Catching Up

I have been a homeschooling failure since that last entry. I just can't get back into the swing of things. I've lost all motivation. I'm sure Lucy is prepared enough to get into Kindergarten, so we've just been kind of maintaining. My middle name should've been "Lazy."

Anyway, here's a little bit of what we have done. I mostly want to record this so I'll have some ideas to look back on if/when I do preschool with Lena.

February
The first week of February, we reviewed CVC words and digraphs. I've especially been focusing on sh, ch, and th.

"Sh" is pretty obvious. "Ch" is like karate CHop. You make the "th" sound by sticking out your tongue.

We've been doing the same three sight words for two months: this, that, the. I'll point to one of them and Lucy will guess either "this, that, or the" without even attempting to read the word. Haha. That hasn't worked out very well.

Later on in February, we started long vowel sounds. We put up a poster about long vowels and learned what each vowel says. Then I taught Lucy about the silent "e." I told her that when she sees a word with a vowel in the middle and an "e" on the end, the middle vowel will be long. We started with the letter a and did a few worksheets to reiterate the CVCE model.

The following week, we did a "magic e" project. I had Lucy put "e" stickers on a bunch of clothespins and typed up as many CVC words I could think of that made a new word when an "e" was attached.

I only did "a" words because I didn't want to confuse her. She did amazingly well with this project. She pronounced the CVC word correctly, attached the e and then could transition to making the vowel long to pronounce the CVCE words.

We also spent a day baking a cake and making our own word family cake:

She has a cousin named Blake. And that one by "make" is supposed to be "fake."

We've briefly dabbled in telling time. I bought a book at the dollar store with punch out clocks. We've only practiced the hours (1:00, 2:00, etc.) and the half hours (1:30, 2:30).

For Valentine's Day, we did a "love unit" with this free packet. We also read Have You Filled a Bucket Today and did some activities based on that. I pretended to care about math for a hot minute, so we could play with candy:

Lucy estimated that it would take 49 candies to fill the heart, then counted out 38 for the actual amount.

March
This week, we did a pathetic "unit" on Dr Seuss. I searched through our millions of books for all the Dr Seuss books we own:

I tried to get Lucy to read them all with me, but she was bored after the first few, so we moved on to our project. I told Lucy that Dr Seuss loved to make up creatures and give them funny names (we flipped through the books to find a few examples), then I gave her a blank sheet of paper and a bunch of random craft supplies so she could make and name her own silly creature:

We also started on "long e" this week and made a word family "ee" hat inspired by the Cat in the Hat.

She loved that I let her write the word "pee" and thought it was hilarious. Haha.

That's about it for any structured schooling we've been doing! That said, we have been doing a ton of reading. I found a few chapter book series that we both enjoy and have been ordering installments from the library. I also dug out my American Girl books, which we will start soon. And I've been trying to get Lucy to read to me. She's impatient and gets frustrated with herself, but is very much capable of doing it, if she gives it a chance. We'll keep plugging along . . .

January Week 2: Penguins

Science
We started the week by reading a non-fiction book about penguins to learn a few facts. Then we made a can/have/are chart. I'd never heard of such a thing before, but they're all over Pinterest, and I thought it'd be a good way to reinforce what we read.

Lucy dictated. I wrote.

Math
Another thing I found on Pinterest was this cereal box penguin. I printed the free image and had Lucy glue it to a Cheerios box, then I cut out its mouth as well as a bunch of construction paper fish.

I gave Lucy all the fish and told her to start with a certain number - say 9, then feed the penguin 5 of the fish and see how many she had left. After each "feeding," Lucy wrote the equation we had just done.

Her sixes look a lot like eights. Haha.

We also did this free printable worksheet from the Printable Princess:

Literacy
We worked again on CVC words with another free printable from the same learning pack by the Printable Princess:

Lucy got one wrong on "What's in the Middle" and had a total meltdown when I pointed it out to her.

Literature
The most popular penguin book by far on Pinterest was Tacky the Penguin. I'd never even heard of it, but ordered it through the library so we could read it and do this fun little craft:

This website has a printable template for all the pieces to this penguin. Lucy cut out the template pieces, then I traced them on construction paper and cut those out. Lucy assembled them all and chose the scrapbook papers for his shirt and tie.

Sight Words
My favorite activity of the week was this sight word game. Lucy got "Don't Break the Ice" for Christmas and I thought it fit perfectly with our winter/penguin/Arctic theme. I wrote each of her sight words on a circle sticker, then Lucy put the stickers on the ice blocks.

