Month 1, Week 2: All about B...

We have just wrapped up our second week of home learning and this week we learned all about the letter B, Fall colors: red and green, and the Armor of God! A new addition to our routine this year is putting up a preview of what we will be learning during the week on our whiteboard, as you can see below. Like previous weeks we kicked off this week with learning, tracing, and writing our uppercase and lowercase B's from our workbooks. Following with our letter B learning we like to add a letter of the week craft, you can catch our letter B crafts from our previous year here. Continuing in letter learning, our preschooler has quickly grown fond of filling a letter B with all the words we can possibly think of that begin with this letter. This is just an easy way to start your week and really get your preschooler finding connections between the letter they are learning and words or objects in their surrounding environments.

 

 

We really shifted our focus for this week to learning our Fall colors: red and green through some fun sensory learning. Thanks to Pinterest I was able to find some color sorting flashcards that you can print out here for free. We used these along with some everyday objects we had around our home to create a two bin color sorting activity. These even carried over to our sensory box this week, giving our preschooler a hands on learning week. You can find my tutorial on how to dye rice for a filler in this week's activities here, giving you an easy step by step guide. These were such a hit with our toddlers that we continued to use them daily this week as a quiet activity for winding down before naps. You can just use things you find around your own homes or you can fit it into a theme with what you are learning this week, the options are endless!

 

 

Thanks to our Oregon weather we have had the opportunity to take a nature walk this week with our toddlers to scope out some Fall treasures. This month we were lucky to have received our monthly Kiwi Crate that was filled with materials for our preschooler to make his very own nature collector box which played in nicely this week for our walk. Despite the rain we were able to get the whole family out together and find some Fall inspired collectibles while burning off some of our toddlers energy.

 

 

Shifting focus once again we wanted to finish the week strong with our bible lesson of this week being all about the Armor of God. We started our lesson by drawing a boy wearing his Armor of God on our whiteboard this week, demonstrating all the different pieces that makeup this armor for our preschooler to see. I wanted our son to be able to make the connections of himself and this armor while reading our lesson from Ephesians 6:10-6:17. We found a great visual using oranges to communicate to our preschooler how important our Armor of God is and what can happen when we forget to put on our pieces each day.

 

 

 

All you need is two oranges and a bowl of water deep enough to for the oranges to float/sink. Then you simply read to them:

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God, so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.  Therefore put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, you may be able to stand your ground, and after you have done everything, to stand. Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around your waist, with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with your feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.

 

Place the oranges in the water, one will stand firm (float) in the water with it's "Armor of God" (skin) on and the other orange you will start to strip it's armor away while giving examples of what piece of armor this orange forgot to put on this day. After the second orange has completely removed all of it's "armor" you will place it alongside the other orange in the water. The second orange should completely sink to the bottom while the other orange remains "standing firm". Use this lesson as a way to teach your preschoolers to think purposefully about putting on their own armor each day to stand firmly.

 

Finishing the week off we set off to our local library to pick up some new books for next weeks learning, we even came across a great learning tub filled with materials for next week that we can't wait to share with you! Wrapping up the week we wanted to share some of our favorite books we have been enjoying this week:

 

 

We hope you all enjoyed another week learning at home and look forward to finishing the last week of this month's learning theme with you. Be sure to check back in with us next week as we learn all about the letter C, community helpers in our town, and even more fun Fall learning with some crafts, games, and even a themed snack!

Homemade dyed rice!

If you are new to the sensory boxes or are just looking for an easy guide on dying materials like rice then you are in the right place! There are handfuls of different ways you can dye rice for activities, some are less complicated than others and in the end you will all end up with the same result. I like to just keep it simple when it comes to making materials for our home learning whether it be play dough, goop, or dyed rice and just use what I have laying around my home. For this tutorial I am keeping with the classic approach and just using everyday products that I have stored in my medicine cabinets and pantry. So, let's get to it!

What you will need:

• White rice
• Rubbing alcohol
• Food dye
• Plastic sandwich baggies or even just small mixing bowls will do

You'll want to divide your rice up and this will all depend on how large you want your different color batches to be, if you are dying it all one color then you obviously can skip this step entirely. I just evenly divided a bag of white rice into five separate sandwich baggies for this time. Then you will add 2-3 tablespoons of rubbing alcohol to each baggie, add a couple of drops of food dye to each bag (I put about five drops of food coloring dye to each batch ,but you can add more/less depending on desired color) and then just seal your baggie. Then comes the fun part: shake, shake, shake until everything is mixed together. Once you have finished this, you can lay the rice directly on paper towels to dry overnight. Simple right? It really is that easy! Once the rice is completely dry you are all set to create any sensory box you can imagine!

