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 . . .

Pizza Parlor Sight Words

Our theme for this week was pizza. We had fun reading pizza books and doing pizza math facts, but I wanted to make up a fun pizza sight word game too. Lena got the Melissa and Doug pizza set for Christmas, so I used that as my jumping off point. I wrote all Lucy's sight words on circle stickers and attached them to the toppings, then arranged them like so:

I also wanted to include the "new" typewriter Lucy got for Christmas, so I told Lucy to make a menu with the typewriter. I wrote down all her sight words and had her type them. She only made it a few words before declaring it too hard. She doesn't know where the letters are on the keyboard so it takes her forever to find each one. It was way too daunting a task to do all 21 sight words. So we eventually compromised. She read the word to me and I typed it.

After our menu was finished, I instructed Lucy to put on her apron and get a notebook and pen so she could be a waitress. I told her that I had five friends and we each wanted something different on our pizza. Then I gave her my order.

Because each Melissa and Doug pizza slice has space for three toppings, I ordered three different words each time. Lucy wrote down the words in her notebook:

Then she went to the "kitchen" and assembled my pizza.

Checking her note.

Finished product!

She did three slices that way before she got sick of writing down my order every time. Eventually, I just called out what I wanted and she picked the correct word/topping off the tray to add to my pizza.

Lucy is a big fan of pretend play so this was right up her alley. She loved it and it was great practice for identifying and writing sight words. Win win!

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!