Preschool

First, I apologize for my lack of posting. I lost my camera, and post without pictures are not very fun. But the much missed camera has been found and pictures have been taken.

On to the post. Recently I started preschool again with my Princess. She has already been in two co-ops, so it wasn't the first time she's done preschool.

We've been using Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading. I love the book, however I find it a little dry. I like to add a craft when learning all the letters. We do all the letter crafts in one notebook.

Today's letter was U. I Googled umbrella crafts, and there were a ton of examples of the activity we ended up doing. (so I can't really credit it back to a certain person).

After writing the letter U a few times, there are more U's on other pages. We made an umbrella out of a pipe cleaner and a cupcake wrapper. She thought it was great! And it wasn't very messy, so I also thought it was great!

I love book lists!

I don't know a lot about Kumon. I do know that The Boy loooooved Kumon's My First Book of Cutting when we were doing preschool.

And I learned today that Kumon has free downloadable reading lists. I love a good book list, people! There are some great books on these lists. For example, Level 2A includes Penguin, which is one of my favorite children's books ever.

I can't wait to check out the ones I haven't read yet.

Do you guys have any good sources for book lists? I have a billion of them bookmarked, and I know that we probably couldn't even read all of them in our lifetime--but I just love them so.

Learning to Play and Playing to Learn

This is what part of our school day has looked like for the past several days:

And it's awesome. The Boy loves building with LEGOs, and I love seeing how his creations evolve. He learns so much from those little blocks.

When I try to build with LEGOs, all I get is a headache. The Boy can build for hours because he loves it--that's how his brain works. I'm a firm believer that every child has an interest (or two or ten...) that lights them up, and that as parents and teachers, one of the most important things we can do for a child is to let them pursue that passion.

And yes, we still read and do chores and go outside each day. It's not all LEGOs all the time around here, although I'm sure The Boy would be all for that.

Kindergarten is Done!

Sort of.

What I really mean to say is, "We did kindergarten for 36 weeks! Yay!" A typical school year is 180 days, or 36 weeks, of school. How a homeschool family divides that up depends on their situation; for us, we school year round with a roughly three-weeks-on/one-week-off schedule. That might change, but it works for now.

Like I wrote in this post, we didn't magically finish all of our kindergarten stuff at once. (We did have a pizza party, though!) And that's okay with me. It's actually worked out pretty well, since it's left us with plenty of material to work with until we get all of our first-grade curriculum assembled.

I didn't take any cute photos of The Boy holding a "Last Day of Kinder!" sign. There probably won't be any cute scrapbook pages made about it. All I have is this photo of a mess:

...from when I was sorting through all the kindergarten "stuff." We didn't even use a lot of what's pictured, but like I said, we're using it now. (Because I paid good money for it, dang it!)

One year--thirty-six weeks of school time--boggles my mind a little bit. (Don't laugh at me, homeschool veterans!) This has been a crazy, unexpected, sometimes hard, sometimes awesome journey. Thanks for reading along--your comments online and in real life have meant a lot to me.

So...let's keep moving forward! I'm excited to see what the next year brings, and I'm excited to share it with you here.

Kindergarten Art: Playdough Bugs!

[This project was inspired by these Play Dough Bug Sculptures.]

We were learning about bugs a couple weeks ago--you know, head, thorax, abdomen, that kind of thing--so I thought we ought to do something buggy for our art project at the end of the week. Thanks to Pinterest, I found something SUPER easy and open-ended.

Here are our materials:

You can use whatever you've got around the house.

And here's one of my first bugs. As we all know, I'm really good at lots of intricate details and stuff.

Not. But at least he's cute, right?

The Boy spent most of his time on this Dangerous Bug:

I would die if I ever saw a bug like this in real life.

We also made some ladybugs, a caterpillar, tons of made-up bugs...we tried a butterfly, too, but it just looked lopsided and weird. Oh, well. I guess that's why God makes bugs, and we don't.

Anyway, we didn't do anything scientific or overly realistic with this. Just fun with odds and ends. It was a good wrap-up for our buggy week.