Month 1, Week 1: All about A...

Hello everybody! We just wrapped up our first official week back and while we unfortunately caught the flu bug that has been going around lately, our school year is still off to a great start! Let's begin with going over some of our big changes this year! We have switched to a monthly planned curriculum that I break down week by week, we have condensed our learning to only 4 days a week this year, and have chosen to widen our learning outside of just a basic alphabet theme. We still implement games, crafts, and letter of the week learning. We still use a variety of workbooks to really help our preschooler with his learning and we still do extra curricular activities as part of our learning. With all that said let's get started with our first week back!

This week we have been learning all about the letter A, the number 1, circles, and the colors red and green. And putting our focus onto bible lessons that went along with our learning themes this year. This weeks bible verses were: "I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made" Psalm 139:14  which we focused on the first half of our week with our all about me theme and "He shielded him and cared for him; he guarded him as the apple of his eye" Deuteronomy 32:10 which we focused on the other half of our week with our apple themes. We have previously made a letter of the week bible themed craft that you can find here. At the beginning of each week I give our preschooler a preview of what is in store for us learning wise throughout our week by writing down our week's learning goals on our whiteboard. We try to fit in each day with a physical activity that ranges from yoga to running or swimming, a music hour where we listen to or create our own music, and multiple reading times to break up our day.

We kicked off this week with a fun "All About Me" activity booklet that I came across on Pinterest, you can print your own booklet out here. This was just a fun way for our preschooler to describe himself and even learn a little about his own self. We used a mirror for this activity so he could look for himself and discover his eye color, hair, and even count his teeth. To go along with our all about me theme for the day, we also filled out a first day of school questionnaire that you can print out here. This was just a fun activity to see how our preschooler would answer the questions and to use as a keepsake to compare with answers from next year. Keeping along with our all about me theme we worked on some name recognition activities: we had a letter building worksheet, a name puzzle, and a matching game with clothespins. If you are wanting to do a letter of the week craft, you can find ours here from our previous year here.

 

A simple name chart, each line he practices writing another letter of his name until he gets to the bottom and writes his complete name.

 Here you can see our preschooler doing a simple name puzzle that we made.

Here we used his name on cardstock and had written the corresponding letters on clothespins that he had to find and clip onto the correct letter.

 

Moving onto the rest of the week we began focus with letter A worksheets out of some of our preschool workbooks. Since this is Fall we will be incorporating many fall and apple themed activities into our learning. Our first craft back fell perfectly into both themes with coffee filter apples! These are an easy prep for us homeschooling parents, all I did was cut out a basic apple shape from construction paper (you will need 2 pieces cut out identically) and then cut out the middle part of the apple for the coffee filter to be placed there. Next you let your toddlers go wild with markers on a coffee filter, when they are done transfer them to a plate and spray with water from a spray bottle. Once the filters are dry you can glue them between the two pieces of construction paper and there you have one coffee filter apple!

 

 

We moved onto a fun numbers game with the help of a simple construction paper tree we had made and some red pom poms we had on hand. You can use this activity however you want, we used it to work on following directions, counting, and recognizing circles. I would simply have our preschooler add or subtract a said amount of pom pom apples and then count how many we still had left on our trees. Our son didn't stop at just this activity, he continued to play with it throughout the rest of our week.

 

 

After a quick park date with some friends we finished the rest of the week with an apple taste testing activity, we picked up a couple varities of apples from our local market and printed out a little worksheet to go along with our tasting that you can find here. Since we already had apples sliced in halves for our taste testing, it only made sense to follow that activity with a parts of an apple recognition activity.

 

 

With so many leftover apples, this gave our preschooler a chance to practice some Montessori life skills by learning to use a knife to cut up apples. We stuck with a simple butter knife that we had on hand and I left the rest up to our son. After a simple demonstration of how I used the knife, I then let him take over and when he finished we used the apple chunks for some delicious apple muffins. We followed our muffin making session with a trip to our local library for preschool story time!

