Then there is the 2 year old.

I love for Edward my 2 year old to be with us when we do school almost as much as he loves doing school with us. I know  that it would be a lot easier to just wait and do school while he is taking a nap (but I like for this time to be quiet time for everyone in the house) or while daddy is home so he can keep him out of the way. And don’t get me wrong there have been countless  days that we have had to put school on pause because Edward was not being very cooperative but most of the time he sits with us at least some of the time we are doing school so I always make sure that I have some things for him to do.  

 Gradually over the last few months I have been creating more and more activities that are fun but challenging to keep him busy while big sister and I are doing school.

Pom Poms

He does all kids of things with these fuzzy little balls. At first I was letting him play with some that are stuck to magnets along with some letter and number magnets on a dry erase board. Then I poked a hole in the top of the container that is holding all of his stuff and he would pick out the balls that would fit and poke them there the hole. After that I gave him some plastic tweezers that came out of some toy the kids had and he picks up the poms with the tweezers and put them in a cup. Theese simple fuzzy little balls bring countless minuts of quiet jabbering from him *lol every minut helps*.

Bingo marker

He loves that thing! He wants to dot everything,  so I always make sure and have plenty do a dot pages printed out with letters numbers or shapes. At first the marks were everywhere and slowly but surely they are more and more just getting on the circles.

Fish/fishing pole

For this I took one of the poms stuck to the magnet (bait) and using thin paper wraped wire (maybe for fake flower arrangements or something? I am not sure it is something I found in my moms craft supplies) and glued it to the end of a wooden dowel then I cut fish (at least he coud tell  they were fish) out of construction paper and used  a small paperclip for the mouth.

Matching puzzle
The latest thing that I have created for him is a color and shape matching game I started in my word processing program and created one page with  9 colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, brown, and white) in rectangles with the word written on it just so he can see the word not that he can read it.  And then another with 3 shapes (circle, square, and triangle) I printed out two copies of each on card stock and laminated them one copy I left whole (game board) and the other I cut out each color or shape (pieces). When we get ready to play he picks up a picece of the puzzle that I have cut out and I tell him what it is (some times he tells me) and then he finds where on the board the piece matches. I have noticed he can most of the time say witch shape is witch so soon I will have to add a few more shapes.

Oh and on a side note I think that I am going to make a game like this for Olivia except on the board just have the color word and on the pieces take the word off. I think that it would be a fun way to practice reading her color words.
I have been visiting a quite a few Montessori based websites and loving all of the fun ideas that they share for the tot to preschool aged kids to make learning fun. Most of it is simple using objects that most people already have around the house.

There are also toys that I know will keep him busy and quiet for a little while sometimes when he gets tired of sitting with us I will get out the blocks or the train set and he plays by himself for quite a while.

 

 

 This is a few things that I use to make school time a fun and enjoyable time for my entire family. I would love it if you could share some of your ideas on this subject in the comments below.

-Becca

A short stop in Ancient Egypt

 

As I have shared before I did not buy a History/Geography curriculum for Olivia this year for a few reasons but mainly because I want to mostly focus on the 3 R’s this year, but I do want to introduce her to some things that I think she would be interested in so for the last week and a half we have been studying Ancient Egypt and it has been fun.

I found this Ancient Egypt unit study from RoyalBaloo.com she wrote it for her 2^nd grader so there is some things in there that I did not do with Olivia but we picked out the things that we would like. I love that everything is included with this unit study. I do plan on writing unit studies for us for later and this one was a very well thought out plan and a great inspiration. **Thank you Erin at RoyalBaloo for sharing all of your amazing stuff**.

The Ancient Egypt unit study is a free 22 page download that includes 2 mini books and tons of worksheets covering everything from Ancient Egypt Geography and the Nile River to the daily life an Ancient Egyptian kid, and everything in between.

The first week we learned a little about the geography of Egypt and the Nile River and Sahara desert. The download included a worksheet to write the definition of a desert and draw a picture so I used that sheet for some Dictionary practice and showed Olivia how to look up words in the dictionary.

The second week we learned about hieroglyphs and pyramids and even built a pyramid out of rice crispy treats. Olivia really enjoyed that. We still have pharos, and mummies that we have not gone over but by the middle of the second week Olivia was over the whole ancient Egypt study and to tell the truth I was as well so we ended our study there. I still have the extra stuff in our notebook so that one day when we are bored and need something fun to do we can pull this out and learn something new.

