First Week was a success!

I think I can call this first week of homeschooling a success!  Like I mentioned before we were planning on focusing on bugs.  It's not my favorite topic, so it is my way of showing my love for my son.

One book that we used were Caterpillars and Butterflies.  It's packed full of unique facts, and I even learned something!.

The next book we  used was 1001 Bugs to Spot.  This is a great search and find book.  It helps him identify different bugs, but also helps with his counting skills.  I love this book because it is an activity that he can do without me.

The next book is the one that gives me the heebie jeebies!  Big Book of Big Bugs is a great book even though it's on something I hate.  It features lots of big bugs to scale.  The pages fold out to be huge bugs.  My son loves it!  Me...not so much.  But, I love my son so I put up with reading it.  

We also used Usborne's Wipe Clean books.  They are fantastic!!!!  We used Wipe Clean 1,2,3 and
Wipe Clean ABC.  This is another activity my son can do himself.  He can do it over and over.  It works on his fine motor skills because there are tons of things to trace to work on his pen control.

This week Isaac's rec center classes started too.  He is doing Gym on Thursday, Art on Fridays, Soccer on Tuesday for practice and Saturday for games.  On the way to the rec center we counted as many butterflies and dragon flies that we could find.

My son is really enjoying himself.  He is a sponge.  Yesterday we had a conversation about how we life in North America (he started it).

I am hoping to start a kids exercise club and a kids book club with other homeschool families in the area.  We will see what I can put together.

I Have A Hypothesis!

Well, my desire to begin homeschooling efforts has completely failed.  Not for lack of desire, but for health reasons (If interested you can read more here under the tag hyperemesis).  I finally came to terms that I can only do what I can do.  My son is still young (3), so I know that he doesn't need formal teaching.  I just wanted to start heading in that direction.

It just makes me sad because he is watching a lot more television that I would like.  At least he finds educational shows.  He really likes documentaries!  I am amazed at the stuff he can find himself on Roku.

A lot of his education right now is surrounded by mommy's medical visits.  He has learned a lot from those.  My doctors are great because they include him in the appointments.  He loves being able to stand on a chair, squirt goo on Mommy's belly, and then use the doppler to find baby sister's heartbeat.  He really gets spoiled by my OB.  (If you are in the Dayton area, Miami Valley Women's Health is highly recommended!)

Anyway, the whole point of this story was to record a fun conversation my husband and I had with our son yesterday before I forget.  For a little background, my son loves dinosaurs and trains.  Therefore, his favorite show is Dinosaur Train.  Buddy the T-Rex always has a hypothesis he tries out.  Here it goes:

Son:  "I have a hypothesis (pronounced hypoxis)!  It's a great idea you can test!"
Dad:  "What's your hypothesis?"
Son:  "That Mommy likes flowers and cake!"  (they had tested this out on Saturday by bringing me flowers and cake)
Dad:  "We already tested that hypothesis.  How about a new hypothesis?"
Son:  "Ummmmm.....I know!  Stegasaurus!"
Dad"  What about Stegasaurus?  What can we test?"
Son:  "I have a hypothesis that they have 17 plates!"
Dad:  "Ok, how do we test that?  I don't know where to find a Stegasaurus."
Son:  "At the Zoo!  We can count the plates at the Zoo!"

Yes, we do in fact have Stegasaurus at the Columbus Zoo until November 2, 2014.  Looks like we will be making a trip there this weekend to count the plates.  I have no idea where he comes up with these things, but I was so proud!

So, I guess even though he spends practically all day every day watching TV at least I know he is learning from it!

This weeks adventures.

Homeschooling has not begun like I expected.  Does it ever?  We spread out Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear for 2 weeks.  Little man didn't mind because he liked the book.  Here are some pictures from our efforts.

This picture shows Isaac working on basic writing skills.  Writing left to right, and following the line.  This wasn't his favorite activity.  His favorite activity was counting.  

Little man wanted Mommy to make snow so he could make a Snowlof (Olaf).  Obviously I can't do that, so I did the next best thing.  I microwaved a bar of soap, and then had him paint it.  

The brown are the arms and legs.  The purple is Anna.  The blue is Elsa.  

This past week was my birthday, and my husband surprised us with a trip up to Canada to visit family.

