Thursday, November 19, 2015

A few of our fall science journal entries!


Here are some science journal entries by Connor from this fall. We have read about why leaves change colors, apples and apple trees and spiders (that one was around Halloween)!





We also did Apple math- counting by ones and twos, addition and subtraction.


Subtraction was eating them 😉
The weather was so beautiful, so we did school outside one day!







Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Noah Pre-K 4

Noah is working on his pre-reading program and learning letter sounds and beginning to write letters! Here was his table set-up yesterday.




We build letters and stamp letters and write them in fun ways. Last night Noah wrote an A on this sketch pad and was so proud to show me! His lessons are short and sweet and hands-on. He listens in a lot to what Connor is learning and is absorbing a lot!

Here he is putting together a number order puzzle I printed off from the Internet!


Here we are making patterns with fun, colorful fall pieces like acorns, owls and pumpkins.



Here is Noah hard at play being a doctor!


Monday, February 16, 2015

Polar bears! More arctic animals! This was winter 2015



Snapshots of the month

Some snapshots of our month...

Matching numbers to number words.


Matching bids to make a compound word.


Lainey loves to put together our math cubes!


This was what out playroom looked like one day- yikes!!! Gasp!!! 


I have an app on my iPad with real life pictures and videos of famous landmarks. Here is Connor building the Petronas Towers in Malaysia.




We also have these famous world landmark/buildings magnets. Noah knows so many of them. He likes the "Egypt pyramids and sphinx of Giza" and "Russia" and "the Great Wall of China".



Here is Lainey participating some more.


Connor reading words on an ant and then feeding it through line I cut out an ant eater to "feed the ant eater". This game came with his reading curriculum.


Here's Lainey again! Grabbing stickers off the table! What a cool girl!


Here we are playing the game "I have... Who has..." With sight words. For example, we read our card and call out "I have want, who has them?" And whoever has "them" shouts- "I do! I have..." And on.


A reading game for when "y" says the sound "i" (in a one-syllable word with a consonant before it).


Doing our "number of the day" math activity.


Learning how to divide words into syllables to break down long words to make them easier to read- locating the two vowels an dividing between the two consonants between the vowels (by chopping the word on the log with the ax). Example- muf-fin, con-test.


Noah participating a little with magnets and puzzles.


This is a valentine's party with our large local homeschool community!! We had games, exercises, play and lunch.



Today we had a long "fluency sheet" to read. I numbered the columns and we rolled a dice. Connor read a word from the column with the number that he rolled. Then when he read the sentences, I put an m&m on the end of each one as an incentive.


More pictures of our area:






Gingerbread Baby and The Mitten reading activities

I bought this wonderful book. We read all of the stories in it, including The Mitten and Gingerbread Baby and Gingerbread Friends. Jan Brett is a wonderful author and the stories have beautiful pictures. A lot of what we did with this was reading comprehension, story re-telling and story sequencing. I also made homemade play dough and put peppermint extract in it to make it smell like Christmas! We did this back in early January but I am just now writing about it in February (busy)!!





Noah's favorite story- Gingerbread Baby!! He loves it! 

Connor matched the picture to the word.


Story sequencing -



All about penguins!

Since it is winter, we had a fun penguin theme! Arctic animals! I checked out these books from the library and we read all about penguins and did fun activities!


Connor's penguin-


Noah's penguin (that I made for him)-


For the record, after making their play dough penguins, they couldn't wait to take them apart and make "roads" and "construction sites" with the play dough... Boys!!!

Connor's journal entry.


Math- matching tens and ones with cute penguins.


This is a list of facts about penguins we came up with after reading the library books. I wrote this on a large chart.


We cut out construction paper to make this penguin craft, and painted with water colors on the background (the aurora boreailas).


We made a "lap book" which is a Manila folder with various things like a penguin life cycle spinning wheel, math flash cards, and a list of facts.