is lending a hand in the kitchen beside us to learn basic life skills. Since our week's theme included vegetables which couldn't of landed on a better week since there are plenty of vegetables included in Thanksgiving meals, I wanted to have our toddlers learn hands on about them. Given our toddlers know a good amount about vegetables because our families all garden, we try to pick up local produce as much as possible, and we incorporate vegetables into most of our meals. An easy way to get your children excited about vegetables is to include them in the process of them, it can be anything from picking them out to helping wash or cut them. We decided on having our preschooler do the washing of our vegetables this week. Honestly, you give kids water and fun scrub brushes and this becomes like a silly game to them. They learn while having fun and you have a little extra help, it's a win, win!

 

 

 

As we wrapped up our week of learning we found one last craft to work into our week while staying in theme. We created our very own name turkeys and if you are like us, you already have all the materials you will need to make this easy craft. Just a little construction paper, markers, and some glue and you are all set to create a fun Thanksgiving craft with your preschooler. I just precut the feathers and body pieces for our son, spelled out his name across the feathers, and then set everything out for him to create. This is another fun way to help with letter recognition and spelling their own names.

 

 

We hope you all enjoyed your Thanksgiving week with your own families and look forward to starting a whole new theme with you all next month. So, as we approach our busiest month by far in our whole year please bare with us as we find a way to make our homeschooling work around all the fun winter activities we have planned.





Month 3, Week 2: All about the letter H.

It's our second week of November and we couldn't be more excited for this week's lesson plans, while we are still focusing on our giving thanks theme, we are also learning about brown bears and hibernation. This is one theme our preschooler has been really excited for since we just recently visited The Portland Zoo and saw the brown bears before they went into hibernation. To kick off the week we started with our letter of the week craft that you can see here. From there we really just dived into our brown bear theme of learning this week by making it an official "bring your teddy bear to school week".

We had transformed our school areas for the week into a teddy bear friendly zone with our very own cave to store our teddy bears for hibernation. This was just a fun dramatic play center we created with a pop up play tent and a few blankets. We left different materials for our toddlers to stuff and create their own unique cave experience inside. It could be anything you have lying around your house, in our case some little blankets, small pillows, and stuffing material. This pretend cave also provided us with a perfect little spot for reading our books of the week (you can see some of our favorites at the bottom of this post).

As you can see above our particular bear cave was literally packed with every teddy bear they could find and it really set the tone for our fun week. We wanted to include our teddy bears in every part of our day, especially with the learning so when I came across this free printable for using our teddy bears as tools of learning, I just knew I had to incorporate it. (you can see the printable in the picture below). This worksheet had a little bit of everything and it incorporated using legos to measure our teddy bear, which if you have a son you know how big of a hit legos can be.

 

From there we continued our number recognition learning with a fun and delicious twist of using teddy grahams as our counting tools. All you need are number flash cards/magnets/really anything you have around your homeschool area and a cup full of teddy grahams. This is just a fun and perfect independent activity for quiet time learning.

As I mentioned above we had a ton of favorite books covering all our learning about brown bears and hibernation, here were a few of our favorites:

To wrap up our fun week of learning we tied in a brown bear craft with our favorite book of the week "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Eric Carle, you can find the printable template for our craft here. All you need is this template, a paper bag, and some craft paper to create your own brown bear face. This is a fun way to tie in what you are reading with a hands on activity for your preschooler.

As we wrap up another week of learning, I just want to let all my viewers know that we are thankful for all of you! It completely humbles my heart knowing there are others out there alongside us on our journey of learning at home and we look forward to sharing next weeks learning themes as we wrap up on this month.

Month 3, Week 1: All about the letter G.

Welcome to Homeschool Oregon, this week we are learning all about the letter G! Wrapping up on our first week of November we really switched gears to learning about giving thanks, the color brown, and the number three. This was our overall theme for the week to really explore what ourselves and our toddlers are thankful for and how we can show that to others. We kicked off the week by learning, tracing, and writing both uppercase and lowercase letter G's. Each week we like to incorporate letter of the week crafts that you can see ours here.

