The last 2 months recap

I can not believe its been 2 months since I blogged about whats been going on. Probably because sooo much has been going on that I haven't had time to blog.lol  SO let me think.... Landon started soccer and his season was pretty much a wash from all the crazy rain we got. Poor guy, but he still had a good time. He even got MVP at one of his games.  He also went door to door singing songs to raise money for relay for life as well as sold goodies at our garage sale. He raised a total of $38.00 and walked 4 miles at the actual event. We also went hiking to Charleston falls and collected bugs and rocks. More rocks than bugs made it home though.

catching a bug from dads shirt

more like a trickle than a fall really

I decided to take a different route with Homeschooling and go with a less academic aproach. we finished up with the letter j is for Jump doing a number of things from hopscotch to listening to the jump jump song. Thats when the caterpillars arrived. Some months back I had bought a clearanced butterfly habitat and thought it might be useful later. We placed the order and caterpillars arrived in the mail. Crazy what you can get by mail these days=)  Maddie called them yucky harry worms.lol  They were fun to watch grow and change into HUGE caterpilars, we had 5 total.

During the month we must have read Eric Carls The Very Hungry Caterpillar a hundred times. My favorite was using her hands to stamp her very own caterpillar. We watched a great time lapsed video early on to show Maddie that these would in fact become her beloved butterflies. All in all I think she got the idea, but was less than thrilled when they had to be released.

So the last couple months we have covered the butterfly life cycle and learned about gardens. In fact we planted strawberries and can pick our very own berries every week. Its been great-except when I catch a little person eating the green ones. 

H

So This week we went with h is for Horses and ponies.lol Because Maddie is really into them right at the moment. Our week started out pretty normal we took a trip tot he library to select some fun books about horses and play for a bit. That's when it dawned on me, I am doing this whole home school thing wrong. I am going at it like a school teacher. Here is what Maddie needs to know to be successful in Kindergarten abc's sounds, big small etc and creating work for her to do. Instead if taking advantage of the fact the we are not in a school. we don't have to have a curriculum. The right brained girl in me hates to be organized but I really felt I needed a direction to keep up with her schooling. That's why we follow the alphabet as inspiration. This week being horses worked perfect for our new week in homeschooling the fun way! We headed out to a local historic farm close to the house to investigate horses and other farm animals. Mind you it was FREEZING! but toddlers don't pay attention to that stuff anyway. It was wonderful. We started with a hunt for horses. Along the Way we saw cows, sheep, pigs etc. The horses were all out in the pasture having some breakfast or working hard on the farm. Maddie loved the lamb and momma sheep in the barn. She said they were sooo fluffy,  I tried to snap pics but the barn is terribly dark. On our walk around the farm she noticed that the tree bark was really bumpy and we had to run sticks up and down and feel the bumps. Talk about student led activities. lol she directed everything we looked at.

On our way out the giant ponies as she referred to them were pulling wagons of hay and muck from the barns and the man stopped to let us pet Duke. She was so excited to feel his hair. And promptly explained that it was not beautiful and needed me to brush it for him. She was scared at first, no surprise; I mean even to a full grown adult a Clydesdale is no small pony. We had an excellent school week we even managed to squeeze in a duck feeding. They were loving us, guess many people don't get out in the winter to feed them. Did we trace stuff, nope, did we learn the letters int he word, nope, but we did discover where horses live and the sounds all their barnyard friends make. I figure she will get plenty of time to sing her ABC's and learn to write letters in school next year. My new philosophy is, does she love what we are doing and can she get this at school?

Because I am posting this for this week and last I need to add our i assignment. We slacked off this week as it was a bit stressful in our household but we covered the letter i. Made homemade banana ice cream for breakfast (yep breakfast), and investigated many different things around our neighborhood. Landon did a service project for the boy scouts food drive this weekend. He was a trooper according to my husband did the whole route by himself and never complained. He is so sweet.

cindy lou who

she loves the food processor

G is for Giraffe and Umm Africa?

So my plan was to go with G for Giraffe last week until Maddie became interested in the African drum display at the library. She noticed that the drums looked alot like the one she had a home (thanks Aunt Becky). So since I had already created these ideas around giraffes I decided to go with a more African animal and sounds idea. Besides um Giraffe does not make the G sound guh that toddlers expect to hear. oops=) This week Maddie took it upon herself to be as honery as possible. She decided it would be a good idea to put my cell phone away for me. After calling it a couple times I found it in a box inside Landons school desk. Thank goodness the battery wasn't dead or I would never have found that thing! Then for Breakfast that morning she had greek yogurt and berries. While she was eating I went upstairs to get dressed and returned to see she had drawn all over the table with it. This is just the beginning of a long list of things she did during the course of the week. She was excited to see the gigantic strawberry and we took the opportunity to talk about big and small. She said it was the hugest one.lol  I posted a pic of the assorted acctivites we did and books we read. She is really getting good at tracing dotted lines and actually gets a little out of lines later to making swoopies as she calls them. What can I say, she's an artist. We ended our time everyday with African animal matching using cards I made of different animals. She really loves the matching games.

