HALT, Rewind, take a deep breath

Homeschooling has become my pride and joy recently. I have loved having themes each week to guide our learning...however I may have taken it a bit too far. Reality check, Will is not yet 4...and he's a boy which means he's just not ready to sit and write for 15 minutes like Ruth. Ha, ha. I got a bit frustrated about that this morning! He's a smart boy who has learned a lot, but really isn't ready to be reading quite yet. I honestly thought that in 2 weeks I could have him sounding out words, HA! After reading several articles about developmental milestones and boys behavior I am rethinking our approach to his schooling at this point. Ruth is really an exception, she is more advanced than other kids her age and always has been and I need to stop comparing the two of them. She thrives on book work and meticulously forming words, word searches and alphabetizing things. Will is still so wild and wants to explore and be physical. So for now we will be trying to incorporate physical movement while learning letter sounds and go back to learning character traits through scripture stories.

Unfortunately I have steered our learning away from scripture based activities and pushed my kids too hard academically. Don't get me wrong, it's not like they've been sitting at the table for hours every day, I've broken it up into several 15 minute activities...but we have completely dropped our scripture study, articles of faith and learning new primary songs. I think some of this is because both the kids can sit at the computer or on my tablet for an hour doing ABC mouse, starfall, or any of the many educational apps I've found. I equated Will's ability to focus and play an educational game for an hour with him being ready to sit and study math and reading.

Long story short, we're revising Will's education to match his ability and developmental stage. More physical games to reinforce letters and letter sounds. I also got a book called Math Play, that we'll do more activities out of. I'm gonna keep the whole theme idea, but not kill myself trying to make sure each and every activity utilizes the theme.

Here are some pictures of this week's activities. The remainder of the week will be more games and less book work. The theme is Olympics.

 Biathlon Event

Torch relay race where they run to me, answer a question (from flashcards we have) and then run back to their teammates and pass off the torch

 Here's Ruth sounding out the word she has to read for her turn

We got the LeapFrog Human Body pack to learn about our bodies. The kids love this stuff, it's fun and they learn a ton. We also have the US map and a bunch of the books.

Here Claire is playing in the box the LeapFrog stuff came in

Here Will is being obstinate about matching the upper and lower case letters. This is the 3rd time we've done this activity, this time with the Olympic theme, and he was just not interested. 

I feel frustrated about Will not wanting to sit and do school activities, BUT I'm really glad that with some prompting I'm able to adjust what we're doing with what he's ready for and what he needs. I'm SO glad he's not in a preschool that's telling me he's disruptive and won't cooperate. I'm so glad we've decided to homeschool so that as the teacher I can change and adapt and give my kids what the need and help push them just enough so the grow. I'm also grateful that as homeschoolers we can study scriptures so my kids know that God is important to us.

After I gave up all my grand ideas about how things were going to go today: the kids actually had fun and worked on sharing and being kind.

Snow Finally Came

It snowed about an inch last night, and Target had their sleds on sale, so...

They had a blast slipping down the hill, and Claire sat there half way up the hill laughing like a crazy baby! Then we filled up their squirt bottles with water and food coloring and let them paint the snow, although this didn't work as well as I saw on Pinterest!

Castle Week

This week we learned all about castles and the people who live in them. We had so much fun. This week was great for the kids because they were actually interested in the theme! So here are some activities we did:

Will is matching upper case magnets to lower case letters written on a castle I drew.

Ruth doing a 100 piece castle puzzle

Inside the castle: counting stairs, dragon eggs and royal jewels (he LOVED this activity, which was surprising, but he asked to do it several times).

Building castles out of shapes, first one that I traced the shapes and then they made their own.

Decorating shields with specific shapes and words. Ruth had a hard time following instructions here. And I was surprised that they both had a hard time drawing squares and triangles.

Spelling words and stamps: king, queen, crown, castle, prince, princess, dragon

Here they once again had to make a castle using specific shapes (we clearly needed more practice drawing them) and then decorated our castles with stickers of dragons and princesses.

Stained glass windows

ABC mouse, sometimes they want to choose their own activities. I'm glad that they want to take initiative in their own education. The letter videos have been priceless to Will's mastering the alphabet.