We played the game as usual, but every time one of us knocked out a block of ice, we had to read the word on it. It was a big hit!

January Week 1: Snowmen

We took most of the month of December off thanks to my brother's wedding, the craziness of Christmas, and my own laziness.

But we got back on the wagon this week! We jumped back into things with a snowman theme. There's a wealth of information on Pinterest, so we did all kinds of fun projects.

I wanted the week to be mostly an overview of what we've learned to date since we took such a long break.

Literacy
We worked again on CVC words by building snowmen. I cut out a bunch of white circles and wrote random letters on them. Well not totally random. I knew we had enough circles for 8 snowmen, so I wrote 8 vowels. Then I wrote "sh" on a couple circles to make sure we practiced the one blend she knows. For the rest of the letters, I did a couple Ts, Ns, Ps, Ds, and Bs because those work with a lot of short vowel words. And then I threw in an S, H, M, and F just to see what she could come up with. I gave Lucy a piece of black paper and told her to pick a vowel to start with and then put a letter above and below the vowel.

She chose "i," put the "f" above it, then played with the other letters until she found one that worked, ending up with "fish." This activity held her attention a lot longer than I expected it to. She actually used all the letters I cut out. Although she had no interest in decorating them to look more like snowmen when we were finished. 

After she built each snowman, I had her write the word down on her manuscript paper. It looks like our next lesson is going to have to be on spacing between words. Haha.

Math
I found this cute free snowman pack download for addition and subtraction review. (I just downloaded the K/1st 1 and 2 packs to get the worksheets I wanted.)

Lucy used some mini alphabet stamps as her counters - especially for the subtraction, which she can't do as easily in her head:

Finished product for our bulletin board:

Literature
I planned this unit at the last minute and didn't have time to order a specific snowman book from the library, so I was thrilled to find a free online edition of "Snowmen at Night." Lucy and I sat down with my laptop and read it, then I had her draw a picture of what she thinks snowmen do at night. She drew three white circles, two dots for eyes, and a carrot nose, then said, "I think they melt" and refused to do anymore. Haha. Ok! Fortunately I had a back-up plan to play in real snow. Unfortunately, it's been frigidly cold around here lately, and while we finally have snow, we also have below zero wind chills. So I filled a couple tubs and brought the snow inside, then let the girls play to their heart's content with cups and bowls and spoons. Truth be told, this activity didn't last real long either because Lucy's hands kept getting cold. Lena actually enjoyed it a lot more than Lucy did.

Sight Words
I found this cute idea for snowman sight word Bingo on Pinterest, and decided to try it out as a review of all our sight words.

As I called out the words, Lucy glued cotton balls over them:

Finished product:

Isn't it cute??

Reading
One more thing of note: I made Lucy read some of Hop on Pop to me on Thursday. She didn't want to, but I bribed her with candy and told her she didn't have to read the whole book. I just had her read the short vowel words and the sight words she knows. It's so awesome to see her actually reading pages of the book! Sure, all it says is "hop on pop" or "Pat sat on the cat," but it's still rewarding to see her hard work paying off! Our library has a bunch of BOB books and Usborne phonics books, so I think I'm going to try to get one out every week and really work with Lucy to have her read them to me - even if I have to bribe her with more candy. How's that for a stellar teaching method? ;-)

Stay tuned next week for Penguins!

Week 11: Turkeys

In the final week of our Thanksgiving unit, we had some fun with turkeys. (See also our units on Pilgrims and Indians.)

There's a cornucopia of turkey ideas on Pinterest, so I just picked a few of my favorites.

We did turkey word families:

On the orange one, we sounded out the word "ten" and when I told Lucy to write it, she wrote the number 10. Haha.

We wrote down things we're thankful for using our five senses:

It strangely took on a Christmas theme.

And we played the turkey gobble sight word game. I originally saw this game on Pinterest as a way to reinforce letter sounds, but since we've moved beyond that, I decided to use it for sight words instead. I wrote all our sight words on small pieces of paper and added 5 hand-drawn pictures of turkeys, then threw all the papers in a bag. I had Lucy draw a piece of paper one at a time. If it was a word, she had to read it to me. If it was a turkey, she had to run around the room "gobbling." It was such a hit! Even Lena got in on the action.

Our final activity was another lesson on skip counting by fives. I saw so many cute pictures on Pinterest of classrooms tracing their hands to make a "counting by fives" wall out of their hand turkeys.

