Internet Detox – what I’ve learned

Well, I am still having computer-email-internet-wireless trouble.  Over the past 1 1/2 weeks it has gone from pretty bad to worse, to much worse, and then back to just pretty bad again. :)  I am waiting for our ISP to send us a new router and then my sweet husband will set that up, hopefully with no trouble, and I’ll be up and running again!

I have learned a few things during this unexpected detox period:

1. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
2. When one is in a state of frustration, it’s generally not the right time to go around pushing the factory “reset” button on every piece of computer hardware within one’s reach. 
3. Especially if one doesn’t know exactly how to reconfigure everything (see number 1 above).
4. Sometimes I mentally narrate the inanities of my life in facebook speak. This annoys me.
5. I do still know how to look up information with a real dictionary and/or encyclopedia.
6. Somehow not having internet access for a few days makes my house cleaner. 
7. Email can be ignored and the world will not fall apart.
8. Reading a book, sewing jammies and new pants for a sweet boy, making a new wreath for our home, going out with girlfriends, and singing Yankee Doodle over and over and over again with a 4 year old are all pretty nice ways of spending my time.
9. If no one is reading what I am writing, it helps me remember that I enjoy writing just for the sake of writing.
10. If I write blog posts away from an internet connection (thank you, Windows Live Writer), they get finished much more quickly, and I can write 5 posts in one evening.  (It has something to do with not playing sudoku and numbrix online between paragraphs.)

For the time being, I’m hooking myself up to our beast of a computer and scheduling out about a gazillion posts that I’ve written on Live Writer over the past week. :)  And then I’m going to go sing Yankee Doodle with M one more time.

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

2010 Homeschool Blog Awards

Well, here I am again. :)  If you’ve seen my most recent post (besides this one) you know only one thing could get me to use our old dinosaur of a computer to blog… Tired, Need Sleep has been nominated in one of the 2010 Homeschool Blog Awards categories!  (Thank you to whoever nominated me – how sweet, and I really appreciate it!)  You’ll find my blog in the Best Crafts, Plans and Projects category, along with many, many wonderful blogs that really deserve to win.  Honestly, I can’t imagine trying to decide between all of them, they are all fantastic, and so diverse.  If you’d like to vote, click the link above or the image at the top of this post!
Have a beautiful day! :)
 

Take a deep breath...

This is what I keep telling myself.  I am having trouble with our wireless connection and seriously, it may never be resolved.  I think the fact that this is causing real anxiety for me may indicate my level of addiction, um, attachment to, uh, affection for my laptop.  

Because I refuse to use the enormous, rumbling, ancient, time-wasting beast we refer to as our home pc to blog, I won't be on here much for a while.  Hopefully this won't turn into forever!  I'll be checking my email once or twice a day, but that's all I can stomach with this thing.  So there you have it.

Wish me luck!  I'll be back as soon as I can!

Science Time – Celery and how Water moves through Plants

We’ve been talking a lot about leaves, trees, and plants, with interest being spurred on naturally what with all the fall going on lately. ;)

So, to add to our talks about how plants need water and how they obtain it and circulate it throughout the plant, we did a fun, quick, and fairly painless little experiment with celery.

If you want to do this, you will need a stalk of celery with leaves on it, a knife, a glass, a sunny window, water, and red food coloring. 

Make a fresh cut on the celery stalk and put it in a glass of water.  Add a few drops of red food coloring and stir it up with the celery.

Set your celery experiment in front of a sunny window (not sure this is necessary, but we did it this way) for a few hours or overnight if your child is more patient than mine.

Take the celery out of the water when you see the leaves have little red spots on them like this:M checked on it to see if it was “ready” or not several times throughout the day.

Then we sliced off a piece of the stem and took a look:You can see the “tubes” in the stalk of celery worked like straws and sucked the water up and into the leaves. 

We worked with our leaf nomenclature cards on the same day, and learned that the little tubes in the leaves are called veins.

For more science fun, check out Science Sunday!

Have a beautiful day! :)

Learning by Heart – Week 5

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

We are finally getting into our “rhythm” here, and it feels so great!  I’ve lightened up my own load by deciding to only do preschool activities 2 to 3 days of the week, and to do them in the mornings, which is key for us.  We are both more enthusiastic about this kind of thing in the morning, rather than in the afternoon after being busy all day.  We’ve established a sort of schedule that is really working for us.  I hesitate to use the word “schedule”… The idea of a schedule can feel stifling and for many of us just leads to feeling more pressure.  That’s not at all what I’m talking about – I want to free up time and energy and feel less stress!  Really what we are trying to do is establish good habits that make it easier for us to use our time wisely.   More on this in an upcoming post!

For now, on to what we accomplished this week:

SHELF ACTIVITIES:

D and E items for our phonics box:

dragonfly, diamond, dog, duck
(oops!  somehow only the D items made it into the photo.)

Letter Crafts:

I continue to make and print out a quick sample of the letter crafts for M to “read” and make on his own.  I do believe interest in these is waning though, so in a couple of weeks we may take a little break from these.

