Fun Things We Did This Week.

   

In My Life This Week: Always looking for new ideas for school. This week I found a couple of ideas that I decided to start using with Brylee. I found a blog of a lady with a very large family who homeschools. http://www.largefamiliesonpurpose.com/2011/02/large-family-organization-scheduling.html

not the greatest picture but you get the idea.

I like to look at their organizing ideas because I assume with a large family you would really have to be organized. She had a couple of ideas on what to do with kids Brylee's age to keep them busy that I adopted this week. They are towel time and table time. Because Brylee is only three, I have presented her with things to do but not really pushed her to stay with an activity for any length of time. This has been frustrating for me on the days where she will do something for two minutes and then want something else to do. Sometimes I have days where she does not like any of the things I set out for her. With towel time you lay out two big beach towels and set three things out for them to do. You can start out with only five minutes if you want, but I opted for fifteen to start with. I set the timer and she has to stay on those towels until the timer goes off. I will gradually work for thirty to fourty five minutes. She does not have to play with the items on the towel, but gets no more options and cannot get off the towel until the time is up. I did not have any issues getting her to spend the fifteen minutes on the towel. Every day you change up what you put out on the towel so it is fresh and fun. For this day I picked several books for her to look at, Mr. potato head(which is something she hadn't played with in a while) and her magnetic dress up dolls. We also added table time, which we have basically been doing anyway except I picked two things for her to do and expected her to stick with them for fifteen minutes. I gave her a coloring sheet and stack a doos. She spent the whole time coloring, which was the longest amount of time she has ever stuck with one coloring sheet. So these two things will be added into our daily routine and will help me out immensely. I think just having her listen for the timer helped her stick with it too.

 

In Homeschool This Week: We continued on our nature challenge. This week was all about trees/twigs. We went out of order because Brylee was on the letter L for leaf so it was easy to tie together. I don't have many great pictures of this one. We observed several trees and were able to talk about all the uses they have and how our world and the animal's world would be so drastically changed without them. We took samples of three different twigs and examined the leaves, buds, and scars. I learned a lot of interesting things about twigs and trees too. Bodie did a painting and a poem about trees. The poem he came up with and wrote himself. All I did was explain what type of words he had to put on each line. If trees was the title, the next line described the trees, then what the tree does for us, and finally how they make him feel.

 

We played store this week. I put prices on the food ranging from .25 to $1. First Brylee and I shopped and Bodie had to run the register. He added everything up and had to learn about giving change. Then we traded out and he and Brylee shopped while I ran the register.

Adding it all up

using his salesman skills to get sister to buy his produce!

This one is blurry but she was the cutest little shopper.

I am looking forward to another great week ahead!

Our First Nature Challenge and A Recap of Our New Year.

  

Already a new year for several weeks and I am so behind. I literally have not had time to write so I'll give a recap of what's been going on. 

Eating birthday cake!

In Our Lives This Week: First of all Brooke turned 1 on New Year's Day. Yes, she is my New Years baby. Glenn was disappointed that she wasn't a few hours earlier so he could get the tax deduction. She was my first and only water birth. The water does help with your back pains, but once you get to the pushing part, there truly is nothing to relieve that if you are doing it naturally. All my babies were large (she was 8lbs 12 oz) so I'm sure that is part of the equation. Thankfully she is a very funny happy baby. She started walking around eleven months and has not slowed down since. I can't believe how fast the year has gone. 

In Our Homeschool This Week: We started the Nature walk challenge ( see the link above) We all really loved this. We take walks all the time, but don't really slow down and look at things. You think in the winter there is not much to see. How wrong I was. We found so many cool things that there are going to be a lot of pictures in this blog. Here are some of the cool things we found. 

A little patch of armadillo skin!

 

couldn't resist getting a picture of these cute baby toes!

 

 

 

 

 

I think these were a type of fungus, they were in some wet spots.

it was powdery inside!

A snail on some dead wood.

We examined things, picked them up, poked them, turned them over, and
brought things home with us!

A little tree sap.

juniper berries

We found a few different types of berries and got to talk about the difference between bird berries and ones you can eat.

This looked like a fossil of a leaf......don't know if that's really what it was.

 

The next day we did a sketch for a our nature book. It was so much fun and gave us lots to look at and talk about. We are looking forward to our next nature walk!

A Few More things We did:

This is one of Brylee's favorite things to do. 

fine motor skill exercises. 

Glue and pasta what else do you need?  

 

 

 This about sums it up. We had a great Christmas and a great New Year. We were all glad for a break from school, but now we are back in full swing again. Bodie's even back in P.E and hasn't pulled his pants down again. So I'd say all in all we are off to a good start this year!