Following the Plan Friday; The Letter G

I have no pictures to show you!  Can you believe that?  For one thing, it's hard to take pictures while you're busy telling a story and holding a mask over your face, and second, who wants to see pictures of the exact same thing (worksheets) every week?

So, I have to confess that our week wasn't all that exciting (Is this normal?  We really have hit the drudgery days of school, I think.  All four kids, really).

Monday was a holiday that we all thoroughly enjoyed.

Tuesday we did Goats.  That was fun.  I printed out some masks from the Sparklebox, assigned each kid a role and we acted out the story of Three Billy Goats Gruff.  The boys got a big kick out of kicking the troll over the bridge.

I also picked some gems from the dollar store and we included those into our worksheet routine.  Now the boys cover their dot pages with gems before doing the dot markers.

We did Gumballs on Wednesday, hoping that we would be able to go to the library and pick up Goodnight, Gorilla, but we never made it there.  So on Thursday we spent the morning at the park and I had the boys do some of the gorilla activities that afternoon, but we didn't get to do the book.  Bummer.

Today we are going to do our Green activities.  I think the boys are going to love the pudding!

Following the Plan Friday, The Letter F

We started our F week with another Fall day.  The boys made the Fingerprint Fall Tree and the Leaf Sorting Page.  Then we did worksheets.  I started Jason on addition and he did really well with the concept of x + y =Z.  Later during the week, he struggled a lot with trying to count up two sets of dice, though.

On Tuesday we did Frogs.  I made Lilypads and wrote a letter or a number on each one, then spread them out on the living room floor.  I would call out a name, then a letter or number and the person would have to frog jump to the correct one.  They really enjoyed that exercise.

Later we were doing printables and I was so pleasantly surprised by how well Justin is doing!!!  Up til now, he's been kinda tagging along, doing the crafts and lots of coloring, but I haven't forced anything with him.  I let him go at his own pace.  Well, Tuesday Justin was coloring while I was working with Jason.  Jason finished up a worksheet where you had to match up shapes:  there was six shapes on a page, and six cards that have pictures on them, with a shape in the corner.  The object is to put the correct card on top of the shape.  Justin said he wanted to do the worksheet, so I gave it to him, but didn't really explain it to him.  I turned back to help Jason again.  Justin shouted "I did it!"  He had matched all the shapes correctly!  It was amazing.

A few minutes later I gave him a simple tracer maze to do, not really expecting him to do more than just color the page.  I was so surprised to see him correctly trace the line from beginning to end!  He's learning, he's learning!!!!

After he did the maze several times, he then started scribbling...

Wednesday we did Fish.  I purchased some fish cut-outs from Dollar Tree, wrote letters and numbers on them, then put paper clips around them.  I had two magnets, which I used to make fishing poles.  Unfortunately, the paper clips would not stay attached to the magnets very well, unless you went really slowly, so the fishing wasn't as much fun as we had hoped.

After fishing we made Stained Glass Fish.  This might be one of my favorite crafts.  I drew a fish with black marker onto a piece of clear contact paper.  Then I cut out the fish, along with lots of tissue paper pieces.  When it was time for the craft, I removed the backing from the contact paper and the boys covered it with the tissue paper pieces.  When we turned it over, it really did look like stained glass.  So pretty!

I had Jason do a "copy the pattern" page from Confessions of a Homeschooler.  This was the first time he'd done a page like that and he did it like a pro.

Thursdays and Fridays seem to be shaping up as days that we don't do as much school because we are shopping, or at chapel, or something like that.  Jason did do the flag activities, but it was during naptime while Justin slept and I would give instructions in between trying to blog.

 

I am very pleased with the progress I'm seeing in my boys!

Following the Plan Friday: Review Week

We had a fun and busy week of review.  Jason did really well, and like I said on Wednesday, I'm going to up the challenge a little next week and see how he does.

Monday we did the first of our Fall days by doing another Apple day. 

We did the Apple Tree Felt Game from Iowa Farmer's Wife, but I changed it up a little.  I wrote A-E on the apples.  Then, I called out a letter and Jason put all of the apples with that letter on them into the tree.  He did really well.