To really start the week off focusing on giving thanks, we wanted something that we could carry out all month long to show what we are thankful for: this year we kept it simple with a writable table runner that we could log what we are thankful for each day. As we progress throughout the month we will keep adding what we each are thankful for.

Before the start of a new learning theme I like to look around on Pinterest for some free printable learning packs to help supplement between our own workbooks and activities. This month I came across a blog called Over The Big Moon and they have some seriously awesome resources that are free! We found a fun Thanksgiving themed learning pack and expansion pack that we are using throughout this month, you can find it here. These packs include a little bit of everything from number recognition, cutting practice, to hands on learning materials like puzzles and color dot cards.

 

In between all the tracing, learning, and writing of both uppercase and lowercase G's this week, and working with our new fun Thanksgiving themed learning kits I really like to make sure and break up the week with some hands on fun. Pulling some resources from our previous learning trials we had to make another "goop" that went along with our theme this week! If you are newer to this blog and haven't seen our previous learning trials before this year then you can find our very own goop recipe here (this is such an easy recipe that can easily be adapted to any themes you like with different food colorings and you can even use different essential oils). Honestly, while it is a little on the messier side of our crafts it is such a hit with toddlers that it is well worth a little extra clean up afterwards.

 

Every week I try to incorporate more hands on learning tools for our toddlers that provide them with a learning through playing opportunity while still being able to stay within quiet time (because let's face it when only one toddler is left taking naps you want to let them nap peacefully without too much noise). Thanks to previous weeks lacing cards and some of the great little printable themed puzzles from our learning kits we ended up with a good little variety for this month.

 

 Above are the lacing cards (a few we just created and laminated).

 Above are the three miniature puzzles included in the free learning kits from Over The Big Moon.

Here are our newest favorite addition also included in the learning kits, these printables are meant to be used with little dot makers. Instead I laminate them to use with felt pom poms to get multiple uses out of them.

 

If you have read previously you'll know this year our preschooler joined Awanas at our church which has been such a blessing in character development, as well as just helping him learn about God. Each week I try to incorporate a bible lesson into our homeschooling ,but these past few weeks it has been skipped with all of our traveling around Oregon. Nonetheless now that we are back home we are getting back into our routine of things and this week with our focus being on giving thanks and gratitude, I really wanted to find a bible lesson that could really bring that to life for our preschooler. Our lesson this week with Awanas really shaped this weeks bible lesson because they were learning about 1 Chronicles 29 and giving their best gifts to God. This challenged us to find ways to give our best gifts as well to God and to our community. Each year before the winter holidays come around we like for our toddlers to go through their toys and pick out nice toys to donate to other families who need them. This is something we like to involve our toddlers with every step of the way and let them lead us, we set no limits to how many toys or what toys, we just express to choose some of their favorites (even older favorites as long as they are in very nice conditions) to donate. You would be surprised at how quickly our preschooler was choosing some of his favorites (even his dinosaurs) to give to other little boys out there and how he had an explanation for each choice, it is both humbling and amazing to see him putting others first.

 

So, as we wrap up on our first week of giving thanks this month we challenge you to also donate some toys or even helping hands to those who need in your community. If you have a way your family loves to contribute and help in your community we would love to hear about it as we are always looking for more ideas!





Continuing with the letter F.

Picking up where our last post left off, we are continuing our week of learning with the letter F. This week's letter couldn't of had better timing since this month's community helper is firefighters, it was like it was meant to be. You've heard me say it before and you'll hear me say it again: take advantage of all the resources you have in your community, especially the local library! I just cannot emphasize it enough that there are literally thousands of free resources to use at your local library. For example below you will see a learning tub that our library offers (these are similar to the small learning totes I have featured in my blog before).

