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!

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 7 Recap: Spiders!

In the spirit of Halloween, we spent last week studying spiders. I'm starting to get a little lackadaisical with school, as you'll notice in this recap. We're going to do a pumpkin theme next week, but then I think we're going to take a week off. I need to regroup and get excited again. It's starting to get boring - which isn't good for me or Lucy. Anyway, here are our spider activities:

We started the week by reading some spider facts via this free printable:

Alphabet Activities
I introduced word families for the first time, now that we know the vowels. I decided to pick a consonant and then work on all the blends we could make with it. We did "t" so our blends were -at, -et, -it, -ot, ut. I found this great idea on Pinterest to make a word family spider. Lucy amazed me with how well she caught on. I thought about writing the "at" part on each of the legs, but she ended up writing each word by herself without a complaint! (I didn't want to overwhelm her on the first day, so we only did the "-at" blend.)

At first, I just asked her to think of some -at words, and she came up with a few. After she couldn't think of anymore, we got out the alphabet cards and went through them one by one to see if we could make words. "Bat: word! Cat: word! Dat: not a word." I didn't count ahead of time, but it worked perfectly that we came up with 8 words for the spider's 8 legs. (I know vat is a word, but I didn't think Lucy would recognize it. ;-) )

Later in the week, to reiterate the blends/word families, we got out the Scrabble tiles to make some words. I searched the Teachers Pay Teachers website for free word family worksheets and found these ones. The pictures were admittedly tricky. I had to tell Lucy what most of them were. And I think there was a mistake on one of the sheets, but that's what I get for being cheap. ;-)

The mistake. They're all supposed to be "ut" words, but that last one has got to be "bus."

She loved this activity and really sounded out each letter to make the words. 

Lena loved it too! 

Math
I saw this little diagram on Pinterest and knew I could turn it into a spider activity:

I loved the idea of seeing how many ways we can get to 8, and identifying patterns in addition. So we made another spider and started adding:

In case you can't tell, I wrote the first number and the plus sign, and Lucy filled in the number we needed to get to 8.

She did great with the first few (1+7, 2+6), but started to get confused around 3,4,5(I had her fix the 3 and 4 after I took the picture.) and then took off again with 6,7, and 8. (She surprised me with her knowledge of  0, although I know she's seen the Curious George episode about 0 roughly 16,000 times.) And it didn't really work to include the equal sign once we got to the right side of the spider. I didn't think ahead enough. Haha.

We also did a little spider graphing. I found a packet of multi-colored spider rings for $1 in the dollar bins at Target. There are the same amount of each color, so I just hid a few of each color before giving them to Lucy, so our chart would show some variation. I couldn't find a printable graph that was quite what I was looking for, so I made a very rough one in Excel. Lucy counted the spiders, then filled in the appropriate number for each color.

I forgot there were four colors when I made the graph, so I drew in another column. Haha. We're high tech around here.

We talked about which color had the most and which had the least. Then we made a graph out of the spiders themselves for another visual:

Literature
I had a surprisingly difficult time find books about spiders at the library, so we ended up just reading Eric Carle's classic, The Very Busy Spider. My super-inspired, creative craft was to punch some holes in a paper plate and give Lucy a skein of yarn to thread through it. We added one of the spider rings at the end.

I totally flaked on sight words for the week. She did a couple sight word worksheets, but that was it. Oops! And, in case you've been wondering, I haven't totally dropped Bible lessons from our curriculum. I've just decided to use her Cubbies lessons instead of coming up with my own thing. We do a lesson, she learns a verse, and there's usually one other hands-on activity to go along with it. Perfect!

Literature: Leaf Books and Crafts

We finished up our fall unit with a few books about leaves.

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Leaves by Lucille Colandro

Who Loves the Fall by Bob Raczka

Fall Leaf Project by Margaret McNamara 

Then we did one of Lucy's favorite crafts: watercolor coffee filters. I pre-cut some coffee filters into leaf shapes, then told Lucy to go crazy with red, yellow, and orange markers. We've done this coffee filter craft a bunch of times before with a spray bottle, but today we tried something new and got the medicine dropper out. 

Lucy loved using the dropper.

The key to this craft is to color it thoroughly with marker. The one in the picture above is one I did. Lucy just scribbles and the colors don't come through as vibrantly.

We'll hang them in the window once they dry. Aren't they pretty?

After we did that project, I made Lucy write her vowels and numbers 1-5, then we went outside to collect some real leaves:

It was windy. Lol.

We couldn't do a leaf unit without leaf rubbings! Lucy did not get the concept of holding the crayon on its side. Can you tell which ones I did and which ones she did? ;-)

Sorry, that's a terrible photo.

And then she glued a bunch of leaves on a paper:

Fall/leaf unit complete! Next up: spiders!

Candy Corn Math and Fun

This week's theme is "All Things Fall." We started with something I knew would interest Lucy: candy! I gave her a bowl of candy corn, then let her roll two dice and add the numbers she got with the candy corn counters.

I wrote down the equations she made as we went. Then she started to eat them, so I used that as the perfect opportunity to introduce subtraction. She grasped that concept as easily as addition, which comes as no surprise to me.

She wrote her own equation for the last one. It says 1+3=4. Can you tell? Haha.

Then we made a candy corn banner just for fun. I forgot to take a picture of the before, but this is what it looked like:

Source

I gave Lucy a bowl and a cup to trace on a paper plate, then we looked at a piece of candy corn to figure out where to paint the colors. Then I cut the triangles and she helped me thread it on a piece of twine to hang in our "school room."

Week 5 Recap: Monster Mania!

Letter: o
Number: 5
Sight Words: the, and, in
Verse: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

Alphabet Activities
I made these adorable monsters, then had Lucy draw an "o" mouth on each of them. We pretended that the monsters were screaming "ahhhh!" like the sound "o" makes. Lucy thought my drawings were hilarious and was much more willing to write an "o" when it was disguised as a monster mouth instead of a plain ol' letter o.

Math
We didn't do much for math this week. Just a number 5 worksheet, and this "roll-a-monster" dice game. I don't think Lucy learned much, but she had fun. :-)

Literature
Lucky for me, our library has a display of monster books out right now in anticipation of Halloween, so I just picked a bunch that I thought Lucy would enjoy. Here's what we ended up with:

Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters by Jane Yolen

Monsters Munch Lunch by Abigail Tabby

Big Monster, Little Monster by Mary Tillworth

Go to Bed, Monster! by Natasha Wing - This one was our favorite because the little girl's name is Lucy. And there's a part in the story where the monster has to go potty. Lucy is obsessed with all things potty-related. And potty has a short o in it! ;-)

Our literature activity was making monster stomping feet. Lucy painted a couple empty tissue boxes on Tuesday, then we added eyes and teeth on Wednesday.

Sight Word Activities
We combined our Bible lesson with our sight word activity this week. We read the story of Jesus' temptation in our Jesus Storybook Bible, then talked about how Satan is the worst monster of all. But I assured Lucy that someday Jesus is going to stomp Satan's head (Genesis 3:15), and we were going to pretend to stomp him today too. I made a bunch of mean monsters with sight words on them, then she put on her monster stomping feet and stomped the words as I called them out.

Next week: All things fall!