Happy New Year's Eve 2014!

A wonderful 2014! Never did I imagine myself homeschooling with 3 kids, but this is where God has led us and I absolutely LOVE this precious time with my children! 

We had a nice day of school today! I took some time while family was here to clean and organize our space better for a good start to the new year! I am doing a good system of "work boxes" which works really well. 

Connor keeps his calendar notebook on his table. He starts the morning everyday with that. 

Here are the tabs of things we keep in there. Along with the calendar is counting the number of days of school in tally marks per month and also in a number chart. We also do the coin cup (to count money) and beans cup (for place value) every day.

Here's a picture of their table area, and my desk/storage area. I love that their table is next to windows.

Back to the work box system... After the calendar stuff, we move to box #1 which is our bible story for the day OR our morning devotion reading (which involves some type of bible lesson and character lesson such as patience, perseverance, and traits like that).

Box #2 is our language arts lesson for the day. Today was a lesson about what common nouns are. It uses the "classical education" model which uses: memory work, copy work, narration and grammar. We will be memorizing poems this year which I think is neat. We also memorize bible verses.

In box #3 is our reading lesson for the day. 

Box #4 is math. For the second half of the year I am starting with a new program called horizons. I think our old program was fun, but moved a little too slow. I can tell I will already be happy with this!

Box #5 are books that Connor reads by himself. They are called "readers" in the homeschool world.

Box #6 is science and social studies.

Box #7 and on will hold extra things such as: sight word worksheets and games, journal entry pages, art, crafts, games, lollipop logic worksheets, pattern blocks and cuisinaire rods (fun educational things to manipulate), and theme/unit studies that I buy off teacherspayteachers.com

Here was today:

A reading game using our friend ziggy the zebra puppet.

Noah did a teddy bear with pattern blocks today! He was so proud!

Connor's helicopter-

And finally, here are Connor's journal entries for December...

Lollipop Logic

I bought this book which has been a lot of fun. These type of worksheets are things I can pull out and have Connor do independently when I need to give a moment to Noah and Lainey. Connor breezed through the first 8 lessons on sequencing today- he had fun and got them all right! 

Macy came along with Mimi this trip. Connor read to her today and did his work next to her. She was a pretty good listener. 

This past month...

Here is a reading game we played. Connor had to turn over two ducks and read the word, if they rhymed, he got to keep them, if they didn't rhyme, he had to keep reading (kind of like a memory-match game). Then when he found two that rhymes, he put them (they were ducks) in a "pond". Cute game!

Here is a sample of a page from his reading and spelling workbook. 

We are making a book called "Animal Tales"!

Another page from workbook (on the top, I dictate the word out loud and he spells it and writes it down).

Another reading game- finding matching socks then turning it over and reading the words.

One of our weekly bible memory verses. 

We make a fun project of folding paper with special sounds he learns- like "ar" as in car and star...

More special sounds projects-

We have magnet letter tiles in which we move around to make words.

We are memorizing addition facts up to 10 right now. We use unifex cubes, and then make a worksheet with all the facts. We put this in a math folder we have made. 

Our daily math activity is still awesome! We add one bean and one penny per day. We have a tens cup and ones cup for the beans. Connor can trade in his pennies for nickles, dimes and quarters. We practice counting the money and also place value with the beans. We count by 5's, 10's and 2's. 

Brotherly love! 

Sight word work

Here are some fun things we have done while learning from the dolch sight word list!

Connor is making his own sight word coloring book. I really think this has not only helped him learn his sight words but also color words! It is a color by number activity. After he colors it, I laminate it and hole punch it into a book.

Here are some worksheets we do:

Find it and circle (reading it in different fonts), trace it, color it, highlight it, put it in a sentence, box it up and build it (cut and paste). I like hands-on worksheets. Also this is something he knows how to do now, so I can give it to him to work on independently when I need to give some time to Noah or Lainey.

I put word flash cards on the floor in a pathway/road, and Connor pushed a bulldozer and read each word as he bulldozed I over it!

Lainey and Noah want to do school too!

Science and fun activities!

We have been reading about science with plants and we did a cut-and-paste labeling activity. Connor did really great at this!

A fun thing to do to break up school work like reading and math is to do a pattern block activity. Connor followed a pattern worksheet to match and make a helicopter!

Here is a new thing I sometimes do, I call it "you pick one". I have a few trays set out with different learning activities to do and I tell Connor it is his choice which one he wants to do, he gets to pick one tray. And then the next day, he picks from the remaining trays, and so forth. Today he picked a spelling puzzle activity. 

Lainey has to be in the center of it all! 

October math fun!

Math fun this week:

We discovered addition facts that equal 10. I made an egg carton to have 10 slots by tearing off two. We used 10 black cat erasers and 10 orange pumpkin erasers, to go with the October/Halloween fun theme. I told Connor that no matter how he arranged the erasers in the egg carton, it would equal 10. So, we came up with all the equations by arranging the erasers and Connor wrote them down. (Picture doesn't show all the pages we did).

We also made a Venn diagram. 

Logical thinking skills:

We made a "one difference train". Connor placed one shape on the table to begin the "train" and the next shape could ONLY have one difference. It was a little bit of a tough one. You couldn't put a shape that had two or more differences next to the previous shape. It wasn't until we made a check list with "shape, color, size" that made it easier to understand. At first Connor wanted to make a pattern, like we usually do, so this was different and required thinking skills! Here is our train!