Last day with the letter Bb

We got back yesterday from a three day camp out with the squad and so we are taking today very easy.  The rest of the day will be filled with movies from the library and naps.  :)

Box #1 writing exercise from LOTW

Box #2 was the Bb tub from Lakeshore Learning.  We went through and sounded out all the Bb words.

Box #3 was a frog matching paper.  The frogs were pretty similar.  It’s just more to establish that critical thinking that goes along with seeing the differences in the letter shapes.

Box #4 was a Montessori Practical Life activity.  Just to keep it with the Bb theme I had him do ‘buttons’. 

Box # 5 was a lacing and color sorting activity.

Box #6 was a number recognition activity.  He is really getting his numbers down!  He did this perfectly.

Box #7 was the Butterfly Number Game from LOTW.  Dad played with him today.  It was the best time ever!

Box # 8 was the clothes pin number match game.

Box #9 was the Leap Frog Letter Factory fridge letter set. (He was singing the song while we were doing box #2.  It made me very happy!)

Box #10 was the I Spy preschool game!  He loves this game!  Today started out playing with me and then I had to go and get the baby and he didn’t even wait… he just did the rest of the puzzle pieces all by himself! 

Proud boy!

ABC Notebook for preschool

Logan’s Notebook is very much like Cyan’s although he needs a bit more guidance for early ed and he is also eager to go along with whatever I am doing.  His notebook is going through the alphabet and learning all the numbers 1 - 9 this year.  The first page is all about the letter Aa!  It has a poem and activities from Alphabet Notebook pages from Homeschool Share.

(These cards are brilliant and have made something like them for each letter we have gone through.  Identifying different fonts were a very hard thing for Alex and Cyan, so with Logan I want to make sure he has an easier time with this skill.  They fit in the little pockets on each of the lapbook pages in the notebook.)

Another handwriting activity minibook for the letter Aa.

After the cardstock portion of the notebook there are his worksheet pages for each letter.  These ones work on patterning and handwriting.  Many of these pages are the Letter of the Week curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

The letter Bb is set up pretty much the same:

These are font cards that I made myself in Word for the letter Bb.

These are more materials from Homeschool Share for his Lapbook page.

Working on writing the letter Bb.

And uppercase and lowercase Bb recognition.

After this are the pages from LOTW and other sources that I find that center around either the letter of the week or the featured words (Example: for Bb it was Banana, Bird, and Butterfly (and Bear, and Buzz Lightyear)). 

The worksheet pages get put into his notebook and at the end of the 26 weeks he will have an amazing little book that not only shows all the letters along with activities for him to do in the lapbooks, but a record of his improvement throughout the year.  :)

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!

How I use tools like lapbooks and worksheets

Over the last few years I have learned that we are primarily a unit study family.  I have found it easy over the years to teach everything around what the child is interested in at the time in one obsessive month - ahem - ‘unit study’.  I like following the children’s interest and then making their studies center around that interest until the interest runs out. I have tried various curriculum’s over my years as a homeschooler and have basically decided that a curriculum is a backbone in which to play with… not a strict guideline.  I take what I want, add what I want, and then leave the rest. 

I wanted to show you how I use Lapbooks and Curriculum to make the kids Interest Notebooks.

This is Cyan’s Animal Science Notebook.  Our backbone is Winter’s Promise Animal Habitats curriculum and Homeschool Shares Animal Lapbook pages.  Everything (pretty much) stems from there.  I don’t follow a dated guideline… for example, this year we started at the end.  We were going to the beach and Cyan was currently obsessed with the beach. So we started our year with a beach study… which happens to be the very last unit study in the Winter’s Promise curriculum.

This is what that looks like:

This starts off our Ocean “Lapbook” pages.  I punched two pieces of cardstock and placed them in her notebook to start off her unit study.  Then I had her pick a post card when we were actually at the ocean to decorate the front of her lapbook section.  After that I used the lapbook idea of minibooks to bring some interest to these pages and some variety to Cyan’s daily work.

I printed minibooks about sharks, albatross, and sea stars.  As she was studying these creatures she would fill out the lapbooks minibooks and paste them inside her lapbook pages.

This section is just filled with fun factiods she discovered from trips to the aquarium, our beach trips, and her readings tucked inside neat little minibooks!

The second section is her World’s Oceans Montessori Nomenclature cards.  I had Cyan sew this pocket set on the sewing machine.  It was super simple and a fun way to store the cards in her notebook. 

This particular set of cards were from ETC Press Inc eductaional materials. It was in the free section. The control cards are the worlds oceans in words and images so the kids can correct their match ups themselves.  The holder keeps all of the cards nicely together.

The next section in the notebook is mostly the pages that she works through from Winter’s Promise. 

The various reproducible pages have so much variety that we can use them for whatever we want.  At one point she really loved reading about dolphins.  So I copied the blank Animal page and she wrote up a page about what she loved about dolphins and put it in her notebook. 

Another time we spent a week at a beach house and I was able to give her a page and print outs of pictures from the trip that she could use to talk about what she saw next to the ocean.

By the end of the year, she will have an accurate representation of her studies this year.  She gets to see how much better her handwriting has gotten, and what types of trips we took…. right next to finding out cool facts about the animals and places she is studying.

The next section of the notebook is where she is working on now.  She has been very interested in harvesting and hunting this year.  She has even expressed an interest in fishing.  For my sweet, nature loving girly this has been an interesting turn of events… and has started a unit study on deer and the Woods.  And for that unit study, we have two pieces of cardstock in her Interest Notebook ready to be filled with lapbook facts, and the three rings after it with neat worksheets… one after the other.

I have started using this general plan for each of the kids.  Years past I have always taken their best work and put it in a notebook for them to look through at years end, and I am sure that something like that will still happen… but I am guessing that most of it will be in this one large notebook they work on all year.