D is for Dragon (from No Time for Flashcards).

d is for door (from No Time for Flashcards).  Open it up to see…dots!

 

E is for Elephant (from Totally Tots).

e is for egg (from Totally Tots).
There are so many great sites out there for letter crafts, and it’s hard to think of something original.  Next week, however, I hope to have a couple of new ideas, so stay tuned!

Tonging marbles onto Dinosaur suction cups:

Dropping water into Dinosaur suction cups with a pipette: the object of this was to drop just one drop of water into each little suction cup, then use the sponge to suck the water up.  This is a very Montessori-type activity, and a great explanation of how to set it up is here.

 

Play dough and Jolanthe’s great letter mats: I recently ran across these letter mats for play dough too; I really like them, but already had the ones pictured printed out.  I think I’ll be able to use both sets for different activities.

Whiteboard letter practice:

Using Wikki Stix to form letters:

 

Sand tray with pipecleaner letters:

 

Scissor practice pages: The stickers are there to guide him and help him stay on the line.  This is way too easy for M now (he’s been using safety scissors since he was just under 2 years old).  He did one page, then wasn’t interested.  I think I need to find something a bit more challenging in this area.  He used to really enjoy these; if you are interested in them, you can find them here.

I put out some sunflowers (from Michael’s – on sale!) for M to add to his autumn leaf arrangement.  I’m amazed at how much fun it can be to stick things into a block of foam.  The result is really beautiful (see photo at the top of this post).

 

 Making Mr. Pumpkin Heads:    I wrote about these in this post, and M enjoyed making them SO much.  It was the first thing he went for the morning I put them out, and they are all hanging in his bedroom.   Last night he asked me to make more of these for him to do – I think it would be fun to try with turkeys for Thanksgiving, don’t you? :)

 

 TOGETHER ACTIVITIES: 

 Tic Tac Toe: After seeing Jolanthe’s cute-as-a-button fridge tic tac toe game (here), I got out our tic tac toe game that I made last year (free printable!) and made it into a magnet game for our fridge.  I wish I would’ve gotten some action shots, because M loved playing this game!  After a few games he was really beginning to strategize, which kind of surprised me.  We’ll be leaving this up for a while!

While I was adding magnets to things, I decided to make his name leaves magnetic too and now they are on the fridge too.  M wasn’t too interested in placing them in order, but I like how they look so they’ll be staying up too. :)

Exercise:

Since E was one of our letters for the week, I thought exercise would be a good thing to add into our week.  Honestly, I need to start making this part of our regular routine, for my sake as well as M’s!  We have a Bobby Susser cd titled, “Wiggle Wiggle and Other Exercises ".  It is so much fun, and a great addition to our days.  I plan to find a variety of cds like this, or just come up with ideas, and plan some sort of exercise each day.  M doesn’t really need this, but somebody else sure does!   

                                      Twisting and wiggling away

Marching in a circle with his hands on his head
(actions for one of the songs)

 

Math:

My big plans for math have been kind of a flop lately.  The bead bars just don’t engage M like I’d hoped.  I’m disappointed because I think the Montessori method with the bead bars and number boards makes so much sense, but it seems to only confuse M and he’s not interested in sitting and listening to me say the same thing over and over or watching me do the activity first. 

It seems to me that before we start looking at how and why the teens, twenties, and so on have two digits and what each place value is, M just wants to count.  He just wants to know the numbers and their order before we go any further.  So we’ve been doing a lot of counting (more on this next week), and I decided to make an activity that engages his whole mind and body, and ended up creating a number line game.   We played it for the first time this week.  It is very active, and a lot of fun.  I hope to give it its own post sometime soon (a printable will be included!):

Science:

We’ve been talking a lot about leaves lately, so we pulled out the leaf nomenclature cards and M matched the parts up.  He really loves this type of activity for some reason (partly because the black and white pictures with only one portion colored are interesting, and partly because he pretends he can read the big words :) ), so I hope to make more some time soon.We also did a science experiment related to this with celery, which will be in a post on Sunday. :)

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

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Advent 2010 – Printable Ornaments and Prayers

***NOTE*** THIS POST WAS WRITTEN FOR ADVENT OF 2010.  FOR A CURRENT JESSE TREE FILE (2011), PLEASE SEE THIS POST.

November is here!  While we are getting ready for Thanksgiving, it’s a great time to remember that Advent is just around the corner!

A photo of our Jesse Tree last year.
Apparently it’s fun to place ornaments in the “sky” too! ;)

Last year I wrote a bit about what a Jesse Tree is and how we use it in our observance of Advent each year.  You can read that post here.  I can’t say enough wonderful things about how using a Jesse Tree has added a sense of hope, expectation, focus, and peace to our home during Advent.  It is one of those things that “work” even better than I had first hoped.  I find myself wanting to share this with everyone I know and am always encouraging other families to adopt the Jesse Tree as an annual tradition in their homes.

