Learning by Heart – Week 3

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”

- Henry Ward Beecher

I don’t know if we just got off to a rotten start with school (sick the first week, funeral and lots of other activity the following two weeks), or what, but I can’t seem to get anything I’ve planned to do with M actually done.  

I’ve got to re-think our schedule a bit, I think.  I know I’d be more enthusiastic about it if our time was in the mornings; however, we are busy with other things 3 to 4 mornings a week.  And at least 2 (maybe all 4) of these are things neither one of us wants to give up.  But school in the afternoon when my level of fatigue is at its highest (my blog isn’t titled that just for fun!), just is. not. working.  Thank goodness we are only talking preschool here, but still.  Why is it every thing we want to participate in is held in the mornings?  It would be great if we could break up our afternoons with some of these outings instead.  It would be perfect, actually, and I guess that’s just asking too much.  ;)

Ah well, if nothing else, at least the shelf activities were not overlooked.  So on we go…

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

Craft punches (leaf and frog) with strips of paper.  Each paper has a number on it and M punched out that many shapes on each one.  Craft punches are always a hit around here:

Biggie fuse beads and patterns:

A sand art activity – fill small containers with a spoon and funnel:The results:  

A “rubber band-jo”, hee hee.  I thought of that myself, but I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one – it just begs to be called that, doesn’t it?I wish I would’ve gotten some action shots with this – M loved playing with it.  We talked about how the rubber bands vibrate over the space below to make music; you can actually see them vibrating, which was neat.  We also talked about “plucking” and “strumming”.  And we listened for low notes and high notes.  M commandeered this to go with his other instruments, so it looks like yours truly needs to buy a new bread pan. :)

 

Sensory activity with sandpaper cards.  I cut out 6 pieces of sandpaper - 2 each of a rough grade, a medium grade, and a fine grade – and we took turns trying to match the pairs by touch alone.  The matching pairs had the same sticker on the back as a control of error.  M really enjoyed this and I found him doing it on his own a few times throughout the week.

Leaf arranging – a wooden bowl, a small block of florist’s foam and some silk leaves.  I bought a couple of bunches on clearance at Michael’s and separated the stems with wire cutters. This was the big hit of the week.  M wanted to do this over and over.  Now, I don’t necessarily think leaf (or flower) arranging is a skill he absolutely must have, but the attention to detail, the fine motor workout, and the appreciation of something beautiful (and the work needed to make it beautiful) are all very, very good things!  And look how pretty it turned out! Well, it’s pretty in real life, not at all blurry like in the photo. ;)

Matching up numbers 1 to 15 with squirrels and acorns.  I think I found this printable here, but have had it now for a couple of years, so it may not be available any longer.  The acorns have magnets on the backs, hence the cookie sheet:

 

Lacing craft leaves onto a ribbon, from here.  I sewed a button on each end of the ribbon and cut slits in the leaves.  The clips are for hanging it on his art string.  I took a picture of it hanging, but it seems to have disappeared.

  

It was “C” week, so some C items for the phonic box – cow, car, camel, circle:

We’ve been doing simple crafts for each letter.  M is not much into mama-directed crafts, but he is really, really into looking at something and then re-creating it on his own.  So I make up a small copy of what it should look like and he goes for it.  :)  

C is for caterpillar (idea from here, although I just cut my own circles):

c is for cars:

We put these in our ABC Collage and Trace book, which he is absolutely loving.

Here’s a sample of how he “reads” it on his own.  He sat down one evening and did the entire book!  His voice is not very loud, so you have to listen closely.

Other than that, not much school has been going on.  Oh, except for a lot of this:

Because if you’ve already dragged the cushions to the floor you might as well jump on them until Mommy comes in.  So, he’s getting his exercise – that’s homeschooling, isn’t it? ;)  Homeschooling and regular life look a lot alike, come to think of it, don’t they?

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!


Have a beautiful day! :)
 

Learning by Heart – week 2 (part 2, where we actually do school stuff)

“The mother’s heart is the child’s schoolroom”
-Henry Ward Beecher

Thank you so much to everyone who had title suggestions for me last week.  You are all so creative and brilliant. :)  I’m going with the above for now (not sold on it 100%, but it’s definitely growing on me).

We’ve had another not-normal week, because Daddy has a lot of vacation time to use up and was home quite a bit (we celebrated both of our birthdays too).  It is wonderful to have him home, don’t get me wrong, but part of me would like to have a chance to settle into a normal routine for a week or two – to help figure out housework, outings, and “doing school”, as M says.  Since we are just doing preschool, it’s not that big of a deal, just something I have to be patient about (and obviously I need to work on just enjoying having our whole family together).  That said, I have a question for those of you homeschool mamas who are more experienced and have older children.  If your husband works odd hours or is home quite a bit, does it affect your homeschool routine?  And if so, is it affected in a good way, or is it something you struggle with?  What have you done to ensure school work gets done, as well as other responsibilities?  Maybe not everyone is a routine-and-schedule-lover like me, and I do need to learn some flexibility, but it’s something I can see becoming a stress factor for me if I were to homeschool M in the future.  Any thoughts about this are very much appreciated!