I finally picked up some bingo markers from Dollar Tree, so the boys were able to do Do-A-Dot pages for the first time.  THEY LOVED IT!!!  Seriously, it was quite a hit.

Completing a trace and color page.

Working on the Stuffed Lacing Apple.  I had them paint a lunch bag, then stuff it with tissue paper.  Then I punched holes and they laced it shut.

I have no recollection of Tuesday and no pictures, except that I do remember making masking tape letters on the tile and having the boys drive their cars along them, use them as balance beams, and move to the correct one when I called out a letter or sound.

Wednesday we had a lot of fun doing review activities and we breezed through almost every single on that I had planned.

We did the Tactile Letters Craft, just B-D (I didn't have any elbow macaroni and I figured we did enough A on Monday).  We did beans for B, cotton for C and dots for D.  My ten-year-old wanted to do it, too.  Good sensory play :)

I gave Jason a set of alphabet cards and a set of letter magnets.  I asked him to set out the cards, then put the letter magnet on the matching card.  For each letter, I named it and made the sound and had him copy me.

Inspired by this pin, I made pages with letters on it, and a legend and asked Jason to cover each letter with the correct colored dot.

For Justin, I made pages with the same letter on it and had him cover the letter with a colored dot.

Similar to the Clothespin Matching Game, I cut off the bumpy part of a paper plate, then wrote the letters we were reviewing around the circle multiple times.  Then I wrote the same letters on colored dots and attached each one to a clothespin.  Jason matched the letter on the clothespin to the letter on the paper plate

More Do-A-Dot pages.  These are great for hand-eye coordination.

On Thursday I took the boys to the park and called it a field trip.  We needed a break and the weather was finally nice enough. 

Friday is our longer chapel day, then when we came home, I let the boys play computer games.  I'm awesome that way.  Seriously, though, I had run out of things to do, so it worked.  Jason did do some of his leftover tracer pages.

Overall it was a great week and I can't wait for all the fun we are going to have next week on the letter F!

Following the Plan Friday; the Letter E

It's Friday again!

Big deep breath!

I don't know about you, but I feel like I'm meeting myself coming and going lately.  I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that my older son has been needing a lot of help with his schoolwork lately, which we do while the little boys are sleeping, which means that I don't get that quiet time to get my busy work done.  So I am running behind on a lot of "home prep" things right now.  But, must remember priorities, right?  Even though oldest son would rather I just forget the division ;)

Unfortunately, I think some of this has spilled over into Preschool and I haven't been as organized lately.  Jason told me this week that Preschool was boring (ooops!)  Now, I know this is normal, and I also believe that kids have to learn that life isn't always fun, but I am going to make an effort to catch-up on things and be "available and hands-on" again.

This week was E week.  We did not do an Exercise and Energy day this week; we had to do some major grocery shopping that day instead.  I offered Jason some worksheets to do on his own and he refused.  We also didn't get to the story of Queen Esther as Friday is a longer chapel day and then the boys wanted to play some educational computer games.  Hey, it worked ;)

After all that negativity, I will tell you that we had a lot of fun with Egg Day.  The boys love playing "Find the Item", so hiding the eggs was a big hit.  We played several rounds with everyone getting to hid the eggs.  Jason was a master at hiding the eggs; he hid them in some tough spots!  Justin (2 1/2) was so funny because he would hide all of the eggs in the same place, then he would get all excited and lead us to the hidden eggs.

The boys enjoyed making a nest and putting eggs into it.

We also enjoyed Elephant day.  I printed out a colored elephants from Confessions of a Homeschooler and cut each one up into two or three pieces, each in a different way.  Then I gave them to Jason to put together.  It was very challenging and he did an excellent job!

Another thing he did was a color by number page.  I was so impressed by his coloring and how it has really improved.  He tries very hard to stay in the lines.  He's so cute because he sticks his tongue out when he concentrates.  I really wanted a picture, but I had to get too close and then he would notice and stop.

One thing that I wanted to point out, and that you can see by looking at these pictures, is that you don't always have to have the exact materials listed to do a specific project. 

This past week I had absolutely no money to buy materials, so I had to use what I had on-hand.  The instructions for the nest project includes making a bird out of feathers.  I didn't have any feathers, so I just printed a bird from the computer.

