Letter Bb week - day 2

Box #1: writing pages that he and I do together.  He is getting really good at these!  His handwriting is going to be great by the time he knows his letters.  :)

Box #2: the game from LOTW.  Oh how he loves this!  It is helping him so much with number 1-6 recognition that I have put it in every day this week.  You just roll the die and then find the next number on the line that matches the die until you get to the end.  It’s simple and also easy for him to win… which he loves of course!

Box #3: another fun hand-me-down from my friend Heather.  Lacing cards!  Just for continuity I put in ‘bear’ for Bb.

Box #4 I added in the Leap Frog fridge letters again.  He has started to really get the song down and I can use that when he is starting to get more letters.  I may add this in at least once a week.  This is not a work with mom, so while he was playing with this around the house, he also magically transformed into Buzz Lightyear!  ;)

Boz #5 was a size sorting game from LOTW.  He is way beyond this and I won’t be printing this part of the curriculum again.  It took him all of 3 seconds to grab these in piles and put them where they went.  No skill building there.

Box #6 was more sequencing and patterns.  Both printed from LOTW.  These are harder for him to grasp and very worth doing for us over and over again. 

Box #7 was the clothes pin number match game.  This was made so much easier today by the number roll dice game in Box #2!  He hardly had to ask about any number between 1 and 6. 

Box #8 was a butterfly coloring sheet. 

Box #9 was a Montessori activity in matching keys that we have done before but he loves.  He likes that he can now do it completely on his own.

#10 was once again play dough.  Both Cyan and Logan have loved finishing their day with play dough.  I added in a pizza cutter and a pie serving spatula today and he just thought that was the coolest thing ever! 

Quite a few people have asked me about the workboxes.  This is what I have done.  My children’s workboxes are not the ones from the Sue Patrick system although the system I used is directly based on hers.  They are two of the Ikea Trofast shelves put together to make 12 boxes.  They take up quite a bit of space but are so incredibly easy to use and fill that I haven’t minded that a bit.  Plus, if I end up not using them for this, they can easily be used somewhere else in my home (I have them in each of the 3 children’s bedrooms right now already.) 

On the front I have two small circles of Velcro.  The first one is for the box number (which is also helping with him recognizing his numbers!) and the second one is for a ‘work with mom’ card.  I used nice fonts and graphics as I wanted mine to be aesthetically pleasing for my homeschool space but Sue Patrick sells her sets inexpensively and I would have found them completely worth it if I hadn’t wanted to make them myself.

I have really put aside some of my homeschool issues this year.  We are doing school in the morning no matter what the schedule is.  We are doing school every day that dh is working except for Thursday and Sunday… which is always the third day in his work week.  (Thursday is shopping day and Sunday is church.) I have put their workboxes together before I go to sleep at night every night.  I have not worried about what the rest of the homeschool room looked like.  I work better in a clean area.  That is true, but waiting for the area to be clean when that is where all of our mess is - school, art, and now (with the baby crawling) small pieces play - like Legos - it’s just not rational that I will be able to keep that space clutter free every single day we need to use it.  So I have started to put that aside.  Hopefully we will get our days streamlined and get a real rhythm to our days so that I can discard whatever isn’t being used efficiently… but for now, I am just plugging away with school and it seems to be working really well!