Playing "Castle Keep"

More spelling practice, later she put them in alphabetical order

Drawing patterns on the Queen's dress

Ruth worked on a Venn Diagram of the similarities and differences between living in a castle and living in a house. She did great and didn't even need help thinking of any answers. Will worked on more patterns as well as a page of "More or Less."

Building towers with pattern blocks.

And Friday's are usually more relaxed, so today we made cookies inspired by "Dutchess Bakes a Cake" and then made a huge castle built out of garbage we've saved over the last week and a half.

I turned all the boxes inside out and re-glued them and covered the juice bottles in paper bags so we could paint everything. It was lots of fun.

Other books we especially enjoyed this week were, The Knight Who Was Afraid of the Dark, Whinnie the Lovesick Dragon, King Bidgood's in the Bathtub, and Princess Hyacinth. There are SO many books on castles, kings, dragons, knights and princesses' that we had a huge pile to take home with us this week. We also learned a lot about castles because of David Macaulay's book, "Castle."

Truck Week

This week we changed our approach to homeschooling, we've switched to themes for the week. This week was Truck Week. First of all, I learned it's really important to choose a theme the kids are actually interested in! That being said, it was still a success. Here are some of the highlights:

The border of this dump truck is all the lower case letters. Clothes pins have upper case letters, he has to match them. He was very successful at this activity, which surprised me, this kid knows more than he's letting on! This was repeated several times since he's working on lower case letters still.

I made a huge parking lot/road system in the kitchen and dining room. Each parking spot was numbered or lettered. For Ruth I put spots with numbers like 76 as well as some sight words. Then I'd have the kids find a specific kind of car or truck and have them park it in whatever spot I selected. What I loved about this is that the kids came back to it over and over on their own.

 We created a little town that was on fire so the kids could rush their fire trucks over there and save it, which was especially fun since we went to the fire department last week.

Then we added to our road system by creating letters that Will had to trace...he was over the car thing at this point and opted for the paint brush! We also made a junk yard where they had to pile up specific numbers of trucks on the number it was labelled. And Ruth had to help the junk yard boss by counting how many cars he needed to get different amounts of tires.

 Then I cut up a bunch of foil with letters, numbers or sight words that the kids read to me and then molded onto small cars...and then we had a monster truck event!

Using pattern blocks to fill in truck outlines I made. Then they created their own monster trucks with the pattern blocks. We also did this with paper squares, rectangles and circles.

Our favorite library book about trucks was "Minerva Louise and the Red Truck," really great, silly and so fun even if you aren't in to trucks. 

And finally we blended up water and dish soap for a few minutes to make "snow" for the trucks to slide around in.

We also had lots of friends to play this week which is always good. I finished reading 3 books this week as well, "The One and Only Ivan," "Milkweed," and "12 Years a Slave." Last week I read "The Book Thief." All of them made me cry. I also made myself a maxi skirt and Ruth a pink rainbow cape and Will a yellow rocket cape. Brad fired his front desk manager and has learned a whole ton about the hotel. And the kids practiced gymnastics and piano every day this week. It was a good week. If only every week were this fabulous!

Weekend Love

Ruth is leading group calisthenics

Everybody lovin' on Daddy

Cute pics

This boy just loves his sisters...he loves making them laugh and really loves teasing them!

 Art time: it was fun to paint stuff that wasn't paper on an easel

Claire really wanted to get in on the paint action, but got to color instead. I love the concentration on her little face.

Today we watched a documentary about Lewis and Clark, which Ruth and Will both really enjoyed. It was only 40 minutes long and gave some exciting highlights of their adventure. Afterwards I asked what they learned and they both remembered so much information. It was fun to learn and discuss more details about them.

Fire Station Field Trip

We got to visit the Kennewick Fire Station today and learn about fire safety and what fire fighters do each day.

 Ruth brought along her camera and caught a cool angle of the Fire Captain showing us some tools in the back of the ladder truck.

A 6 year old snapped this picture of Ruth and her friend next to the fire engine.

After we got home and I was making lunch, Will informed me that he was going to be a firefighter so he can rescue people, and then said, "I will rescue YOU when you burn the food!"