We went to Marineland.  Little man has taken a particular interest in killer whales, so even though it was expensive we really wanted to do it.

They had a little nursery for beluga whales.  We loved seeing the nursing whale.  It helped little man understand a bit more about how mommy is going to feed baby.  

Marineland gives kids lots of opportunities to feed the animals.  We fed bears, deer, fish, bison, and could have fed the beluga whales.  

 The area surrounding Niagara Falls, in Ontario, is rich with historic teaching opportunities.  We wanted to make sure Little Man got to see the locks.  He got to watch them load cargo onto the boats, and then see the bridge raise to let the boat go by.  Later on he watched the boat travel across Lake Erie.   

 No trip is complete without a visit to Niagara Falls.  His favorite part about the visit was watching the Maid of the Mist.

I am lucky to have such a good little boy.  My hyperemesis is back in full swing.  I have spent most of the past week in bed.  Luckily my son just likes to bring me books to read to him.  I just wish I could do more.  Luckily, he won't remember this part.  I keep reminding myself that he doesn't need to be learning anything in particular right now.  As long as he is playing he can learn.  

Music ideas

I have seen quite a few posts in the past few weeks on the homeschooling boards with questions about what to do for music.  I wanted to share a little of what I have been using.  Granted, my son is 3, so it may be too young for your children. However, it does work for some older children as well.

Most parents know the author Sandra Boynton from her wonderful board books.  What most parents don't know is that she also composes songs.  Some of these songs even go along with her books!  She publishes these songs in a book with great illustrations.  It comes with a CD with the songs sung by different celebrities.   What I like the best is that some of the CD's have a karaoke version after the regular version of the songs. This gives the kids to sing the songs themselves.   There is sheet music in the back of the book for parents, or kids, to play the songs.  Here are the books that I own, but there are more.

My son likes to sit on my lap while we go through the cd/songs page by page.  Sometimes he will get out some pans and spoons to drum along with it.  Other times he will play his harmonica to the music.  Then of coarse there is always lots of singing!

 There is also this book by Ben Kingsley.  The book goes through different instruments, some music history, and brief overview of a variety of composers.  It comes with a CD as well, but we haven't listened to it yet.  It is above where my son is at, so we are holding off on this.

I know it's not much, but I thought I would put this out there for those of you who are searching for where to start with your kids.  This is easy, and non threatening.  I also encourage you to look into community centers to see what is offered.  I know that there is a lot offered here in Columbus, Ohio.  Music doesn't have to be too involved at first.

The First Week

I had originally planned to begin preschool with my son last Wednesday since that was the day that all of his friends were starting school.  We sort of started on Tuesday because he kept begging for school to start.  I have learned a lot in this first week.

The first that I learned is that Isaac knows a lot more than I could even fathom!  That first day I made a concentrated effort to read to him.  He didn't want the reading to stop!  In any case, through this reading binge I found out how much he knows about dinosaurs.  We had a discussion about why dinosaurs are not lizards, and he listed off all the different kinds of dinosaurs (correctly) shown in the book.

What surprised me the most was when he stopped me mid-sentence to say, "That's a triceratops.  It's a triceratops because it has three horns."  I am assuming that I can thank Dinosaur Train for that one.  This is the book that he loves.  There isn't a picture of the book, so here is a picture for you.  It is an older book, but it is a good one.

Feel free to check out my Goodreads profile for more books here.  

I will admit that this week has consisted of a lot of TV watching.  The last few days have been difficult in my pregnancy, so it's what I have to resort to.  However, my son has decided that he loves the Leap Frog movies on Netflix.  He has been watching that or Magic School Bus this week.  He seems to be learning from it.  He has always been good at differentiating what letter is which, but didn't know the sounds very well.  

Up until this morning I didn't know he knew the corresponding sounds at all.  Last night I had finally got around to laminating the worksheets for this week.  These are two examples.  Isaac was able to get a majority of them correctly.  Didn't expect him to do that well at all!  

These worksheets go to Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear and can be found here.

Before Five in a Row has been interesting.  This week was Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear.  It is a cute book.  I think the most important thing my son has learned from the book was how important it is to have a clean room (I stressed that while looking at the pictures).  The first day that we read the book, we lasted 20 minutes.  I didn't have any worksheets for him yet, so that was all that we did.  Now that we have our worksheets we can last a few hours.