Source

We obviously don't have a classroom's worth of hands to trace, but since we were hosting Thanksgiving dinner that week, I decided to have each member of our family trace their left hand and get it to me before Thanksgiving. While I was at Bible study on Tuesday, Justin and Lucy decorated all the hands. On Wednesday, I painstakingly cut them all out and arranged them as above to have Lucy count the fingers by fives. She didn't quite grasp it, but we still had another use for all those handprint turkeys:

Place cards! Aren't they adorable? We glued each hand to stiff cardstock, cut them out, then added clothespin legs.

Of course, we spent the whole month of November talking about what we're thankful for and recording it on our thankful tree:

Lucy thought of some pretty bizarre things to be thankful for (icicles??), but it's true that we're very blessed and thankful for all God has given us! Happy Thanksgiving!

Week 10: Indians

 We took the first week of November off, so I knew I had 3 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. I decided to divide them into 3 units: Pilgrims, Indians, and Turkeys. I've already written a post about our Pilgrim lesson, so check that out here.

In week 2, we studied Indians. I actually bought the book Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving on Amazon because I procrastinated and didn't have time to order it from the library. But I thought it was important that Lucy understand some of the Indians' way of life. It was a really interesting book. I actually learned a lot from it.

Afterward, we made a compare/contrast chart to show some of the differences and similarities between the Pilgrims and the Indians. Some of Lucy's answers were hilarious.

We made a super-pathetic teepee out of construction paper. I didn't even take a picture because it looked so bad.

And we pretended to be Indians hunting for Thanksgiving dinner with this super-fun word family scavenger hunt:

I was on top of my game this week and we did a bunch of free printable worksheets:

Thanksgiving-themed subtraction and CVC code word making. And Lucy has a problem with making "N's" into "M's." Those last two words aren't rum and bum. Lol.

The above worksheets are from this free download. (Subtraction is from thanksgivingpart5 pg. 8. CVC code is from  thanksgivingpart3 pg. 41-43.)

We also did some blends/word family work from the same download. (thanksgivingpart6 pg. 7-9)

And we started skip counting by 5s and used a cute Indian-themed printable puzzle from this download. 

Week 9: Pilgrims

We took last week off of school as a chance to regroup. Not much regrouping was done and I was kind of a homeschooling failure this week. I decided that working up to Thanksgiving, we're going to do three units: Pilgrims, Indians, and Turkeys. This week was Pilgrims. I didn't do nearly enough prep work, so this is what we ended up with on the fly:

Literature
I usually save literature until the end of the week, but Lucy doesn't really know the story of the first Thanksgiving, so we started out with this book:

The First Thanksgiving by Linda Hayward

Math
I found this cute printable and decided it was time to start working on ten frames with Lucy. We've never tried them before, but we jumped right in and she did great! I've been trying to think of a good way to reinforce the teen numbers and this fit the bill. There were two sets of cards: the marked ten frames and a number. She counted the dots in the ten frame and matched it with the number.

We also did a pilgrim puzzle from this free download to review the skip counting we learned two weeks ago. And finally, we made our own Mayflowers out of tin foil and put them in the bath tub ocean. I gave Lucy a jar full of pennies and told her to pretend the pennies were Pilgrims. We learned that there were 102 Pilgrims on the Mayflower, so I told her to see if she could fit 102 pennies in her boat. Her first boat capsized within seconds, so I showed her how the one I made with higher walls kept the water out better. So she tried again, and started counting pennies as she threw them in the boat. She made it to 41 before the boat went under.

I could not get a good picture of this whole process. Haha.

Alphabet Activities
I severely lacked in creativity and printed off a few worksheets from this printable pack.

I also pulled a couple of pages out of a workbook I had laying around, not really sure if Lucy would be interested/ready to do it, but she did really well!

Crafts
And here's my super creative craft of the week:

A strangely orange Pilgrim! Haha. I combined yellow, red, and white to try and get that lovely flesh-color, but apparently failed. Inspired by this.

Field Trip
The one fun thing we did was a spontaneous field trip to Presley's house. My friend Kelly is homeschooling her daughter Presley, who is Lucy's age, so we decided to get together and re-enact the story of the first Thanksgiving. It was hilarious and adorable. Kelly has the pictures on her phone, though, so you're just going to have to take my word for it.

