Hey Friends! An update on us & curriculum

It's been WAY too long since I've checked it! If you have read my last few posts you know this school year hasn't gone as planned, but God's grace is sufficient & just what we need! On October 31 we found out we are pregnant with baby #4!!! Which meant 2 months of HORRIBLE sickness, not morning sickness...hyperemesis! YUCK! But praise the Lord it has passed & I am now in my 2nd trimester & we are back to normal life! Well normal for us :)

We weren't able to to do any school due to the severity of my sickness, but now we are back & on a roll! Before my blog hiatus I didn't get around to posting some of the fun stuff we had been doing so keep your eyes open & ready for those posts!

Brady is doing well in 2nd grade & I have updated & made a few changed in his curriculum. He is using Horizons for spelling & its going great! The various worksheets come in handy for him to practice each day & that has helped me out tremendously! We got behind with MFW but are picking it back up & adding Road Trip USA from Confessions of a Homeschooler soon! Brady has loved learning about the USA & asks lots of questions about all the different states, so instead of using the net level of MFW net year we will continue to do Road Trip USA & dedicate one week for each of the 50 states including Washington DC for a total of 51 weeks so we are looking at a full year of US Geography. Of course we will take breaks in our school year, but since we homeschool it doesn't matter if we finish in the middle of the school year or not. Both Brady & I are VERY excited about this!

He is also doing Singapore math & we really like it a lot. Before we get back to using it again we are taking a few weeks to relearn our addition & subtraction facts before we move on to harder stuff. I want to be sure Brady is ready to move on with a good foundation in place! Brady completed he's reading program from Hooked On Phonics so now we are just reading for fun & doing various worksheets we copy from the Resource Center on specific skills. As far as Bible goes, we use the Beginner's Bible & Brady reads a story from it each day & we talk about it. We also use the Bible lessons from MFW & enjoy watching What's In the Bible DVDs! For Science we go along with our MFW curriculum & do whatever seasonal things that come  up or whatever the boys decide they are interested in.

Rylan is doing great with Horizions Preschool books! The worksheets are great for him! Of course I add fun hands-on stuff & use lots of fun things from 1+1+1=1. He won't complete the workbooks for awhile since we didn't start them til recently, but when he's ready for "Kindergarten" I will also add in Raising Rock Stars Kindergarten, You Can Read & Hooked on Phonics for K.

As for Keller my lil tot, it's just intentional play! We talk about letters & count together as we read & play. He LOVES to color & do "school" when he notices his big brothers working & demands a pencil or crayon & a book or paper.





I hope you all have been doing great! If you are interested in seeing our day to day pictures of what we do you can follow me on Instagram...my name is MommaAsh & don't forget to check out my other blog about my Jesus Journey.

Get Ready...

Well June is just about over which means we are getting ready to start schoolin again. I'm actually looking forward to it. Brady will be starting Adventures in My Father's World & I found a blog with a link-up full of other mommas who use My Father's World...you would've thought I won the lottery!! :)




As for my 4 year old, Rylan, I've decided to use lots of goodies I've found from various blogs. I really love Raising Rock Stars Preschool, but Ry isn't quite ready for all of it so I'll just use bits & pieces for now along with some fun stuff from my other favorite sites.

Making Learning Fun

I'm still getting things organized & about to do a HUGE clean out of our school room to get everything ready. My goal is to start July 9. Now I just need to get set & GO!

Letters Y & Q

(January 7, 2011)

Well we are the home stretch of Kindergarten and of course I have VERY mixed emotions! Happy to see how much Brady is learning, but a little bit sad because he's growing up so fast! Even though he's known all of his letters and their sounds for a long time I have decided to review him on them and use this as a way to get Rylan involved and to have some learning fun with Brady. We are doing this on top of our regular reading and math lessons and using the weekly letters to learn new words, play games, do science, and some social studies type projects. So check back every week to see what we've come up with :)

The boys glued Yarn to a Yellow Y. Rylan's is on the left & Brady's on the right. Brady & I also discussed words that start with Y & we talked about the one's he didn't know & looked for pictures of them in his 1st Dictionary. I purposely made lunch or dinner with something that began with a Y, but it took him a bit to guess Yellow corn :) Momma doesn't do Yams! And of course he had Yogurt at lunch one day. Brady was also extremely happy that Yoshi from Super Mario starts with a Y too and reminds me of this whenever he plays :)

Rylan coloring a letter Y from his book. you can also see textured Y we trace with our fingers & a ball of Yarn we used for our art & to play a game of toss with.