Today I got the water color paints out.  My son is a bit different.  He HATES getting his hands dirty (unless it is mud).  Regular paints he has always detested, and refused to do anything with them.  However, he loved his water color paints!  He painted for about an hour, and still wants to paint more this afternoon.

 This weekend we went to the Ohio Historical Society.  We had never been there, but they were having a food truck festival there.  With the festival (which only cost $6 for parking) came free admission to both the museum, and the historical village.  I wasn't doing well pregnancy wise, so we didn't explore the village much.  My son seemed to enjoy the museum.  He found a trolley to play on, and he loved the skeleton of the Mastodon.

I have learned that my son is capable of learning from me.  Up until this point, if I asked him a question he wouldn't answer me.  Now I know that he is willing to answer me in the right conditions.  He much prefers reading while sitting on my lap, and activities while sitting at the table.

I have also learned that I need to find a way to fill our days better.  I don't want television to be the filler, but that's what it is.  If anyone has any ideas for easy, unsupervised activities for a 3 year old please let me know!  I just can't handle much with this pregnancy.

Something I want to work on is our eating.  I need to find a way to eat healthy.  That is the difficult part.  I would just stick something in the crockpot, but the smell would just make me sick all day.  Lately, Isaac's lunch is fruit, crackers, cheese, and lots of snacks.  No smell ;).  I really want to start doing little cooking lessons with him, but it just isn't possible at this point.  Perhaps in another 4 months.  

Finding Learning Opportunities

Lately I have felt pretty deflated.  This pregnancy has been extremely rough, and it has resulted in my son watching entirely too much television.  Before I started getting sick I was working with him on his letters, colors, and numbers.  Once the sickness began, that all ended.  I have felt that everything he learned has slowly slipped away, and I will have to start all over again.

I am not sure if planning out how I am going to implement Before Five In A Row has changed my way of thinking, but this week was a bit different.  The week started with a trip to the library because I had a book I needed to pick up.  I let my son pick a bunch of books out (even though the ones he picked I wasn't thrilled with).  Two of the books he picked were Elmer and the Whales and Whoosh and Chug.

Elmer and the Whales may have been one I picked out, but I can't remember.  My son is convinced that I am having a baby whale, so we are trying to convince him otherwise.  This book didn't have a particularly exciting story, but it did allow us to work on his counting.  The art work has multiples of animals on each page.  We would spend the time counting all the different animals (which also involved finding them).  He really enjoyed it.

Whoosh and Chug was not a book that I wanted to read.  It was one of many train books that have entered this house.  It ended up being quite fun to read, and it has a lot of sight words in it.  Some of the words I know my son has memorized from the story, but this evening he surprised me.  He recognized the word stop! without any prompting from me!  It's fun having him participate in the story for once.

This week we also went to a local splash pad.  On Wednesdays during the summer they do special things for the kids.  This week was everything creepy crawly.  We went because we expected snakes, but there weren't any.  However, there were lots of other fun things to learn about.

There was a bee keeper there with his bees.  He had honey samples, dried honey comb, and beeswax.  It was fun explaining to my son how honey and beeswax are made.  This ultimately was his favorite part of the excursion.

A lady was there with lots of bugs in plastic for the kids to examine.  My son spent about an hour in this tent.  She was awesome with him!  She answered all of his questions, and told him lots of additional facts.  I expected this to be his favorite part of the day because he has been asking for weeks to see a bug in amber (thank you dinosaur train!), but it wasn't.

 Lowes was there as well.  They had brought a bunch of soil, pans, and flower seeds.  Kids were able to plant there own seeds, and now we are waiting for them to grow.

As you can see, I am finding lots of different learning opportunities for my son.  Even though I am still unable to do much (even our Wednesday outing was too much for me) I can still adequately teach him.  It is exciting to watch his little brain work, and it's nice to know that he will learn in spite of me.

Preschool Curriculum Part 3

The main piece of curriculum that I decided on was Before Five In A Row.  I purchased my book from Rainbow Resource for $35.00, but I know that you can find it for much cheaper elsewhere.  You can check homeschooling resale pages to find some deals.  I have also heard that you can sometimes find it at the library.