This specific learning tub is themed all about community helpers and inside it holds numerous books on different community helpers, puzzles, educational DVD, puppets, and hands on learning tools. Since our focus this week is on learning about firefighters we can just use the materials that are relevant to that. We kicked off our day with some light reading on firefighters to get a better idea of what exactly it is that they do. A few books we focused on were:

Using some of the materials from our learning kit and some materials from our own homeschool area, I was able to set up a fire themed sensory box for our preschooler. This gave him the opportunity to discover on his own. Inside were different themed magnets, firefighting puzzle pieces, wooden fire engines, funnels, and small hoses for the rice to go through. This makes for a great quiet time activity or just a nice break between different learning lessons.

To keep in theme with our hands on learning we tied in using a firefighting themed magnet board and a magnetic dress up by Melissa and Doug. Both are simple, hands on learning tools that let your toddler learn through playing.

To break up our day inside we wanted to incorporate a fun learning game that could be played outside, we made small flame letters and filled a small squirtgun for our preschooler. I constructed different flames with different letters, stuck them to our fence, and instructed our son to "put out the fire" on only the flames that had the letter F on them. This simple idea was such a hit with our preschooler that he didn't want it to end!

There are so many more ways you could incorporate fun fire learning into your home whether it be themed snacks, crafts, or if you are lucky even a tour of your local firefighters station (we plan to do this at their next open house). Of course even with all the fun behind learning about our community helper this week, we wanted to make sure to educate our preschooler on fire safety as well. We used the DVD included in our learning kit:

 

This covered a little bit of everything from what firefighters really do for our community to fire safety itself. Which helped us enforce our own emergency preparedness standards to review with our toddler. Check back in very soon to see what we are up to next!

Month 2, Week 2: All about the letter E and F

This week we are still learning all about the colors: orange and black, squares, the number two and are changing up our normal schedule a bit by learning two letters this week! Yes, two letters this week and I know what you are probably thinking ,but have no fear it can easily be done! The letters E and F are so similar it made sense with our upcoming traveling that we use this opportunity to add in this extra letter now. This months theme of everything October has to be our favorite so far, our toddlers are loving it and we are enjoying all the creative learning ideas that tie into this month. Like most weeks we kicked off this week with an updated white board reflecting what we will be covering. We jumped into the week by learning, tracing, and writing our lowercase and uppercase E's and F's (an easy way to do this is to either introduce both letters together or to break up the week in half and introduce a letter during each half, either way works fine). To go along with our letter fun you can add in a letter of the week craft like we have done here for the letter E and here for the letter F.

This week we kicked off with a fun coffee filter monster game. As you might have seen in past posts we love coffee filter crafts because the materials needed are always on hand and the results are always changing. For our little coffee filter monsters all you need are: coffee filters, markers, and a spray bottle filled with water. Give your preschoolers free range to color the coffee filters as much as they want and when they are done, put them on a plate and begin to spray with your water bottle. The colors will mix together as you spray, since the filters are very thin it doesn't take long for them to dry. I like to cut out little monster shapes after everything is dry, you can either leave them as a finished craft or use them in a counting game like we have. We used our dyed monsters (like you can see below) and let our preschooler role a dice, each time he rolled he would add/subtract that amount of googly eyes to his own monster. This is a really simple game to help develop counting skills and number recognition.

To stay in our fun October theme we made our weekly trip to our local library to pick up some new materials. I honestly cannot emphasize this enough: take advantage of everything your community offers! Our library has an amazing story time for different age groups, they have little themed learning packets (like you can see below) that have different books, movies, music, and some kind of hands on learning material, they even have larger tubs filled with themed learning materials that are a homeschoolers dream!

We decided to continue reusing some of our materials from the previous week for these upcoming weeks to really help our toddlers with number recognition and counting in general. As well as bring in some of our leftover apples from the previous week to make our very own apple prints (you can see them below). For these prints we went ahead and used our homemade finger paints here. For the prints you will only need to slice an apple in half, you can carve little faces in them if you like to keep it in theme with everything October.

 Here is our little pumpkin prints from our carved apples, this one turned out great!

 

Since Halloween is just around the corner we decided to go on a pumpkin patch trip as a fun break from our everyday learning. You can read all about our fun field trip and some of the learning we worked into our special day here. We hope you all enjoyed your week and look forward to jumping into our next month of learning with you!

Happy Halloween from our family to yours!