Thursday - Unit 2's are finished!

Today we finished Unit 2 in D's curriculum & K's curriculum - what a sense of accomplishment...10 days of "school" (well, actually 11 if you count the zoo field trip).

K was wearing her "foo foo" shoes again this morning at the start of the school day. She finished out Unit 2 by tracing the flashcard "B" with her finger and then drawing "B's" (with a little help from me) using 2 crayons taped together. She enjoyed it! Later when D was working with me, K was drawing her chalkboard easel making lowercase "b's" all by herself and they were looking good!

Her Bible story today was about the Tower of Babel and so we used blocks to build a tower for her activiy, counting every block as she stacked it.

We counted together and she built by herself, "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13...

Below she's adding #14 and right after I took the picture, the tower toppled over. She thought it was funny!

When we started to read the Bible story this morning, she wanted to go back and look through all the pictures in the book, so we did. The pictures in the book are really well done & colorful. She told me about Adam & Eve sinning, Cain & Abel, Noah obeying God and building the ark, the rainbow being God's promise...with D chiming in from the other side of the room where he was playing with more details than K knew. They are learning God's Word and it makes my heart happy! I hope they are always this excited about God's Word! :o)



D's Bible story this morning was also the Tower of Babel and for his activity he acted out building bricks and then saying "yes" in other languages after I would say "Put the brick here." He said "Ne" in Greek, "Aiwa" in Egyptian Arabic, "Da" in Romanian and "Ee" in Syrian Arabic. He told me his favorite "yes" was "Aiwa" because of how it sounded.

Right now his history book is corresponding with the Bible stories and so whenever we read the Bible story, we read the history book, too. Yesterday (I forgot to write this in the blog post below) he made a rainbow to add to his timeline on the wall and wanted me to do the writing. Today, he drew the Tower of Babel by himself and then had me label it (added after I took the picture). He loves adding events to the timeline and I am hoping this gives him a good foundation of history so we can plug in more details/events in the coming years (which is how the curriculum is planned).


D's rhyme for the unit wasn't his favorite activity to do, but I think it's beginning to grow on him. Hopefully it will as he has a rhyme/song for every unit in the curriculum. ;o) Today K asked if she could do it and D had "fun" teaching it to her.

He completed the 3rd page of Chapter 3 in his math book. After 3 days of learning the colors and numbers of the blocks, he is remembering them! When we were using the Primer level off and on last year, we gave all of the blocks food/candy names for the 2-9 blocks:
2 is orange so we call it cheddar cheese
3 is pink so we call it bubble gum
4 is yellow so we call it mac'n'cheese
5 is light blue so we call it blue raspberry slushie
6 is purple so we call it grape jelly
7 is tan so we call it vanilla ice cream
8 is dark brown so we call it chocolate
9 is light green/teal so we call it mint chocolate chip

It's silly, but D remembers it. He'll move onto addition in Chapter 4 by the middle of next week. I know he's ready to be challenged a bit.

For thinking skills, D had to cut out a large rectangle and follow the directions to make a birthday card for someone...he chose daddy since his birthday is coming up. Shhh, don't tell him! :o) He dictated a message so I wrote it down on scrap paper and then D copied it into the card - it was sweet what he came up with on his own. He is still writing a lot of his letters in CAPS...we have to work on this, but today I didn't make it a big deal.

In Phonics, D finished reading a story about a dog that liked to dig holes and eventually dug a big hole and found gold in it. His fluency is improving as the stories progress especially since we are reading daily now. I LOVE to listen to him and so does K. She will often come to the table and sit on my lap while D reads. D is also aware of the " "'s when someone is supposed to be talking and when the word "yell" is in front of the " " D picks up on it and "yells" the words. I'm amazed at this because when I taught 2nd grade I constantly had to work on this with my students in reading groups. The 100 Easy Lessons book says the student will finish at a second grade level and I believe it! We're almost done...I figured we'll be at lesson 100 at the end of the month. Then the "real" book reading comes! Can't wait!

Wednesday Fun!

This pic shows how our school day on Wednesday began...K wearing her "foo foo" dress-up shoes "to school" and D looking tough in the picture (he was really in a good mood). I laughed so hard when I came downstairs after putting C down for her nap and found K walking around in the shoes. Only in "fun school" can we dress like this! :o)


K was delighted we were finally making a "B" out of tape on the floor. (The curves of the letter challenged my masking tape skills!) She covered the "B" in blocks and every time she put down a block she was to say the "B" sound.