I really like this curriculum because it focuses on good books.  For those that choose, it gives you a passage of scripture to start the day/week off with that matches the theme of the book.  It also offers a lot of ideas on how to incorporate different subjects from the chosen book that week.  I plan on taking 1-2 weeks on each book (depending on how fast my son wants to go through it).  Some of the books are older and out of print.  I know I will probably have to use inter-library loan in order to find a few, but that is fine with me.

There are lots of outside sites that offer ideas on how to supplement each book.  I have found that I really like Homeschool Creations for their supplements.  They have different pages for sequencing, math, writing, letter recognition, colors, and much more.  I plan to laminate the pages that I like, and then I can have Isaac use a dry erase marker to work on it each day.  I am creating a folder for each book.  That way each week I can just grab it and go.  Laminated pages will work great for other kids in the future.

We also use ABC Mouse.  We have had a subscription for over a year now.  My son loves it!  We have a laptop set up so that he can do his homework while Daddy does his.  ABC Mouse is the reason Isaac has known his upper and lower case letters for about a year.  It's great!

This week I have started looking into coops.  I think I found one that I like, but I can't participate fully until after the baby due to an attendance clause.  However, they have public field trips every other week, family activities, and mom's night out that I can go to without being a full member.  We will have our first field trip on August 20th.  I am excited, so I hope that I am feeling well enough for an outing that day!

For the first time in about 4 years I ordered a new insert for my planner.  I cannot express how excited I was to open it!  I use Google calendar, but there is just something about being able to see everything on paper.  I have already started planning out the next month of activities.  This way I know when I need to request the books I need.  I plan on getting additional books to go along with the main book for the week.  This will help me expand on different aspects.

Curriculum Part 2

The first of my curriculum that I purchased has arrived.  I have had numerous friends recommend this book to help a child learn to read.  Everyone had such great things to say about it, so it has been on my list to buy for about a year and a half.  It will cost you around $15.00 if you purchase it new, but if you buy it off of half.com you can get it as low as $4.00 if you watch for a good deal.

I have always planned on starting this the year before my son would start kindergarten.  Which would put this a year away.  Isaac knows his upper and lower case letters fairly well.  I thought perhaps he might be ready for this a bit earlier which is why I purchased it for this year.

I think right now my plan is to focus on 1-2 letters a week.  I have lots of ideas in mind on how to implement the letters, but I will just have to see what works out for us.  I will see where Isaac is in about 6 months.  He may be ready for it then.

Preschool Curriculum Part 1

My posts regarding my preschool curriculum will come in a few posts.

About a year ago I wanted to start a preschool type program since I had a few kids that were going to Kindergarten that year.  I had purchased this book from Amazon because it had decent reviews, and I thought it would cover a lot of what needed to be covered before a child started Kindergarten.

Ultimately, it didn't work out at the time.  Most of the kids that I watched just weren't ready for the kind of activities in the book, so I just did it with the older kids.  Out of the kids that completed the activities they seemed to like them a lot.  At times the activities were much to young for them, so I would think this book would work best for 3-4 year olds.  Even though my son is within this age range, he doesn't want to complete the activities.  He would much rather watch someone else do them.

I think it will be useful to work on handwriting, so I will be using this as a supplemental aspect of my preschool curriculum.  Most of the book won't work for my son because he already knows his upper/lowercase letters, and numbers.  I will use some of the counting/math pages, the pages that work on cutting, and writing.

Pros

• The front of the book has a great assessment for the parent to complete on their child to help them know how ready their child is for Kindergarten. 
• Another aspect of this book that I like is that it has a perforated line to allow easy removal from the book.  This made it easy to make photocopies of the pages.  
• A variety of activities.
• Great for letter recognition

Cons

• Some activities seem way too easy while others seem quite difficult.

For those of you that are doing preschool at home, I would recommend that you buy pencil grips.  I bought a few packages because they are easily lost.  I know that most Kindergarten teachers wish that parents would teach their child the correct way to hold a pencil.  These will help with that.  I believe they work for both right and left handed children.  

If you bought both of these items you would spend $23.00.  I am keeping receipts for tax purposes, but I am not sure it will count for preschool.