December 27, 2011

What's new for 2012?

Hey all! Hard to believe it's the last week of the year 2011 isn't it? Remember in grade school when we had to draw pictures of what we thought 2012 was going to be like? I know that I was drawing us living in outer-space with cool hovercrafts to jet around in--think like the cartoon The Jetsons's! LOL!

But it's true...2012 is right around the corner! A new year for a new start...or at least a reboot for our school curriculum. Over the past weeks-really since right before Thanksgiving, I've really let our "schedule" just kind be in a state of eternal flux. While that works for some people, I've discovered that for our family it's just not the best choice. If I'm going to get everything done--well, at least MOST of what I want to get done--in a week, I need to have a better grasp on things.

So we are making a few changes for 2012...

The biggest change will be including more independent work for Little Britches. He can do sooo much with minimal instruction, so I'm going to take advantage of that by initiating a Daily Notebook. You can see most of the pages I'm using--since I downloaded Carisa's (1+1=1 Blog) wonderful Daily Calendar Notebook--but I am adding a few more in for us. I am going to let Little Britches work on this while I get his stuff for the day out and ready to go...I have it all in sheet protectors in a binder that he can just pull out every day and work on while I get things ready, or while I'm taking care of the Baby Britches in the morning.

Another thing I'm going to try is using the Daily Heart Report form that Carisa has also created...you can find it in the bottom right corner HERE. I love that it's like a report card for behavior--something that might really help me out right now. It's rough for us sometimes with my husband working away from home for 3 days/2 nights every week and it tends to come out in the boys behavior...so I'm hoping that maybe using this report card will help us out. I'm laminating it so we can just hang it up in the classroom for me to make notes on. I love the scriptures for each section and really think this might work well for us.

We are going to start back up with our Five In A Row curriculum...trying to do it 2-3 days a week--which means we'll row a book about every 2 weeks. Little Britches really enjoyed our past rows, so I'm just going to have to step up to the plate and stick with it. I'm going to do ONLY the lapbook things which I think will help him internalize what we are going over and just use the manual for everything thing else.

And some changes in store for Baby Britches too!! First off my hubby moved in the other school desk into the classroom for Baby Britches since we spend about 70% of our time trying to keep him out of Little Britches desk! Oh boy, he was so excited last night, he hustled in there and climbed right up into it. Then he patted his brothers desk, then his own with a HUGE grin on his face! Talk about making my life easier! Today he just played with toys and books sitting there the whole time we were doing lesson work!

And I'm going to try to put him together a sensory bin to play with during school time. I have so much bulk beans/barly and oats that I know I can *spare* some for him a container full. I will get one with a lid on it and pick up a few random cups/spoon/containers to put inside of it. Then I'm going to let him have at it during school time. I know he's going to have a blast!

Whew! So there are the biggest changes. I'm going to post pictures as we incorporate them...this week we're just finishing up the year with just random things--games, miscellaneous worksheets, writing, books, ect...that way I can start fresh next week with our  new schedule! Needles to say my laminator has been going in overdrive with me getting everything ready! Now I just need to get some more binding rings--I checked out OTC, but with shipping it's ridiculous...thankfully I found some on EBAY for less than the shipping cost of OTC!

December 23, 2011

Be Safe!

I hope you all have a very safe weekend full of family and love!

December 17, 2011

MFW-Hightlights: Ww Water

We did our unit on Ww Water the week after Thanksgiving. We enjoyed doing some fun water activities along with learning about the wild and wacky letter W!
Some W cut n paste sheets from Schoolsparks.com

And some fun Water Themed science experiments--focusing on water as a liquid, gas and solid!

like testing the density of hot water (dark blue) versus cold water (light blue)...
mimicking what underwater volcanos look like...

Lifting ice with thread...
learning why they put salt on the roads during the winter.

As always, Little Britches fills out his science observation sheets before and after each experiment...

And then we also poured water into various shaped containers to show that it can take on any shape as a liquid--and then did the same thing with a penny to show that pennies keep their shapes.

The we worked more on ordinal numbers...
(worksheet from Schoolsparks.com)

We have been working hard on our sight words, so I decided to introduce a "spelling test"...I was tickled pink at the results!

We wrote our sight words onto craft sticks and put them in our jar to use for creative writing and then we started working on our new ones...I'll be posting a picture of our sight word snowman in a later post.

Nothing too highly exciting, but a lot was accomplished and we had some great science fun this week!

 

Link Information 

December 14, 2011

MFW-K Highlights: Week #9 Oo- Octopus




Here we go to start catching up for our past weeks!


Oo Octopus has been one of our most favorite weeks so far! We both really enjoyed learning about the octopus!


We loved the little hand octopus activity! Little Britches made one...and then I helped Baby Britches make one too! Isn't it darling?? Naturally we HAD to add googly eyes!


There are some great activities regarding the Octopus on the Homeschoolshare.com site. Just type "octopus" into their search and you will find a plethora of activities. I used the anatomy lessons found HERE and we labeled an octopus.
And here is our completed undersea picture with our octopus hands!

Some other things we worked on this week...
Still making sure we have our colors down...so it's a weekly thing we are doing.

Identifying number nine by the written word, counting objects and the number...
Letter hunt for O
And the most amazing video to conclude our octopus studies...to REALLY see how "Even the octopus praises the Lord"...




Important Links
* Letter Hunt Worksheets (confessions of a homeschooler)

December 8, 2011

The Bugliest Bugs

It's all about insects this week! 
I will give a detailed post later, but I just had to share these darling little things we made today...

I got the idea from THIS SITE and had to make them! Of course we clearly made ours cuter...(wink) We made more, but I will show the rest of them later.

December 5, 2011

Catching Up

Hello!
I'm a bit behind in posting, but I promise to play catch up starting tonight! We had a couple great weeks with our studies and I took pictures! Since it's just a rainy day here, I should have time to knock out a couple posts later--so check back!!