D didn't want to be left out of the fun...he gave her a little bit of help but then I made him stop as he was laying 3 blocks for every 1 block K put down. :o)
The completed B looks good!
One of her other projects for her school day was a rainbow made out of torn paper. She will tell you it is God's Promise not to flood the whole earth again! I helped her make the semi-circles of glue on the paper for each color, but she tore and put down a lot of the paper herself. She didn't like getting glue on her fingers (what a girlie-girl). :o) K also had to act out the Bible story - she was pretending to be coming out of the ark, giving thanks to God and pointing to the rainbow in the sky. She LOVED this! The camera battery was dying or I would have taken a video of it. She's too cute!

We did her "B" rhyme again which we have done every day of Unit 2 and it begins like this...

Two big bears got on the boat (hold 2 fingers up)
the rains came down (flutter fingers down)
and the boat did float (flutter fingers side to side)
B - B- B (hug yourself & sway as if on boat)

She loves the rhymes and often wants to do her "A-A-Adam" rhyme from Unit 1. :o)

D chose to begin his school day with the science activity - he associates the icons in the curriculum guide with FUN! Knowing which symbols mean "activities" and "projects" as opposed to just phonics or the rhyme (which is one of his least favorites...though it's growing on him a little, I think!).

Anyway, his for science we were talking about measurements and then made foil boats (like the ark) and piled them with kidney beans to see how many would fit in the boat before it sunk. Unlike Noah's Ark which God designed to float even filled with animals. :o) D LOVED this and went right to work making his foil boat while I made one, too.



We then put them into the tub of water (his is on the right, mine is on the left).
And D began filling both boats with dry kidney beans (we were supposed to use math counters or pennies, but I had the beans from K's letter "A" the other week so we just used them instead and they worked!).
His boat was getting more full, but then it began taking on water and soon filled completely with water.

Poor guy, I thought he was going to cry for a minute, but he didn't. I assured him it was okay and he decided to then dump the beans into the water.He continued piling beans into my boat which then began leaning to the left and finally tipped over when the beans were at the very top edge of the foil...I think we'll try this again so he can build a leak-proof boat. I showed him after each boat sunk, that when he crumpled his foil on the sides he left a hole near the bottom and that's where the water leaked through causing his boat to sink. He understood.

We went through the rest of his school day and one of his last projects was coloring this picture of Reddy Fox (I attempted to draw the fox from the book cover for him). After coloring he filled in the blanks which said "D" and "walk" since he can walk but Reddy Fox can't right now (in the story Reddy Fox is careless & gets hurt). We then placed a bandaid on his leg in the picture. This was a cause of small fit for D.

He did NOT want a bandaid placed on his picture, but this was the directions in the curriculum guide and so I said that we needed to follow the directions. As I was talking with J last night, I told him that I struggle sometimes with what I should do in this situation. In a "real" school he would HAVE to follow directions exactly. I always go back and forth about this - here at home, it's not a big deal if the bandaid was left off the picture, but the concept of following directions to complete the project is important to me.

Here's little "teacher's helper" erasing the board after we were finished with school on Wednesday. After I took the picture she asked me to hold her up so she could erase the rest of the board. :o)

Back to school...

What a long weekend - it was nice to have a break from school. :o)

The school area became a bit messy over the weekend. The table became my scrapbook area where I worked on some pages into Friday night and a few things Monday afternoon. The floor had various toys scattered around including K's new hopscotch set. We had to do a quick clean-up this morning before beginning another week of school.

K was on Unit 2/Day 3 and it was the story of Noah and the Ark - with an emphasis today on the ark floating when it rained for 40 days/40 nights. Her main activity today was discovering what objects sink & float. I filled a blue dish tub with water and collected a few small objects the curriculum suggested. K predicted sink/float before setting each in the water, then she dried them off and placed them under the appropriate heading on the masking tape chart on the carpet. When we were done with the suggested objects, she wanted to keep trying things so I let her pull a few toys from the room that were waterproof! ;o)

The process...

Popsicle stick...floats!

Plastic tea cup - floats!