First, we made a pilgrim hat and bonnet for the girls to wear (which stayed on their heads for about four seconds). Then we talked about why they wanted to leave England and how crowded and awful the long boat ride was. To illustrate how crowded it was we put Presley, Lucy, and both of the little sisters in one laundry basket. Haha. Then we talked about the gross food the Pilgrims had to eat: hardtack, smoked meat, and moldy cheese. We gave the girls crackers, salami and [non-moldy] cheese to eat, and emphasized how sick they would get of eating the same things for 66 days! We also discussed how boring it must have been on the ship with no toys, and how the Pilgrim kids used to sing songs to pass the time. I asked the girls if they wanted to sing a song and they decided on "Let it Go." Lol. So the girls and both us moms belted out "Let it Go." Finally, our ship made it to land and we talked about how the Pilgrims had to work so hard building their houses, and only took breaks on Sundays to worship God. We pretended to build our houses, then stopped to sing Jesus loves me, then went right back to building.

We discussed the many hardships the Pilgrims faced: sickness, lack of shelter, lack of food, and fear of the Indians. But then we talked about Samoset and Squanto and how they proved that the Indians weren't scary at all, but rather wanted to be their friends! At this point, we made Indian vests out of paper bags and headdresses out of construction paper.

My stellar photography skills back in action.

Finally, we talked about how the Indians saved the Pilgrims' lives by helping them, and how the Pilgrims wanted to thank them - and God, so they had a big feast. At which point we ate macaroni and cheese and called our lesson complete! Thanks Kelly for inviting us over!

P.S. Our entire lesson was based around this book:

If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620

It got rave reviews on Pinterest, so I ordered it from the library. I was surprised to see how incredibly long it was. I didn't actually read it to Lucy. I just read it myself to refresh my memory and have a jumping off point.

Week 8: Pumpkins Galore!

Alphabet Activities
We're continuing our work with word families, to drive home sounding out letters and using vowels appropriately in CVC words. I made up this little pumpkin patch activity for our pumpkin theme.

The word family work is serving its purpose. I was looking through some old books today and found "Hop on Pop." I flipped through it with Lucy and had her read the parts I knew she could sound out. She did great! It was also cool for her to read the sight words she's been learning in actual sentences in an actual book. She was so proud of herself! As was I!

Math
Lucy is a stellar counter, but until this week couldn't make it farther than 49. I realized it's because she doesn't know the numbers 50, 60, etc. So this week we learned to count by tens and identify those bigger numbers. I printed out the "10s" chart from this free printable pack:

Courtesy of blessbeyondadoubt.com

First, I had her dab the numbers 10, 20, 30, etc. with a Bingo dabber. I counted in a sing-song voice as she dabbed. Since she already knows 10-40, I explained that 50 is the last tricky one she's just going to have to memorize, but then the rest are easy. You just look at the first number and add a "dee" to it. Six-dee, seven-dee, and so on. She caught on in no time. Then, I labeled 10 pumpkins 10-100 and had her arrange them in numerical order.

We also did this worksheet, to practice counting by 10s, and show how you can use counting by tens to add.

I pretended the candy is all a part of the pumpkin/Halloween theme. ;-) Worksheet from education.com.

Today, for the first time, she sat down with her 10s chart and pointed to every number, counting aloud to 100. Mission accomplished!

Sight Words
On Monday, we did this sight word game that I forgot to do during our spider theme last week.

I got the free printable from education.com, and wrote sight words randomly throughout the web. We used a regular die (instead of the one you can print from the website) and identified sight words as we landed on them.

And today we did Bingo again. I'm running out of creative sight word ideas . . .

Literature
We read the following pumpkin-themed books:

The Pumpkin Mystery - this one was long, but had a fun surprise about how new pumpkins grow from old pumpkin seeds.

Pumpkin Cat - this had nothing to do with pumpkins, but was a cute story about a cat living in a library. I love any book about libraries. 

Pumpkin Jack - the pumpkin book favored by preschools across the nation. A fun look at a pumpkin's life cycle. Lucy loved that the pumpkin had a name. 

While I was reading the books, Lucy sorted through my bag of tissue paper squares to find all the orange ones. She does so much better with listening to books when she has something to do with her hands.

Then we made a totally un-original tissue paper pumpkin on a paper plate. (Whew! Points for alliteration!) I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but it looks a lot like this:

Source

Pumpkin Fun!
It wouldn't be a pumpkin unit without some pumpkin carving and seed roasting.

I used this genius tip from Pinterest that is probably common sense to most people: put trash bags on the table before you start so you can just scoop up all the goop and mess in one fell swoop.

I used this recipe.

We also made these fun jack-o-lantern quesadillas:

And today, while I was prepping our activities, the girls had a blast simply drawing on the pumpkins with pens. Who knew that'd be so entertaining?

We're taking next week off from school. (We'll just call it fall break. ;-) ) But I'll be back in two weeks with more wit, wisdom, and delightful pinspiration for all your homeschool needs! ;-)