On to what we accomplished…

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

Tweezing felt autumn-themed stickers (Target, dollar spot!) into the slot of a little treasure box.

 

Our homemade build-a-letter set, lowercase version:

I used glitter foam for the pieces, which made it a bit more inviting for M, who does like him a little bling:

Uppercase version too, in gold glitter foam ;) :

Hit of the week – rubbing plates for B and b, and objects that begin with ‘b’:

He did this over and over.  He loved using the double stick tape to stick the card to the mini clipboard.  Then he used a brown or blue crayon to rub over the picture:

Here’s a sampling.  They really turned out great, and we had many of these little guys by the end of the week:Clockwise, from upper left – B, b, bumblebee, bus, bird with a balloon.  I made the ‘B’ and ‘b’ and bus from rough sandpaper, and the others were pictures found online; I simply went over the lines with hot glue.  I’m sure regular glue would work too.

Button board, to work those fine motor skills:

Stick puppets for the poems 5 Little Squirrels and 5 Little Owls:

Our puppet theater is simply a tension rod in a doorway with a blanket thrown over it:

Autumn-themed play dough number mats with autumn colored play dough, made with cinnamon, mmm:

These were a pretty big hit too!

Letter leaves to clip and spell M’s name* (with a “cheat sheet” for him to look at):*I know just about everyone knows M’s name is Matthew.  It’s not something I’ve tried to hide… I only use his initial because I am just too darn lazy to spell his name out all the time.  I’m wordy (in case you haven’t noticed!) and there’s enough typing going on here as it is…

 

M’s first weaving lesson, which was also a big hit now that I think of it.  I used a foam bowl that once held mushrooms, and threaded yarn through it to make the warp.  I looked for more “manly” ribbons, but what you see is all I had.  M didn’t seem to mind. ;)

M played with his KID K'NEX , making creations while actually looking at the “constructions” and figuring out how to make each one.  This is not an easy task because the pictures show the finished product, which means M had to use reasoning skills to figure out what to do first, second, and so on.  And sometimes he had to guess at what kind of connector was used.  He did great and was SO proud of himself!

 

Together Activities:

New ‘B’ objects for the phonics box – blue bird, brown button, bead, blue bear button, bear, bumblebee, boat, boy, bunny, bird:

We took out all the ‘A’ and ‘B’ objects and M sorted them into two groups by beginning sound:

 

More work with the bead bars.  This time we added in the number cards and introduced the golden bead bar for #10.  M is itching to really learn how the whole teen and twenties (and so on) thing works, I’m just waiting for him to become more familiar with the color of the beads for each number, since that plays such a big role in this method.  He’s playing around a lot with “twenty-teen” and “eighty-teen” and that kind of thing when he counts, so I know he’s curious and trying to figure it all out. :)

 

I’ve had these sand art color by number kits around for ages.  M doesn’t have the fine motor control to really do color or paint by number activities, but this was perfect!  I used old peanut butter lids to hold the sand and he peeled off the pieces for each number, then pinched a little sand in the correct color and sprinkled it on.  He LOVED this activity!  I got this at Michael’s for $1.00, I think.  I’ve linked the text above to some similar kits on Amazon.

Close up of him working.  If you haven’t seen these before, you peel off each section and the sand sticks to the sticky surface underneath.

In the end, you have these pretties, though not so blurry as my bad photo-taking skills make them out to be:It was a great activity for numeral review and fine motor skills.

 

And then one day when Mommy was awfully busy, he came up with his own little activity.  A car wash with soapy water and an old toothbrush.  He spent over an hour washing all of his little cars!                               

Just having fun…

The newest member of our family is this super cute scarecrow, who is supposed to keep the deer away from our garden, but isn’t quite living up to our expectations.  Ah well, he’s cute, and very loved by someone in particular:

 

AND LASTLY…

We’ve been having gorgeous weather here, exactly like October should be!  We are loving it.  I thought I’d share pics from our favorite walking trail along the creek near our home.

Sunlight hitting the tips of prairie grass.

my boys :)
  There’s a lot of yellow, red, and brown this time of year, but somehow my camera was attracted to the pretty greens that still remain. ;)

Playing “Pooh Sticks”

I love the cool blue of the autumn sky next
to the yellow tips of the tall trees.     

I’m linking this post up to Preschool Corner and Weekly Wrap-Up; be sure to check them out!

Have a beautiful day! :)