Homeschool Mothers Journal 1/11/2012

In Our Lives This Week: Honestly this week has flown by. Taxes and school has taken up most of our time this week. I have managed to do a few extra things though.......trying to keep up with my house and not let it get ahead so much. I got my filing cabinets cleaned out and organized. The feeling of knowing where everything is makes me smile. I am hoping to do one decluttering thing every week. I am just all about destressing our lives this year. My lack of organization spills over into everything, including my kids and that is a serious focus for 2012. Have been putting everything I find that we don't use on Craiglist. Pretty sure the kids think they might be next!

Bodie, graphing how many hearts of each color he has.

Here is Brylee sorting sweethearts onto the right color of heart.

In Our Homeschool This Week: I found some free, cute printables for Valentine's Day from www.teachingheart.com  and also www.preschoolprintables.com.

She liked this heart pattern matching game.     

    This game had pictures of hearts with a certain vowel on it. Bodie sorted the words onto the heart with the matching vowel sound. 

The next game we did was kind of like Cooties. We had the two hearts glued on paper. Then you roll the dice and look at your sheet to determine what bug part to draw.. They liked it so much we had to do more than love bug.






Things that are working for us: I am doing a combination of things to work on behavior issues. I have a jar for tickets. The deal is that when they get fourteen tickets they get to do something special with mama or daddy. These tickets are harder to earn. I reserve them for things we are really having issues with. I also take tickets for being disruptive in class, whining, argueing, and other things. I want those fourteen tickets to be something they really have to work for! We have a sticker chart for smaller goals. I am more generous with these and they can't be taken away. Once they get five stickers they get a choice between things in the prize box or .50 cents. I am always keeping this stocked with bargins I find in the dollar section.

Questions I have: Still looking for creative ideas to deal with sibling fights. Any ideas?

In Our Life This Week:  Spring feels like it's right around the corner here, especially with the really mild weather we are having here in central Texas. We don't have a tractor so Glenn hooked the disk up to his truck and was able to disk up our pasture and the arena! He put seed out too so now if we could get a decent amount of rain we might get some grass growing! I'm a little worried for our trees though. The leaves are already coming out and we are sure to get some nasty weather before spring really arrives.

In Homeschool This Week: More towel time and table time and it really helped this week. We had one day where she tried to pout about it, but I stuck to my guns and made her wait for the timer to go off. The rest of the week we had no issues.  The best part for me is that for at least part of the day there are way few battles. I am not frustrated trying to keep up with up jumping from thing to thing. She seems happier too so it is one little part of the day that feels more organized. 

Bodie's caterpillar.  

 

 

 

I found a site that had cute ideas for fractions using caterpillars for Bodie. I modified Brylee's to work on patterns.

Brylee's caterpillar   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

She's excited about finding the right letter!

I have noticed a big improvement in Brylee's recognition of letters lately. I used my "parking lot" board with clothespins that had matching letters. She loved this game and was so proud when she found the letter that the clothespin belonged to. We did this during table time. It took about twenty minutes for her to get all the clothespins on the correct letters. She stuck with it the whole time and I did not help her with any of the letters.


Struggle of the week: Usually there is at least one struggle during the week, sometimes involving multiple days. This week Bodie had a day that he was just really emotional. I'm not sure what was going on, but he was just frustrated and crying over everything. I could feel my frustration rising and patience dropping so I just decided to have him lay down. I made him lay down for an hour and a half. He never did go back to sleep but got up in a much better frame of mind and the rest of the day was uneventful. Now if only I could lay down every time I was cranky!

Questions/ Thoughts: There has definitely been more fighting between brother and sister lately. Their ages are three and six so it is a tough age I think. I'm looking for any great ideas on what to do to break up the fights with less frustration on my part. Any ideas? Things that have worked for your family?