Gallon Guy

I'm usually really bad about doing crafts. I try to have one slated per week, but so many times they end up being ones we're doing "just to do them," and with 4 kids 5 and under, I'd rather not deal with the mess, time and hassle of that. However, this one made sense to me. I could see the benefit to doing it. So we made Gallon Guy: You need one large piece of paper, 4 smaller rectangles, 8 smaller squares and 16 even smaller squares (hint: start with the smallest squares and work your way up!) We used different colors for each so they would stand out.

There he is! I maybe should have labeled the pieces AFTER Matthew glued them all together - some of them you can't see the words anymore, but it adds character. And he's serving his purpose! Daddy asked this morning, "Matthew, how many quarts in a gallon?" Without hesitation (and with Gallon Guy nowhere in sight), Matthew answered, "FOUR!"

(Matthew loved Gallon Guy so much, he made a Gallon Guy mii on the wii.)

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!

Week #7 Review

What an insane week! We've been without internet since Wednesday, which is why this update is late. In addition, I've been helping Stephen on a project for work that the EARLIEST we've quit on this week was 1:30 a.m. One morning it was 4:30. Of course, with 3 young kids, you don't compensate by sleeping in the next day! So things have definitely been interesting here this week.

Thankfully, Matthew was very cooperative this week so school went smoothly.

The week was very tough on the kids with them not seeing Daddy AT ALL, so on Friday we made him pictures. First, Matthew made a sunshine with a smiley face (the eyes and nose are kind of hard to see in the picture). I know it doesn't look like much, but I'm AMAZED at how far he's come:


Then we traced a sign language "I love you" (he stands at the door each morning and presses his little hands up against the storm door in an "I love you sign" and keeps it there until he can't see Daddy anymore). So he signed it up against the paper and I traced it. Then I wrote "Daddy" on another page for him to copy, but he wrote these letters COMPLETELY by himself. I bumped the paper while he was writing the "y," but I was so amazed again at his improvement in this area!


Then the girls drew theirs. Jessica:


Ashlyn:


We hung them all on the fridge for Daddy to see when he came home in the wee hours of the morning. I think they brightened his... night.


This week's verse was "Forgive as the Lord forgave you" (Colossians 3:13). He was able to recite all 7 verses tonight, though was a little bumpy on the references, but I was impressed!


In planning ahead for a few weeks (I was amazed at how much time I had when I didn't have internet access ), I realized that since we skipped 25 weeks of reading, he only has a few weeks of reading left before he's done with the books we have. So I looked up what books were in the next reading level for Sonlight and then went to my trusty "Paperback swap" account (a GREAT resource if you don't already know that!) and was able to get TWELVE of the books off of the list for FREE! One of them was 16.99 through Sonlight and someone had it listed on Paperback swap! I couldn't believe my luck. Now I just need to get a Sonlight order together to be able to get the schedule for the readers. Hmm... wishlist items?

Week #6 Review

Matthew had another week where he just wanted to keep going. He finished one of his books by Tuesday! But I always try to just go with it because by Friday he really doesn't want to do much. This Friday was devoted to crafts. We had read "The Clever Mouse" this week so we made a mouse bag puppet. I cut everything out and placed the whiskers because they were a little harder, but he put on the glue and placed the other pieces. He broke into a huge grin when I showed him that it was a puppet. He just didn't see that coming at all


On Wednesday at skating they got to ride on saucers while the teachers shot them across the ice. Needless to say, Matthew had a blast.


He is doing SO MUCH BETTER with his reading to me now that we switched books. He's so much more expressive and today got through an entire page properly pausing at all the periods, continuing on through line breaks if he didn't see a period and really enjoyed looking up and making eye contact at the end of phrases.

