Mid-Summer Hello!

With summer being half over I wanted to take a moment to pop in on my blog and give you all a little update to what our family has been up to so far. As you might of noticed we have taken a break from our conventional lesson plans to fill our days with nature and learning through playing (because at this age I believe a good portion of learning is through play). And this summer has been nothing short of family fun! As a family of Oregon we are truly blessed to have so many great options for finding family activities to fill our summer. These are just a few of our favorites this year:

We have been taking to hiking as a family on some of the easier trails here in Oregon and letting our preschooler lead us through the paths, this is something we all enjoy as a family. Along with our frequent hikes we have started camping more frequently this summer (tent camping that is) this is something that surprisingly our whole family really enjoys together. I love it because we are away from all electronics, our kids sleep better in a tent than they do in our own home, and our kids love it because they can fully immerse in the dirt and fun of the outdoors.

Obviously no summer would be complete without water play, we have been doing swim lessons all summer long as part of our summer routine. We are really fortunate to live close to an aquatic center that both our toddlers absolutely adore, they have an amazing outdoor water play area and have a time specifically for families with toddlers. We have also discovered some of the amazing parks in Oregon that offer splash pads and water play for free. Seriously, if you haven't come across these yet then you are really missing out!

Summer in Oregon means one thing to our family and that's local farmers markets, they have the best produce finds (aside from our families gardens). While farmers markets aren't something new to us, we have recently discovered the joys of berry picking thanks to a few friends. Seriously, if you have toddlers this is a great activity for them! They get to run around freely, pick berries if they like (maybe even sneak a few for themselves) while you get to take home a serious haul of delicious berries. It's a win, win! And in our family we are all about teaching our children to be self sustainable, food is something that we nurture to grow and harvest. Another great discovery of this summer was Awana summer day camp that was offered through our church. This was such a saving grace for our preschooler! He got to spend his days with other children his age, learn about the many wonderful messages from God and really flourish in a new learning environment. Obviously a good chunk of our time was spent discovering new parks for our toddlers throughout Oregon.

No summer in Oregon is complete without traveling to the coast. There is nothing quite like sand castles, ocean waves, and salty air. This year we spent a good amount of our time on the coast exploring different towns along the way.

 

We hope your summers were as colorful as ours was! We look forward to hearing from all of you in September and cannot wait to kick off this homeschool year with all of you! Thank you for popping in and we will see you again soon!

Letter H...

Welcome to Homeschool Oregon, this week we learned all about the letter H! It is officially summer over here which means we are switching into a different schedule for the time being. What this means for us is a lot more activities, sports, and family trips. This also means that while we will still be learning throughout our summer, the posts may be spaced farther apart until summer is over. Now back to our week of learning: We kicked off this week with learning how to trace and write the lowercase and capital H's from our workbook. We also kept in rotation filling our very own capital letter, this week being H with all words, animals, etc. that we could think of.

 

 

This has by far been our best addition to our weekly learning, our preschooler loves finding words that start with the letter H. This is something simple you can do each week, it helps them associate the sounds of letters to actual words which can really help down the road when it comes time to start reading. It is a win, win for both parents and children. The word exercise also really helps our preschooler figure out what we should do for our letter of the week crafts, this week we agreed on doing a house for capital H.

We took a break from our conventional home studies to go on a learning field trip at A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village that you can read all about here. This way a great fun trip for our whole family to get out of our homeschool room and get to do some hands on playing (it's just playing to your toddlers ,but they are learning throughout the experience). Since we were having a relatively slower week in our learning and are nearing the end of this week, we decided to wrap things up with adding a new idea to our rotation, learning wise that is. Now that summer is upon on us, we are going to be stepping away from our homeschool area for a bit and getting out in the weather while it is still nice. So, while our calendar is filling up with more recreational activities for our children and family trips for us all we thought this would be a great time to introduce reading chapter books with our preschooler. A great way to expand their vocabulary while working on their listening skills and patience since this requires listening to longer stories. Also just a great way to get more one on one time with your children in general, you can make a goal to read one book together each month. I like the option of letting our toddler choose what we read together, going in theme with our letter of the week our son chose Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone.

*As a note I realize that there are some out there who would firmly not agree with reading this book to our preschooler. While there are a few areas that I "edit" to make a little more appropriate for our younger audience listener that it really depends on the child. And I will leave it at that.

To wrap up this week, we added our very own letter H to our Chicka Chicka Boom Boom Tree. Now that we are in our summer season here we are going to be changing the pace of our lessons and learning. While we are still going to be learning and sticking to lesson plans, they may just be spaced further apart to make time for extra activities right now. We currently have two toddlers in four different activities, as well as some fun family trips planned. So, as you can imagine we are shifting some things around to make time for everything and my blog posts will also be pushed back from weekly to every other week or so until summer is over. We really hope everyone out there reading enjoys their summer and pop back in to see what we have been up to throughout the summer.

Field trip day: A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village!

Summer has kicked off over here and to celebrate (also to just give us a little break from our homeschool routine) we decided to take a trip with our toddlers to the The Gilbert House. If you are from Oregon and have yet to visit them, I encourage you to do so. This is the perfect way to spend a day learning in a fun, interactive environment as a family. You can check out all their information here. Let's get started with our trip!

