One Month Down...

So one month into the school year and we've only had one really awful day. I think I'll take that! We're really enjoying this Core from Sonlight and have finished our first chapter book! The kids really loved The Boxcar Children and thoroughly enjoyed transforming our little "set" that we built as the story went on. I'll have to take some updated pictures, but we added pine straw beds and some more grass and shrubs over the tracks, etc. I'm guessing we'll be reading more of those books as the months go on. They're not completely enjoying the book we're reading now for our "rug time" - it's got a TON of Old English-type vocabulary, etc. and that's just something they've not been exposed to in their young lives. But they still come running (most of the time) when I say it's rug time. I've found that it works especially well if I let them have a cracker or something while they listen. Then they leave each other alone and I can read :-) Andrew is now 6 months old and can make the school day quite challenging. But since they're young, we can get most of what we need to get done during his nap time, provided they're all ready to sit and listen during that time. I often use lunch time as a time to read anything that I still need to read - history especially. Again, they're eating so their mouths are occupied! Of course, this often means I go without lunch until much later in the day, but it helps ease some of the stress surrounding school. We've recently started attending a new church and are excited for the enrichment opportunities it offers. It's neat, too, that Sonlight is a pretty missionary-focused curriculum and Matthew's class at church is studying missionaries right now. That about sums up our life right now. Overall, it's been a good first month of school!

Edible Science

Today for science we were studying the various layers of the earth. I was supposed to hardboil an egg to show the various levels (shell = crust, white = mantle, yolk = core), but last night was a rough night with the baby and I didn't want to heat up my house today boiling the water! Luckily, we had apples in the house, so I cut one down the middle and improvised (skin = crust, pulp = mantle, core/seeds = core). When we were done with the lesson, we of course had to eat the apple so that it wouldn't go bad

Matthew took a big bite and said, "Mmmmm! This mantle sure is yummy! And some magma just squirted into my mouth!"

Kids are fun!

First Day of School

So it's upon us! The start of another school year. Matthew and I went out by ourselves yesterday for a special shopping trip for some last-minute school supplies. It's rare to get out with any of them, let alone one-on-one time with them since Daddy's working 6 and 7 days a week now. So we enjoyed it and tried to make the most out of it. Got some good deals, too!

The kids were very eager to get started this morning.

We read the creation story this morning and made a melted-crayon earth to mark the beginning of our timeline.

They enjoyed their rug time reading with the Boxcar children and acting out the chapter with the little "dolls" they had made last week. The girls need lots of work on listening and not interrupting, so we're trying to focus on that during rug time.

Our science reading was about where rain comes from. After each part, Matthew would color the corresponding part on his water wheel.

When he was finished he put his two pieces together and could spin the back one to see the water cycle in action!

The girls did some freestyle coloring during all of this.

Then we took an impromptu trip outside to check out where the rain water on our street goes.

We also made a rainbow on the driveway with a glass of water. After this picture we got a really good one with bright colors. Ashlyn was the most fascinated with this experiment, while the others were more excited to run around the yard

They were excited about their new (cheap Target find!) lunch items.

Thankfully Andrew took a good morning nap today! Once the girls went down for their rest time, Matthew did his spelling work. It's supposed to take him a week to learn the words, but he spelled every one of them 100% correctly the very first time I said them. I'm really trying to find a good Language Arts fit for him but it's not working too well! With Sonlight, the grammar is way above his head while the spelling and reading are beneath him. We'll keep trying to find a good fit.

More Prep

In trying to add the girls in to Matthew's more advanced readers, I knew we had to do something to make it fun and keep their interest. So, since our first book is The Boxcar Children, we made a little figure of each of the children and also made the boxcar. The kids had so much fun doing this that they were wanting to play with them all day!

You can't tell in the pictures but we also made a railroad track that the boxcar is sitting on. I hope this makes the story more fun for them!

Matthew decided he can't wait until the 31st so he wants to start school this week. So tonight we took the kids for a back-to-school-bash ice cream treat from the dollar menu at McDonald's

(some kids don't need ice cream to be happy )

Prepping for Another Year

We've set our first "official" day of school this year as August 31st. It's been a little crazy around here trying to prepare! This year I'm planning to include the girls a whole lot more now that they're old enough to start to learn to sit still and listen more. So they'll be participating in craft time and Matthew's Read Aloud time, as well as our family Bible time around the breakfast table. I've got a CD of Matthew's memory verses set to music and am hoping they can learn them along with him. They're about halfway through their memorization of the Lord's Prayer and are doing great with it!