The outcome...(the cotton ball and the rubber band sunk)
K begged to do her A-A-Adam rhyme from last week, so we did it and then went on to this week's rhyme for "B-B-B - the boat did float". She had another page to circle the "Bb's" on the paper and trace lines from B to b. She also did the counting paper where we drew one raindrop in each of the 5 boxes then she counted with me as I wrote the numbers 1-5 under each of her raindrops.

D chose to begin his school day with an art activity based on his history/Bible lesson for the day: Cain & Abel. He colored a quarter sheet of white paper with crayons using a lot of pressure to make the colors bold. He then colored over the bright colors with a thick layer of black crayon. I gave him a wooden skewer to etch a heart out - he decided to etch layers of multiple hearts. While he was working I read aloud the Bible story & history text about Cain & Abel. We then talked about having a right heart since good behavior & speech comes out of a heart that's right, unlike Cain's heart that was not right (angry) and he then murdered his brother.

1st layer - bright colors

etching the hearts

He quickly completed his thinking skills paper which was following left/right directions to get a little girl across the town and to her home. I thought he'd have trouble with left/right since it was on paper but he didn't!

He began chapter 3 in his math curriculum this afternoon. It was "easy" as he's learning the colors of the blocks and that the yellow one (4) represents 4 units. The curriculum uses the blocks in addition & subtraction the rest of the school year so he needs to learn the colors now. We played a game where he placed the blocks certain places and then had to count from 1-10 and collect them as he went. He's learning the colors and we nicknamed the 8 block "ChocoEight" since it's dark brown like a Hershey's bar! Mmmm!

He breezed through Lesson 85 in his Phonics book - reading the 2nd part of the Singing Bug story. In the first part the girl gave the bug a piece of cake to keep him from singing. In the second part of the story, the bug began to yell and so she gave him another piece of cake to keep him from yelling. Eventually, he was sick from eating lots of cake so he couldn't yell or sing and this made the girl happy so she ate her piece of cake in silence...finally. It's a silly story, but D enjoyed it and read it very well!

We're continuing to read through Reddy Fox - cute little story with manners and character lessons woven through it. D really enjoys listening and begs for "just one more chapter" each day but I always tell him it's for the next day. Otherwise, I think we'd read through the entire book in a day! I love that he enjoys to be read to! Today's chapter was about Reddy Fox not telling his Granny Fox the entire truth about what really happened to him in the woods.

When we were finished with schoolwork, I said, "That's all!" He looked at me and said, "Are you serious? I'm done!" I love it! ;o)

We did it!

We completed our first full week of homeschooling which included our first "official" field trip (see our other blog for zoo pics & stories).


C was happy this AM...took a nap for half the morning then was content to play in her pack'n'play for the remainder of the school time.

Today we did Unit 2, Day 2 for both D&K...

K finger-painted her letter of this unit...B! With her choice of paint...purple!
She had an activity to pretend to be a "buzzing bee" or a "galloping horse" or a "hopping kangaroo" getting on Noah's ark. It was fun to talk about these animals since we had seen most of them yesterday at the zoo! :o)

For part of our daily calendar time I have the kids count $. Today it was 3 cents and K counted 3 pennies all by herself!

D being a "tree" in the Garden of Eden (square taped on the floor) for his "thinking game" this morning (following directions & prepositional words).

D completing his math test for chapter 2 (we went quickly through this chapter as it was counting to 20). He's anxious to begin chapter 3 on Tuesday where he'll be using more than just 3 colors of blocks. In History, we read about "the curse" and then God's "promise" to finish out the second chapter. At one point D looked at me and said, "I'm so thankful God sent His Son to die on the cross for me because I believe it and I know I'm going to heaven someday." It made my heart smile! This was the highlight of my week!

To review his memory verse we rolled a ball between our legs - if we made it through we said the verse - sometimes all of it, sometimes a phrase or two or just the reference. After that we bounced the ball back and forth and said one word for each bounce. He LOVES these verse activities and I'm hoping he'll continue to like them as we do them with his Spark's verses soon!

He read a story about a singing bug in his 100 Lessons book today - it was another 2 part story (which are how the stories are until the end of the book I think...). He breezed through it and I love to listen to him read - he's trying to be more expressive when he sees the " " marks around words he knows the characters are speaking. I tried to sneak a video but he caught me and so I respected his "no video" statement today. I'll try another day though...

Now we're off for a 3-day weekend! Hooray!