He's also doing great with his memory verses. He learns one each week and tonight was able to quote all 6 of them and had only forgotten one reference. His memory never ceases to amaze me. His verses so far have been:

Week 1: Pay attention, my child, to what I say. Listen carefully. Proverbs 4:20
Week 2: Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. Hebrews 11:1
Week 3: God loves a cheerful giver. 2 Corinthians 9:7
Week 4: Let the peace of God rule in your hearts... and be thankful. Colossians 3:15
Week 5: Tell your neighbor the truth because we belong to each other. Ephesians 4:25
Week 6: Obey your leaders [because] they keep watch over you. Hebrews 13:17

We also went to the store together and picked out a Kumon workbook. It's the Let's Cut Paper book for the younger kids. They had one for 3, 4 and 5, but he's had NO experience with scissors so I got the one for age 2 and up and added the other to our wishlist. He's done two pages so far and is really doing well. His hand shakes when he tries to line it up but he's able to open the scissors wider than he was a couple of days ago and has cut fairly accurately on the line. I'm restraining myself from getting a few of the other workbooks (a coloring, tracing or maze one to help with his pencil holding), but I'm impressed with Kumon so far! Everyone's recommendations were right on the money!

On a non-Matthew related note, Ashlyn has recently started to sit through longer and longer books. She'll find one and bring it to me and just plop in my lap. Today we got through an entire book of Matthew's (as in, not a short board book) and she never moved. Granted, it was a Blues Clues book and that's something that completely holds her attention, but still, it was motivation to start to save harder for Sonlight's Core P3/4. I was hoping it would be something all of us could do together (I currently have to wait until the girls are occupied or napping to work with Matthew to avoid distraction) and it seems like the girls are getting closer to attentiveness in that regard.

So all-in-all, another good week. It definitely has its difficult moments, but so far our schooling journey has been very positive.

Week #5 Review

As a general note, I got the wish list up earlier this week. So leave me feedback about any of the items you’re familiar with if you’re so inclined It’s in the right margin and I’ve included links to each item.

This has been a good week. It started on Sunday with Matthew asking as soon as we got home from church if he could please do school. It ended today with him saying “Can we do MOOOOORE school please?” when we finished for the day. It’s definitely nicer when the week goes like that!

In science we were learning about summer and therefore focusing on the sun. So for our craft we made a sun out of Matthew's handprints. The girls LOVED it and want to touch it and hold it every time they're in the kitchen where it hangs on the fridge. I guess it's all the yellow

During his skating class this week he got to play hockey again. He had an absolute MELTDOWN when his teacher removed the net from the ice so the public skating session could start. He skated almost the entire length of the ice to get down to it and then right before he got to it she took it off the ice, then told me to go to the door back at the other end of the ice so he'd have to skate all the way back. I felt so bad for him, but he certainly did get extra skating practice.

By Friday, we typically only have a few books to work on because on certain days he’s wanted to go ahead in books or whatever. So today I put the four books we needed to work in on the counter and told him to choose which ones he wanted to do and then we’d do the rest later. He picked all of them except one – the reading book. We’ve both pretty much loathed this book for the past 5 weeks. He doesn’t enjoy reading it, it’s really beneath his ability, plus there are no pictures and the stories make no sense to him because they all try to use smaller words to convey the story. He just doesn’t enjoy it at all. I had been holding out hope that it might get harder as the weeks went on, but so far, it hasn’t.

So today, realizing we still had TWENTY weeks to go in the book, I flipped to the very last lesson and realized it was still stuff he could read now. So I made an executive decision to scrap that book. I picked another book from his pile of readers and he flew through it and asked if we could do more! That was music to my ears. So starting Monday we’ll just move on to the book that’s scheduled for week 25. I’m hoping by the time we get to the end of his readers that he currently has that I’ll have saved up enough money to get Sonlight’s Core P3/4 and then he’ll have plenty more books to fill up the holes in the schedule.

And as you’ll recall, we started Math a week ago today. One would assume we’d be on or around Lesson 6, correct? (last Friday, then 5 days this week). Nope. We’re on Lesson 18. And we’d be farther but today after 7 lessons in a row with him just continually asking for more I had to tell him LAST ONE. Horizons is definitely a colorful curriculum and I think that makes it more fun for him. I know some kids would be distracted by that, but it’s definitely a plus for him. So I had to adjust all of next week's schedule after today because we wouldn't have any math otherwise!

Anyway, I’ll end this insanely long post and try to enjoy my weekend. Hope you do the same!