So Read Aloud time is going to be our "rug time" or "circle time" or what have you. I decided that sometimes I'll have a little coloring page or something for them to do while I read, so for those times they'll sit around Matthew's little table. Other times they'll just sit quietly on the floor and give me their full attention. I was trying to figure out how to make them recognize this reading time, even though it will have various forms.

I decided I would make them each a poster board with their name on it and they can find their name and know to sit at that spot and that's where they'll be while I read. I'm only planning to use these during that Read Aloud time. So hopefully they'll quickly recognize the correlation.

So yesterday they got to "decorate" their name card with stickers. They had so much fun!

Amazing Little Brains

"School" has been difficult lately with a miserably-teething 3-month-old who wants to be held all day long. But that doesn't mean the brains aren't engaged. Ashlyn (2 1/2) can spell her way through an entire book (she'll literally look at each page and say "T-H-E D-O-G I-S B-L-A-C-K" or whatever.) and Jessica (also 2 1/2) knows all of her letters and can do each sound.

As I was leaving my 4-year-old's room tonight after putting him to bed, he said, "Do you know what loud noises are called? Cacophony."

Goodnight, Matthew...

Guess I'll quit feeling guilty about not doing much organized education these last few weeks...

Color Wonder = BIG thumbs up!

I love Crayola's Color Wonder products. It's SO wonderful to be able to give each of my 3 "coloring aged" kids markers at the same time and not have to hover and pounce when they stray from the paper. It is wonderful to be able to sit nearby taking care of the baby or reading a book while they color and not having to worry about the walls and carpet!

The kids love them too

(I only WISH Crayola was paying me to say this!)

This Child Floors Me...

Matthew loves playing with calculators. This week he's been testing to see that a number times the same number is always the same as the number squared. (In other words, hitting 6x6= will always show the same answer as hitting 6 and the "squared" button.) He gets overly excited when he sees that it always works.

Well today he just wanted to type big numbers. After a very brief explanation from Daddy about what each "place" was and how you read big numbers, he was easily reading 5 and 6 digit numbers without missing anything. He came up to me and read, without faltering or missing anything, the number 555,245,555. I know some adults who can't do that and he's 4! His brain just absorbs stuff so easily and I'm enjoying it while it lasts!!

Back to the Blog World

Wow... 3 months, huh? It's been a whirlwind. We've still been trucking along with school, but have had a little trouble keeping up with everything with the new (very fussy) baby. Blogging has sort of fallen by the wayside.

We had Matthew's 4 year check up last week (about half a year late but had to wait for insurance to cover it). The doctor said he had a small fine motor delay because he couldn't hold the tiny little pen and write his name very legibly (he's used to fat markers at home). While I don't think 4 years old is really old enough to be behind in much of ANYTHING, I still figured that as long as he didn't protest, we'd work a little more on his writing and drawing. I found a John Deere letter coloring and sticker book at the dollar store (not the "we're going to end everything with .00 and call it a dollar store" but the "everything's a dollar" dollar store). He loves John Deere because they sponsor the zambonis at the arena where Daddy works, so it was perfect. He's had fun tracing letters in that today.

I've started doing some more focused preschool activities with the girls. They love to color so it's great to get them all at the table coloring and then use that time (provided Andrew is sleeping or at least content in his swing or bouncy seat) to read some of Matthew's books to all of them. The girls are learning to sit quietly for a little bit longer stretches as we do this, plus working on some fine motor skills at the same time ;-) We're learning lots of active songs and they're blowing my mind with how much they're picking up about letters. Matthew has an alphabet floor puzzle and it was all over the floor the other day and Jessica said, "Mommy, H - hhhhh, hhhhh, hhhhhh" (making the sound). Then Ashlyn said, "Yeah Mommy, wook (look), S - ssssssssssssssss". They got almost all of them right and were able to do the sounds. I was impressed because I didn't realize they knew so many letters.

Today Matthew was drawing a picture and he said, "I'm going to draw our family. Look, there's me, Daddy, Ashlyn, Jessica and Andrew on planet earth. And here's you, Mommy (points to a person on a completely different part of the picture). You're on Jupiter." Thanks, bud! He proceeded to tell me that Jupiter is the "bounciest" planet (so at least I was having fun) and that I had taken a rocket to get there. I guess it's good to know he doesn't think that's where I originated or something