One week, already?!

Time flies when you're having fun- I can't believe we've been homeschooling for a week already?! The kids were both excited to begin their second units today!

When I was getting out K's "new" letter flashcard for the week she was so excited to see what it was you would have thought I was giving her candy! ;o) As soon as she saw it, she guessed "B" - I didn't realize she could already recognize this letter. When I asked her what sound it makes she said "Ssss" - so I quickly corrected her with "Bbbb" and then she went and found "B" on our handwriting alphabet poster before I even asked her to do it. It amazed me that she remembered doing this with "A" last Wednesday because we only did it once.

She added a new page to her counting book today for #2. She cut out one hand from a magazine and we traced her hand and then she cut out the circle around it. She LOVES using the scissors but I have to help her a lot with them right now so her hair and my hair doesn't get cut accidentally! ;o)


We said a new rhyme/fingerplay about letter "B" and Noah which is one of her Bible stories this week. She learned how Noah obeyed God and built the ark. We also read a little devotional story about Behaving and briefly talked how she can obey & behave at home. I'm trying to make it apply to her each day.

Tonight at dinner she was disobeying - her fingers were covered with applesauce and she was "painting" all over her plate after both J and I had asked her to use her spoon to finish her applesauce. When I looked at her with a sad face and said, "Did you disobey?" She immediately began sobbing and kept saying, "I'm so sorry I disobeyed" through her tears. I think we saw this because of what we have been talking about in school almost daily with Adam & Eve this past week - obedience/disobedience!

When her 30 minutes of school was done she begged me to do more and make the tape letter "B" on the floor. I assured her we would do that in a few days. I love that she is enjoying her "preschool" time. :o)

D began his day after K and didn't complain about doing work...I guess after a week he's more comfortable & settled with the routine of school in the AM. He sat down and asked what activity he was going to do today. Hooray - he's actually excited about doing school!

I tried to keep K busy with a computer game while D & I worked at the table. The headphones are adult-sized and so they are constantly coming off her head. I've been making her wear a hat with the headphones over top so they don't slide as much. It works and today I finally remembered to take a picture of her...she's so stylish playing games!


D opted to do his Thinking Skills page first which was to follow directions to make a truck on his paper. The last direction was to think of a name for the truck and write it in the large rectangle. D did not want to do this because he couldn't decide on a name so he just wrote "truck" in the rectangle. It wasn't a big deal to me, but the whole point of thinking skills is to follow directions and so since that was the final direction on his paper I had him follow it. I also have him write his name on the top of several of his papers and explain that kids that GO to school have to do it so we do it at home for practice.

For math he cruised through another page in chapter two...in the pic below he is building his number on "Decimal Street" by placing the tens in their "house" on the street. He loves making his numbers this way and it's a good way to see place value. He thinks it's fun that he knows the "real" names of 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 & 19 (one-ty one, one-ty two, etc.) It actually makes more sense than the nicknames 11, 12, 13, 14... It's something this curriculum does to help the kids learn that "one-ty one" is one 10 and one 1 when they're building it on the "Decimal Street".

Here's a picture of his Phonics story for today - it was part 2 (continued from his story yesterday). He enjoyed this story because it was about a horse & car (one of his favorite things to build/play with) and the story had a little humor in it, too. I'm so proud of his reading & recall ability! Maybe one of these days I'll get a video of his reading (with his permission, of course)!I really love the focus on the Bible - we had a chance to discuss his new memory verse for the week Ephesians 6:1 (Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right) which he already knows thanks to our "Hide'em in Your Heart" CD. He told me that he has to obey Daddy and me and that we have to obey God. We then talked about Adam & Eve's disobedience again. His unit is a little behind K's Bible stories, but repeating them and talking about them a lot gives them a chance to really know them and understand the basics.

D really wanted to add another picture to our timeline, but since we added "The Fall" yesterday there wasn't a new picture to add today. I LOVE to see him get so excited learning the Bible. I pray his heart for spiritual things continues to grow.

Two weeks ago, D said he wanted to look up a Bible verse that he heard after listening to one of his Adventures in Odyssey CDs but that he didn't have a Bible to use. I felt bad we hadn't given him his own full-size Bible yet. We decided we'd get one for him for his birthday. I ordered one last week from Scripture Truth (great Bible selection at great prices & low shipping!) and I'm so excited for it to arrive. I'm really hoping the USPS doesn't lose it! I may let him open it early so we can use it for school as soon as it arrives!

