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!