There are about twelve different rooms/activities to explore, as well as a playroom just for babies and an outdoor area for exploring on sunny days. They have a little bit of everything to offer, their rooms range from dramatic play to storytelling and learning, to building and tinkering. (Since there is quite a bit here, I am just going to cover what we loved best) When you first walk in, if your kids are anything like mine they will flock to the village grocery store. This is such a great little mock set up of an actual market that is filled with pretend foods, reusable grocery bags, kids carts, aprons, and even a pretend check out area. It is the perfect dramatic play area that really engages toddlers to play together. We also loved the Go Figure! room that was filled with classic storybooks and learning games that corresponded with the stories. As you can see from our picture below, both our toddlers loved this room.

 

We also loved the Oregon Room obviously! This room was seriously awesome, it had a little bit of everything that Oregon has to offer. There was a milking cow simulation, garden game area, both grass area and ocean area with a pretend beach that you can clean up. Our kids really loved this room and if you are like our family, you may have a very young toddler who can enjoy the baby playroom that is located right next to this Oregon room.

Another dramatic play area we literally couldn't get our kids to leave was Village Vet Clinic, where our little animal lovers could help fix up and care for stuffed animal patients. This room had everything from cages for the pretend animals, an operation area, to a wash area and potty area. The room was complete with children lab coats, stethoscopes, and velcro bandages for the animals. I cannot express enough how great this room was!

 

 

The last bit that our children (and my husband) absolutely loved was the different tinkering rooms: Tinker Tracks and Imagination Playground. Both of these rooms offered hands on building that really engaged problem solving thinking to figure out how to get the tracks to work. It was great to see their little minds working out the ideas to get the marbles rolling and to build their own little worlds out of foam pieces.

 

 

There is much more to discover here, we just covered our favorites for the time being and plan to visit again soon to explore the outdoor area. We are also hoping to explore the other options that A.C. Gilbert's Discovery Village offers, as a homeschooler I love when local areas offer different ways to continue the learning especially during the summer. They have a wide range of what they call discovery days for families, homeschool days specifically made for us homeschooling families in mind, and small summer camps for in depth learning. We hope you are all enjoying the beginning of your summer! Stay tuned for our letter of the week post all about the letter H! 



Letter G...

Welcome to Homeschool Oregon, this week we learned all about the letter G. I have to just say it was one of our best week's of homeschooling so far, we really loved all that the letter G brought to us. So, let's dive in! We kicked off the week like usual with learning, tracing, and writing our uppercase and lowercase letter G's to get ourselves familiar with our new letter of the week. Something a little new to our normal routine this week we filled our very own capital G with all the words we could think of that started with G. This was our preschoolers idea, he wanted to be able to see the connections from the letter itself to actual things, foods, people, etc. (an added bonus is they get familiar with the actual sounds the letter makes). Thanks to this simple idea, we now have another activity to add to our normal routine to kick our learning off!

The list of words that start with the letter G really helped our toddler have a visual of what we could make for our letter of the week crafts this week. Ultimately we decided on a guitar for our uppercase G and a grape on the vine for our lowercase g:

We continued to incorporate the letter G into a good portion of our everyday, even our snacks started revolving around G with goldfish crackers and grapes. What snack would be complete without a game to go along with it? To begin our week we decided to do a game all about grapes. We drew out our own vines, I made two sets (one was for numbers and counting, the other was for the alphabet), and cut out our own set of grapes. We went with 14 grapes so that we could do both uppercase and lowercase letters from A-G that I labeled on one side, the other side was labeled with the numbers 1-14. The game was a simple matching game that was perfect for an afternoon snack break in our homeschooling day.

Our toddler is still learning to associate the actual written number with the amount, so I like to put the amount in dots for him to count. We also are moving away from just 1-10 learning now and have moved into the teen numbers currently.

Moving onto our bible lesson for this week, we made the focus about God in general and thanks to VeggieTales we turned our usual lesson into a night for the entire family with enjoying their movie and printouts for movie night snacks. Both our toddlers really got a kick out of using their tickets to "buy" snacks and afterwards we went over what the message was in the movie we had watched. I don't know about you ,but in our household we love VeggieTales! If you haven't checked them out already, I highly suggest you do because they are really a fun, kid friendly way of learning about the bible! They even have a few of their videos available on Netflix to watch, including the movie we have shown below that we used for our own bible lesson.

 

Now in our home our son loves anything and everything that has to do with messes. Creating them, joining them, he is always in and as he rightfully should be! So, of course we needed a great sensory activity for our midweek slump and I couldn't think of a better, messier idea than homemade goop! I spent a while searching on Pinterest for a bit looking for a homemade version of this that didn't involve borax and with some luck I came across this blog I was able to find a version I liked. With a bit of tweaking we made our own goop that you can read all about HERE!

With a trip to our local library this week, we found a great selection of books revolving around the letter G. Here are the few that made our favorite's list this week: We had a little bit of everything in our range of books this week from classic to the very cute Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site.

Wrapping up the week to an end, we added our own capital G to our very own Chicka Chicka Boom Boom tree. We hope you all enjoyed this week's activities and stay tuned for next week's lesson plan!