 

 

To wrap up our week we took the opportunity to head to our local library to check out some books for next week. Here are some books we loved this week:

 

 

Thanks to our little trip to the local library we were able to turn it into a nature walk on the way home and collect objects that were related to Fall, like acorns, colorful leaves, and an apple from our neighbors tree. We hope you all had a great kick off to your new school years and look forward to connecting back next week with all of you! Check back for another week filled with craft, games, and some new learning ideas based on the letter B!



"Not back to school" traditions...

After seeing all our family and friends begin the "back to school" postings with adorable pictures of their children getting ready to begin a new year at school, I decided to come up with some traditions of our own. Our preschooler still hasn't grasped the full concept of homeschooling and needless to say he was a little disappointed when he realized he wouldn't be joining his friends at their schools. Hence, our decision for some fun "not back to school" traditions was created to get our preschooler excited for his own exciting year of learning at home! Here is what we came up with:

• A new "school outfit" which in this case happens to be a new pair of pajamas special for our first day back at learning. Funnily enough our preschooler loved it! And it gave us a good laugh because more often than not we do most of our learning still in our pajamas in the morning.

 

 

• A special celebration breakfast for our first day! This can be anything from something as simple as pancakes to even going out for a special breakfast, just us. I let our preschooler have complete choice over what we would have. This year he chose pancakes and chocolate milk, I made them a little special by adding sprinkles and whip cream to them!

• Changing our entire learning area! This is something I actually look forward to ,but I personally think giving our learning areas in our home a fresh look adds to the excitement for the new year. This year we made just few subtle changes such as divided learning areas in both our kitchen and now our living room, a little reading nook, and more learning surfaces like magnet boards and white erase boards at his height level.

 

• New routines (in my opinion better routines) for our toddlers. We now have started to implement a "behavior chart" in our household we refer to it as a character chart to emphasize the importance of making good choices. You can find the printable of this chart here. If you are anything like me and love the idea of a routine or are tired of answering your own toddlers multiple times a day what we are doing then you will love these daily schedule cards that you can find here. And lastly I wanted to have my preschooler be more involved in Montessori approaches to learning self care, at this time we are focusing on brushing our teeth. To help him make sure he is remembering morning and night we found a printable checklist here and have it hanging in the bathroom for him.

 

• Lastly, we choose a fun family outing to celebrate our first week back in Fall. We leave the decision of how to celebrate completely up to our preschooler and this year he has decided on a Frozen Yogurt family date! Here is to a wonderful new year learning at home and we hope you all enjoy some "not back to school" traditions of your own!

 



New school year, new approach...

Greetings fellow homeschoolers!! It is once again that time of year where the leaves begin to change colors, the air is crisper, and we prepare to embark on another 10 month homeschool journey! This year we will be embarking on preschool learning with our son and some basic tot learning with our daughter. For any homeschooler out there you know when I say that it can take some time to really get into your teaching groove and figure out what works best for everyone. Previously we had been planning out our lessons week by week, which led to time consuming hours spent trying to keep up with what we were going to do next. Well we are excited to announce that there will be some BIG changes this year in our approach for planning out our school year. Thanks to Preschool Palace we were able to outline our entire year based on her 10 month curriculum ideas. You can purchase her entire curriculum if you want, we opted to use this as a "model" of how to break up our learning over the year and cover more topics at once.

To go along with our new curriculum I decided to invest in a planner to break down every lesson plan, which days we choose to homeschool, and get a more structured year. I honestly cannot say enough good things about The Ultimate Homeshool Planner that I came across on Amazon. It honestly covers everything, a break down by year, month, week, and even has a weekly bible section that plays into having our faith play a larger roll in our homeschooling.

 Here you can see the weekly section focusing on a weekly prayer, accomplishes and evidence of God's grace we have witnessed throughout the week.

 Here is a breakdown of our monthly plan where I can write down our themes, what we are focusing on learning and then can break down lesson plans for each day.

Lastly, just a breakdown of our entire school year! Honestly it looks like such a short period of time when you look at it. This really helps us keep on top of extra curricular activities that we are a part of each year and plan our school year accordingly.

Not only have we changed our curriculum, our planning, and the amount of days we are choosing to homeschool. But we have also decided to revamp our learning areas for the new year! Here is a peak at what we have completed so far:

Have no fear! Not everything has changed completely, there will still be plenty of crafts, learning games and sensory ideas ahead. We are just so excited to kick off this new homeschool year and cannot wait to share with all of you our journey! Check back with us next week to see how we kick off our new year exactly with new "not back to school" traditions and breakdowns of our entire month, week by week!