Brady using Cuisinare Rods to make Ys. This book also helps with colors & counting & many other fun activities.

Brady tossing Quarters onto the letter Q.

After practicing his printing we put the Quarters under the paper so he could rub the imprint of the Quarter.

The boys also painted Qs with Q-tips & happy for me, they didn't even make a mess!!

Their final products with our list of Q words.

After school was over today we went out to lunch and ate some Quesadillas! MMMMM MMMM MMMMM!!!!

Valentine's 2011

(February 14, 2011)

Last week began discussing Valentine's & how it's a holiday for us to remind others of how much we love them & more importantly that God loves them. We started the week off with the letter H for Heart. The boys used these little Hearts for EVERYTHING all week long! They made patterns with them & sorted them by color & size.

Brady used them to count while he did his addition.

They glued the Hearts to a letter H.

Decorated their Valentine bags with them.

And Brady used them to decorate the Valentines he made for all his friends.

As we talked about love we focused on the Verses Matthew 22:37 Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’" We discussed many ways we could show love to others & how we can show God how we can show God how much we love Him. I really enjoyed talking about God's love! In fact I NEVER get tired of about of the love of my Savior & Bridegroom...but that's a whole other blog not in homeschooling :)Our H foods were of course Hot dogs & Ham & cheese sandwiches.For the letter V we didn't have any foods except what I called our special Valentine meal of Heart shaped pancakes. We have some Venison, but I never got around to thawing it out to cook :)

For our V craft the boys made Vases.

I drew different kinds of flowers& let the boys color them. We cut them out & pasted them with stems to fill the Vases. I thought they turned out SUPER cute!

Today we concluded our Valentine lesson with a Valentine party with some of our favorite home school friends!

We went to Kidz Rock which has many inflatables for the kids to go crazy on.

And arcade games & outside playgrounds.

The kiddos played, us mommies got to chat, we talked about love & the lil ones exchanged Valentines.

We ate some yummy food & had a fabulous time! I am SO incredibly thankful that God has brought some sweet homeschooling mommies to me! It's nice to have some friends who understand what I am going through in this area of my life.

This week we are reviewing our letters up to this point so no big crafts. Hopefully this break will finally let me upload a blog on Tot School...Rylan's special stuff :)

ARGH!!! Pirates Ahoy!!!

(May 2011)

I just came across this post on oceans & pirates that I never finished from LAST YEAR!! Better late than never right? :) So please forgive  the choppiness of this post.

We checked out a fun learning box from the Resource Center that included pretend ocean animals, seashells, stamp art supplies & other items to help the boys learn all about the ocean. We are actually going to check this box out again soon, so I'll go into more detail then.





My boys have been in love with pirates for quite sometime now. So of course I had to find as much learning stuff as I could that was based around the pirate theme. All of the printable stuff you see came from HomeSchool Creations & Making Learning Fun.

I printed off pirate themed letters from Homeschool Creations & Brady had to line them up in order the match the lower case letters to the capital letters & he also traced the letters with a dry erase marker. Below, he had to read the color words on his worksheet & match the correct color fish to it.

Rylan practiced counting to five with the help of a cute tot-book from 1+1+1=1.


I found the cute printables below at MakingLearningFun.com.  Brady cut & pasted pictures to their rhyming word in the treasure chest. He also counted Cheerios & the big boys glued them on to represent the suction cups. As you can tell Rylan ate more Cheerios than he glued :)


One day the boys went on a pretend treasure hunt in the back yard & when they came inside for snack they found their treasure right where X marked the spot! One of their favorite snacks is popcorn with M & Ms & Skittles. They enjoyed their snack while they watched Veggie Tales: The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything.

 

For some letter P fun, Rylan used his Do A Dot Marker for this cute printable I got from Making Learning Fun & Brady made a parrot from the letter P. After all, what's a pirate without a parrot?!

Brady read a children's pop-up book to Keller called "I'm a Pirate" & Rylan "read" his pirate book to our dog Fred :) They're BFFS!! Unfortunately I cannot remember the name of this book. Sorry for the fuzziness, I took these pics with my phone.



We will be learning about oceans again in the next couple of months & I'm sure they'll request more pirate stuff as well so please come back to check that out!!.