Today, “A is for Alligator” as we used tweezers and tongs to “eat” treats. Tongs are the perfect alligator-shaped mouth, and using them helps strengthen hand muscles for fine motor skills development. Alligator fine motor skills play was “school in disguise.” Continue reading
In the book In the Snow by Huy Voun Lee, Xiao Ming and his mother walk in newly fallen snow and his mother shows him Chinese characters by writing them in the snow. They discuss how the characters look like the items they are describing. Despite our lack of snow in Chicagoland this season,we made our own snow and practiced writing in the snow at our kitchen table, making English letters rather than Chinese characters as they did in the picture book.
In The Gingerbread Man Loose in School by Laura Murray, the familiar character from the tale of the Gingerbread Man has now been retold in a new way. In this book, the Gingerbread Man has been created by a classroom. After he has come out of the oven, he is looking for his class! As he explores the school, he has a number of adventures before he finds his class, who has also been looking for him. When we read the book this week, we decided to continue the fun by playing Gingerbread Man hide-and-seek in our “school,” aka our basement. Continue reading
Last spring, we read a fun book called I’m a Dirty Dinosaur, in which the illustrations were created with actual mud. Of course, we had to make our own mud paintings! The same author has another book, I’m a Hungry Dinosaur, in which the illustrations were created with cocoa powder, chocolate, and sprinkles, so of course we needed to give a try to painting with chocolate ourselves. Continue reading
It has been an amazing few weeks for me. Since I last posted, I had the honor of welcoming my third child into my family. My newest daughter, nicknamed “Kitty Cat” for the sake of this blog, was 7 lbs 2 oz, and arrived October 2 after a much-too-short labor. She’s a sweet little one, and 8-year-old Raisin and 3-year-old Strawberry love her. It’s good Kitty is a good sport, given the number of hugs and kisses her siblings smother her with!
I’m easing back in to blogging today with a simple fall project we did when Grandma was in town: we searched for favorite leaves and made rubbings! A nearby maple tree shed it’s super-sized leaves for us to enjoy, and it was fun to create leaf rubbings, a simple art project for all ages.
Continue reading
Twelve mini plastic eggs, a marker, and some pennies made a fun game for my preschooler in her beginning effort to understand basic number concepts and numerical values.
Continue reading
I’ve recently finished reading Treasure Island in the original and unabridged language with my son. In Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins travels across the ocean to a remote island, where the crew of the ship mutiny and turn out to be pirates! They spent plenty of time on the beaches of Treasure Island, and both my son and I enjoyed the setting, the intrigue, and the final result of their treasure hunt. To celebrate our finishing the book, I wanted to do something fun! Why not have a backyard treasure hunt in our backyard “island”?
Continue reading
It has taken many months, and it’s still not a polished product, but I feel really good starting our next school year with our new basement homeschool room!
We have a large home, with four bedrooms. Because we will soon have three children and my husband frequently works from home and needs a private office, we cannot afford an upstairs room for school work. In the past, we’ve been moving around: from the kitchen to the couch, to the play room. But we need a space to store all of the supplies and resources, as well as a place to do school work.
I struggled last year, as my toddler constantly wanted attention in the play room (which is a small semi-finished carpeted area in the basement) and my son wanted help with school work while he sat at a desk. It did not work to have him in the same room as the playing toddler!
In January, we began the transition in to making our unfinished “storage” area of the basement into a school room. Here are some preliminaries to keep in mind if you too want to have school in an unfinished concrete-floor basement. I also share some of the ways I’ve organized the area! Continue reading
Today it’s another special Story Corner with some blogging friends, this month with an animal theme. I had high ambitions: a mother and baby farm animals matching game, and more. But our activity ended up much more simple and delightfully fun.
My daughter loves farm animals right now, so this was a perfect subject for us! She adores the Farm Animals chunky books: they are predictable, small, and work as blocks to make stacking towers when you are down reading them!
She also loves the Farmyard Tales about the Boot family. We decided to focus on these stories. After we read them (and listened to the audio CD) and read them some more, I asked her if she wanted to make Apple Tree Farm. I simply drew a hillside and a pond on a piece of paper and she went to town adding the animals! Farmyard sticker stories was simple but plenty fun!
Continue reading
One of the go to activities my daughter has enjoyed lately is beads and pipe cleaners. Everywhere we go, I try to remember to bring out bead box! She and other children her age enjoy putting the beads on pipe cleaner to make “bracelets” and “necklaces.” I also found a simple strainer for her to put the pipe cleaners through. Continue reading