The week we also had a celebration with the boyscouts at the blue and gold banquet. Landon recieved a golden egg and his progression badge with one bead. He was super excited. We also lerned that night that there is a video game badge? Pretty sure Landon should already have that one=) It was a nice night of activites. He really loves boyscouts. Jared is out of town a bit this week so our schedules might be a bit different for school. We are starting H and of course doing horses. Because as Maddie informed me, she does not like zebras she likes ponies. lol

Last weeks lesson

Last week we covered F, so I embraced Maddies obsession with all things girly and went with fairies. I found  super cute book to read and came up with a few activites. You have no idea how hard it is to find fairy lesson plans for preschool online, they just don't exist. Sooo I cut and pasted several fairy trading cards from Disney online and made flash type cards with them. We then used those to play a matching game. We must have aplayed a dozen times. I also had her do bit of prewritting by tracing lines from the fairy to their mushroom houses. She is getting better at this. We of course had to dress like fairies, I had to be the bumble bee as we only own one set of fairy wings. So I apologize to any neighbors who thought I was crazy taking out the trash in my wings=) We ran around the house saying fly fairies as fast as we could, unitl I realized I'm old and had to take a breather. We dvr'd the movie tinkerbell and the great fairy rescue so we watched that and then created our very own fairy house (sorry no pics) Super fun. Of course a lesson wouldn't be complete without painting so we did a watercolor resist butterfly painting. According to the movie thats how butterflys get their designs. If you have a fairy lover in your house go to disney.com and look up Tinkerbell, talk about a ton of stuff!

We had a full week that ended with not one, but 2 sets of Grandparents visiting for the weekend. Then Maddie had a dental surgery early this week. This is why I'll have nothing to post for this week. We are focusing on Valentines day by talking about shapes (hearts especially) and the word love. She is recovering nicely, but looks a bit rough so I am just taking this week a day at a time to see how she feels. Next week is Giraffe- she has already picked out the art project she liked best so be looking for some awesome toddler art work next post!  As for the super cute pic of my little man, I LOVE that my 8 yr old comes bounding off the school bus wearing this hat and has no notion to think he might look uncool. I hope this lasts forever. He is so cute!

Last weeks lesson

I am pretty sure that the gods of homeschooling would kringe at our lessons this week. I was trying to cover the letter E ands its sounds etc. She just wasn't into it, after a couple minutes of trying to persuade her to get into it, I gave up and went with the flow. My thought was E for elephants. She did not want to do any of the tracing or cutting so we watched clips about elephants on youtube. Then we listened to a couple elephant songs on it as well. The songs were great, she is still singing them. Then I made elephant pancakes. So that was day one. Not to forget we did our usual calendar and weather. The next day went a bit smoother. We made elephants from handprints. She loved this of course, and I have to admit the art is always my favorite part. I read some books that featured a ton of words with the long and short E sound. We had one of those wierd weeks in the winter where its 50+ degrees outside. We played outside a ton last week. So I like to think we were working on motor and social skills alot this week. Landon made me some cool lego creations for my birthday. LOVED IT! Not sure why everyone is drinking.lol The last pic is of Maddie enjoying a slice of the amazing cake my neighbor brought over. She obviously really loved it.
 Maddie is very excited about the Fairy books we got from our library trip that we will use this week. This week and weekend was busy busy busy around here so hopefully things are smoother this week.

Last weeks letter

Whew last weeks school was a little bit everyday. Between doctors appts, boys scouts and Maddies activities we were lucky to get 30 minutes at home a day. But we did it! What a week, D is for Dinosaurs (and dragons Maddie tells me) We read soem really cute books like 'How do Dinosaurs go to school' and 'ABC T-Rex'.  We attempted to make dino track cookies but failed miserably, Maddie did enjoy making the footprints in the cookies though.  Wow lets see we did big to small dinos, letter matching for the word dino, drew lines to get the dinos to their homes, which dino is different, and last a bit of scissor practice. Oh wait how can I forget, we played archeologist and she searched for the dinos in her jello mold. The biggest part was the trip to see the dino exhibit in Dayton. As an adult it was way over priced and took all of 10 minutes. But as a toddler and 8 yr old it was pretty cool to see life size dinos moving. A great field trip to go with our Dino studies this week.

Pinewood Derby

This week was the big race for Landons awesome military cop car. He was so excited. He worked very hard and it paid off. Landon took 2nd place overall! I guess all the extra paint he put on it didn't slow it down.lol That means we get to got to districts in March! He is very excited and couldn't beleive he got a trophy. We are so proud of him for bieng a gracious and humble winner, even though I know he was wanting to jump and yell about his win=)

Landons car is winning in this one