When we did Elephant day, I did not have do-a-dot markers or pom-poms for the "E is for Elephant" page.  I searched around and found those disks in Tyler's Math manipulative bag that we get from his school.  They were a little big, but did the job.  I also found some left-over stickers that had elephants in them, so I had Jason put an elephant sticker into each dot.  He was able to get fine motor skill training by peeling and placing the stickers.

So, don't automatically throw out a project if you don't have the extra materials.  Look and see if you can substitute something else.













Next week we are doing a review week.  We are going to revisit some loved activities and do lots of review work.  See ya next week!

Following the Plan Friday (er, Sunday): The Letter D

We had a great week of D projects!

The favorite by far was the Dino Dig.  I put sand into plastic shoe boxes from Dollar Tree, then buried dog bones, also from Dollar Tree.  The weather was unusually cool, so we were able to play on the front porch.  The boys had a great time digging in the sand.

On duck day we went to a nearby park to feed the ducks.  There were over 30 ducks there and they were not shy!!!  Forget the idyllic "standing on the bank throwing bread into the river".  We stood right next to our van and threw the bread while the ducks quacked all around us.  None of them attacked, thankfully.  Quite an experience.  Picture taking was impossible.

On Dog day the boys made dog ears, dog tags and tails.  We played "obedience school" and the boys LOVED the Feed the Dog game.  I wrote letters on the "bones" and said "Okay, feed the dogs all the As".  It was fun!

The boys also enjoyed painting dump trucks on Dump Truck Day.

Following the Plan Friday: The Letter C

Welcome to another addition of Following the Plan Friday.  This week we focused on the letter C.

Well, actually, we started C last week.

Monday, a week ago, we did our Cats theme.

Oh, let me tell you this:  Jason had a blast cutting animal pictures out of magazines.  See, two weeks ago I was prepping for the week's lessons.  The kids were playing and doing various things.  I started cutting animal pictures out of magazines (I knew there was a reason for those free magazine subscriptions!).  Jason asked me what I was doing, and then asked if he could do it.  He absolutely loved finding animals, calling them out to me, and cutting them out.  It was a wonderful, impromptu learning experience and connecting time for us.  I will definitely be adding more of this type of thing into our days.

So, Monday we sorted cats from other animals and did a bunch of Cat Printables.

Monday was also the first day of school for my daughter, so we began our new schedule of getting up and out the door in the morning do drop her off at school and to participate in chapel.  You can read about our new routine and what our days look like in my Day in the Life post.

Tuesday we had to stop at Walmart on the way home from the school and so we were late getting back and starting school.  Tuesday night is our mid-week service at church, and I knew that I needed to get things ready for my mom's arrival the next day, so I scratched the plans to paint with cars and have a carwash and instead, gave the boys the cars and some blocks.  They had fun making structures for their cars to drive around.  We didn't get any more school done that day :(

The boys playing with cars and blocks.

Wednesday my mom came and we didn't get any school done that day either.

By Thursday I had decided to scrap the week and start again the next Monday.  We had a blast visiting with my mom.

So, school began again this past Tuesday.  I picked up the Cars theme again and we did the painting with cars activity.  My boys loved this and it looked so cool.  I used black poster board and started out with white paint.  We then added yellow and purple.  The boys also enjoyed going into the bathtub for a "car wash".

Jason also painted the cars.

Jason also did his printables.  I was amazed to discover that somewhere along the line Jason learned his numbers.

My mom said he looks asleep here, but he's just concentrating really hard :)

Wednesday we had another 4-year-old join us for the day.  I held off on Preschool until Justin went down for a nap, then I had both 4-year-old boys do the lesson.  They breezed through my plans and wanted more, so I printed off twelve pages of tracing.  They shared and stayed busy for 1.5 hours!!  It was great!

Trace and Color Cow

Thursday I borrowed a Candy Land game from a friend.  Once the boys saw it, they refused to wait until the next day to play it, so we switched and did our Candy lesson instead of Caterpillars.  Jason has loved playing Candy Land and is a good sport even when he gets sent all the way back to the cupcake!