I also found this Ancient Egypt printable pack at 3 dinosaurs it included pintables suitable for tots to 1^stgrade level. Like with the unit study I went through and picked out things that I though that my kiddos would enjoy. I printed out lots of do-a-dot pages for Edward, a color mini book with scarab beetles and several 2 piece puzzles. For Olivia I printed out a 100 chart color by number and a 10 piece count by two puzzle. I also added the greater than/less than sheet and the addition sheet to her daily calendar notebook.

Besides the do a dot pages Edward was not happy with the Ancient Egypt theme, he would not even color the mini book or play with the puzzles he wanted his dinosaur things that we did the week before. But just like with Olivia, I will put all the stuff we did not do up and pull them out another time and maybe he will enjoy it more.

Along with the pintables that I found online I also went to the library and checked out all the books that I could find on Ancient Egypt and all our read alouds from the last two weeks came from one of those books. Olivia really enjoyed the myths and legends from the book Ancient Egyptian Civilization by Michael Bell and Sarah Quie .

This is not everything that we did it is just what stuck out in my mind and the things that we got picturs of. I can not wait to figure out where our next stop in history will be.

Come back next week and I will show you some of the fun things that I am doing with Edward my 2 year old to keep him occupied while we do school.

-Becca

pre-k and kinder for free!!

When I decided to homeschool Olivia I knew that I did not want to have to spend a lot of money for preschool and kindergarten. It was so much fun searching all over the internet for the perfect ideas for fun and educational activities for my then 4 year old. I have had several people recently asking me about what I did with Olivia so I thought I would take some time and share some of the websites that put Olivia through pre-school and kindergarten for almost free, all I had to pay for was copy paper and ink.

Theese first ones have free printables

schoolsparks

First School


Kids Learning Station


Free interactive web sites for letters and phonics

starfall
Reading Bear

Olivia really enjoyed the you tube videos from

Have Fun Teaching

I got alot of my preschool craft ideas from

DLTK's

Phonics
Fun Fonix

Progressive Phonics

I am sure that there are more but those are the ones that I remember using the most
Last year I started using alot of things from



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So there is my list and I hope that this helps someone in there homeschool journey

-becca

update on my journey to a more organized life

A while back I wrote here about needing a way to organize my though so that at night when I am trying to sleep I could get there faster. I thought maybe if I could get all my ideas down on paper with some problem salving pushed in there maybe my sleepless nights would be a thing of the past. Well I am here to say that was a complete failure.

I must also say that I still don’t know if it would work if I gave it a shot but I could not get into it, oh and you should have heard some of my excuses. First I had to go out and buy a cute new notebook (because we all know there is no form of paper in my house) to put my thoughts in well that never got done, I never thought about it when I went to the store. (I know I should have wrote it down lol)

Every night I would put the kids in the bed and think now lets do it and then I would think nah I want to just forget about worrying for a few hours and watch TV thinking I would do it latter. Well later never got here and before I knew what happened it was midnight and I had to get into bed.

But I have been doing one thing to try and help myself and that is get into a routine during the day in the hope that if I feel like I am getting things done during the day then there will be less things to worry about at night. I have also been making myself get up a little earlier in the mornings but it has been super hard to beat the kids up.

Anyway, even though what I tried this time was a big bust, I will keep trying and maybe next time it will stick. 

 

-Becca

Swirly Chocolate Sandwiches

Hey everyone, I am super stoked to announce I finally found a sandwich Karli will eat!!!  I'm calling it Swirly Chocolate Sandwiches. I think the name alone is the main reason Karli likes it. The best thing is it isn't chocolate I am using, it's Nutella. I figure what Karli doesn't know won't hurt her. (And may actually help her)

   The only things you will need is a rolling pin, bread, Nutella and a knife

First you cut the crust off the bread and roll it flat with a rolling pin

Spread on the Nutella and roll it into a sushi roll.

 
 

I cut mine into bite size pieces

The cute swirl of "chocolate" ;)

 

If anybody has any cute school lunch ideas to trick my kid into eating PLEASE let me know
                                                                                                -Sarah