Ice Cube "A's"

We finished our first unit of both LHTH & LHFHG today. K made letter "A's" with ice cubes on construction paper. D even joined in on the fun! We did her "A-A-Adam" rhyme again (I have a feeling we'll be repeating this in future units even though every unit has its own rhyme). Her Bible story today was about Cain & Abel. She acted out being "angry" with a Tigger puppet and then she acted out the right reaction to anger with the Tigger puppet. I wish I had captured it on video...she followed my directions and acted it out perfectly. She learned the right way to handle her anger (we specifically talked about NOT screaming!). :o)

D had a good day with not one complaint about playing during school time. Hooray! I think it helped that we took a morning walk (D ran) prior to starting our school day.

He began his second chapter of math (counting to 20 - review) and we concentrated on making the numbers correctly. The way he makes a "6" and "9" were creative, but I had to correct them.

He flew through his phonics story and review of words. I can't wait to be done with 100 Lessons so we can get into REAL books every day and increase his reading confidence!

For History we read about Adam & Eve and D made the next picture for our timeline ("The Fall" with a tree and snake around it representing Satan). We played "Adam says..." (variation of Simon Says) and K joined in for this. We reviewed the continents song which he doesn't really like to participate in - but K does the motions and D points out the continents...he found all but one correctly!

We also read another chapter of Reddy Fox - D is enjoying the book and even made me read a chapter to daddy the other night. :o)

"I want to play!"

...were D's words about 5 minutes into the school day this morning. I had gone upstairs to "rescue" C from her too-short nap and when I returned I found him hiding under the keyboard cover with his unfinished handwriting paper laying on the table. He had a talk on the phone with Daddy and it helped.

I purposely began later this morning to allow D more playtime before beginning our school day. I'm hoping his complaining is just because it's still "new" and once we get into the school routine after a few more days/weeks, he won't complain?

On the other hand, K LOVES to "play school" as she calls it. She used scissors for the first time today to begin making her counting book (#s 1-10) by cutting out a tree.

Another activity for her was to find the capital & lowercase A's in the beginning words of her rhyme. She was delighted that I let her use a MARKER! She found all the capital "A's" though her circles are a bit silly as 2 year old circles go. She needed a little help to find the lowercase "a's" but after helping her find a few, she found the last couple of "a's" on her own. Then she had to follow the line to help the capital "A" get to the lowercase "a" at the bottom of the page.
Her Bible story was about how Adam & Eve disobeyed God and had to leave the Garden of Eden. When I asked her what they did to leave the garden she said, "they punched each other." Ouch! That is disobeying! :o) I reminded her that Adam & Eve disobeyed God by eating the fruit from the tree He told them not to touch, although punching someone is disobeying and makes God sad, too.

After the rough start, D had a good morning of school. He did complete his handwriting paper (review of E, F, G & H). I still have to sit with him and watch him form his letters but overall he did it correctly today.

D took his first math "test" today. I read the directions to him and then he completed it without any of my help. He did everything right! He's excited to move on to chapter 2 tomorrow.

D is learning the 7 continents as part of his history & silly song that's been in his 1st unit (the curriculum is broken down into units - each unit is 5 days). The song is to the tune of "Skip to my Lou" and it says "Leap, leap to North America (repeat 2more x)...God made deer leap there." Then it goes on to name all the other continents with different movements and animals for each one. I think this is the least favorite part of his curriculum, but it's helping him learn the names of the continents. The first day I showed him where each continent is on the globe (freebie from a garage sale!). Then everyday since he's been pointing them out and today he found most of them without my help!He LOVES Phonics and completed lesson 80 today. He read the second part of a story he began on Friday and the second time through the story K sat and listened to him read (and he let her!). He's doing well but I have to remind him to look at ALL the letters of the word before saying the word...the/that or was/were.

For science we read about God creating the animals and his activity was to jump from "water" (blue paper) to "land" (brown paper) when I called out an animal name to show me where that animal lives. He did well with a bunch of animals I called out and when I said "penguin" he stepped on the water and then made his foot touch his white math poster and told me that was "ICE" since penguins live where it's cold. :o) We're excited to go to the zoo on Thursday to see all these animals in-person!