I would place a number on the dish and he had to add the correct number of candies to the bowl

Color by number candy dish

Friday we had furniture delivered (hurray!), so we just did an abbreviated lesson while waiting for our new table.  The boys glued pom-poms onto a C to make caterpillars.

Justin's Caterpillar

Our favorite books this week were If You Give a Cat a Cupcake and Cows to the Rescue

They hated It Looked Like Spilt Milk.

What'd you do this week?

Following the Plan Friday

It's Friday!!  Woohoo!  We had a great week, but I'm glad for the weekend.  Actually, I'm looking forward to next week when Katelyn starts school.  We'll be getting a part of our routine, which will include joining the school for their morning pledge and prayer time.  Katelyn's school lost their principal, so in the transition, our Pastor is going to be taking over the spiritual aspects, which include morning prayer.  He plans to be there praying with the kids every morning that he is in town and he is calling it "chapel" because he plans to "share a thought" with the kids every morning.  I'm so excited about this!  THEN, they changed the extended chapel service from Thursday afternoons to Friday morning (basically just extending morning chapel time), so we can go!  I've wanted to take Tyler to chapel, but the time has been prohibitive due to the littles nap time and their general inability to sit quietly during prayer time.  Now that they are older and the time is better for us, we are all going to go and take part.  I think this will be a huge blessing to all of us.

Oh, yeah, I'm supposed to be talking about our week.

We had so much fun this week with our Letter B projects.  I have been so impressed with Jason's abilities and learning just in these few weeks.

The boys thoroughly enjoy gluing anything and everything.  I have a bunch of bottles of glue leftover from a birthday party so I am having them use those before I buy glue sticks.  They love watching the glue come out and "that's enough, that's enough!" can be heard over and over during Preschool.

One thing that I've really had to work on in myself is letting go of my desire to do things "Just Right".  For example, on Tuesday one of our projects was to make a handprint barn scene.

I started with Jason.  I painted his hand yellow and made the print for the duck.  Washed him off, painted his hand brown and made the print for the horse.  Washed him off and prepared to paint his hand black for the sheep.  He told me that he was done with the handprints and just wanted to paint.  So I told him to paint a red barn onto his paper.

He painted the whole entire paper around his handprints red.

While working with Jason, Justin decided that he wanted to paint his barn, the one that I had made for them to put animal stickers into.  He would not be dissuaded.  He wanted nothing to do with handprint painting.  He just wanted to paint the barn.

So he did.

Tyler wanted to paint Luigi.  So he did.

Katelyn was the only one who painted a barn scene.

I felt a little frustrated, but quickly made myself get over it because they were having fun!!!  They weren't going to learn any more by having a perfect picture than they were by just painting whatever they wanted.

The same with everything else.  So the windshield of the bus was not actually on the bus.  He didn't know, didn't care, and was so proud of his bus.

And, by the end of the week, Jason can identify an A and a B and tell me what sounds they make.

Justin glues black shapes onto his paper plate soccer ball.

Gluing a black stripe onto his basketball.

Cutting out his hot air balloon.

Proudly showing off his hot air balloon in the sky.

Jason's hot air balloon activity.  He was very serious about showing this off.

The barns that I made for them to put animal stickers into.

Jason's Handprint Barn Animals Painting.

Justin insists on painting his barn.

Katelyn's beautiful barn painting.

Jason draws a door onto his bus.

Making "B" word cookies.  I didn't have the ingredients to make the bus cookies that I had linked, so I thought we would make bus shapes out of sugar cookies.  Well, that didn't really go over well, but making things that started with B did, so we choose all of our cookie cutters that were B words.  Jason enjoyed rolling out and cutting the cookies.  Justin worked over one section of dough until it was gone...into his mouth.

I think this crazy idea of mine is working!

Other notes:  The "Find the Bear" activity was a huge hit!!  We spent a good amount of time with that game.  I saved it to pull out when we need something to do.

I am enjoying all of the books that we are reading.  We go to the library every other Saturday and it takes me about an hour to find all of the books that I need for the next two weeks, but we are really enjoying the wide variety of books that we are reading, rather than just the same few series that we know.  A couple of books have been a little "off", but I've just used it for conversation about making good choices or why we didn't like the book.

How's your week going?