The Jesse Tree is a way of seeing God’s love for us and His plan for salvation as shown throughout history.  It is basically one Bible story per night, beginning with creation and ending with the birth of Jesus – a way of waiting and hoping for Christmas, and really living Advent by focusing our hearts on what Christmas is truly all about. 

Each Bible story is accompanied by a symbol taken from the story which is made into an ornament for the Jesse Tree.   Each evening the Bible story is read (directly from Scripture, or for younger children you may want to use a Children’s Bible), and the ornament for the day is placed on the tree. 

The name “Jesse Tree” comes from Isaiah, chapter 11, which says:

“But a shoot shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, and from his roots a bud shall blossom. The spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him: a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, A spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the LORD, and his delight shall be the fear of the LORD. Not by appearance shall he judge, nor by hearsay shall he decide, But he shall judge the poor with justice, and decide aright for the land's afflicted. He shall strike the ruthless with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall slay the wicked. Justice shall be the band around his waist, and faithfulness a belt upon his hips. Then the wolf shall be a guest of the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; The calf and the young lion shall browse together, with a little child to guide them. The cow and the bear shall be neighbors, together their young shall rest; the lion shall eat hay like the ox. The baby shall play by the cobra's den, and the child lay his hand on the adder's lair.” – verses 1-8

Many people use a large branch placed in a pot of dirt to hang their ornaments on.  Some use a miniature artificial Christmas tree.  We use a simple felt Christmas tree, tacked onto our flannelboard.  Our ornaments are made from felt also (decorated with markers and glitter glue).

In the attached printable below, I’ve included the ornaments that we use.  If these do not appeal to you there are numerous others you can find by doing a simple Google search.  I chose these for their simplicity – young children can color or paint them, or they can be used as a design for felt ornaments like our family has done.  (Some of these were designed by myself, and as far as I can tell the others are all public domain images.)

I’ve also included the prayer cards that I made for our family, with the Scripture reference for the day printed on it, the ornament of the day, and a short prayer.  There is also a simple word or phrase to meditate on for each day, which oftentimes leads to a nice family discussion about the beauties of our faith.

To simplify things a bit, many families begin their Jesse Tree on Dec. 1st and finish on Dec. 24th, and therefore have the same ornaments and Bible stories on the same days every year.  We do things a bit differently, and try to begin our Jesse Tree on the actual first day of Advent.  Since this date varies from year to year, the number of ornaments and the order of Bible stories changes a bit.   I’ve included a schedule of dates, ornaments, and readings specific to this year’s Advent season.  (If you want to do this, and have any questions, please feel free to email me or leave a comment with your specific question.  I’ll do my best to give you a good answer!)

2010 Jesse Tree Packet:
We also have a little felt Jesus doll and a “manger” (for a tutorial, see here).  M puts a piece of yarn “hay” in the manger each evening as we end our Jesse Tree time, and we say simply, “Come Baby Jesus, be born in our hearts.”  On Christmas Eve he places the felt baby Jesus in the manger on his soft bed of hay.  So sweet.

It’s a beautiful and meaningful tradition, and if you haven’t done a Jesse Tree in the past, I hope you’ll try it this Advent!  If you have had a Jesse Tree in the past, leave a comment and let us know the impact it had on your family’s Advent!

I am linking this post up to Kylie's blog:


Have a beautiful day! :)

The Art Box – Nov. 1, 2010

M’s love for drawing has really taken off lately, and I’m enjoying seeing all the interesting things he makes.  Smiley faces and hearts are prevalent right now, but he also throws in a car here and there, or sometimes he draws an entire story.  Being 4 is amazing! :)

I’m guessing smiles and hearts are a way of saying he’s happy. :)

He continues to gather leaves and make leaf people… or leaf creatures like these guys: 

A “pom pom boat in the water”:

A “pom pom duck in the water”:

M in the swimming pool at a hotel with his float ring on, and a woman coming in at the door (we were at a hotel recently where M had an exceptional amount of fun in the pool):

A “car on a road on a hill”, with smiley faces on the wheels: 

M and his cousin S:

My favorite of the week – Daddy swinging M, while a mommy mouse kisses her baby mouse; it even shows M’s slide and ladder:

Have any children’s art work you’d like to share?  Link it up below!  Remember to link back here somewhere in your post!

Have a beautiful day! :)

 

Learning by Heart – week 4

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

This was supposed to be our Review-and-Catch-Up Week (yes, in capital letters), so I didn’t have many activities planned.  I wanted to use the time to plan activities for the weeks to come, but that didn’t really happen.  I’m learning that it’s more normal to have things not work out as expected than it is to have things go according to plan. :)

I set out some easy, no-prep shelf activities for M to choose from throughout the week, giving myself a huge break from planning and prepping our normal variety of activities:

Top Shelf – Guidecraft Feel & Find, small set of Magz, and our Wedgits:

Second Shelf – Lite Brite, Hammering Shapes, and a card game from M’s High Five magazine (on top of his work mat):

Third Shelf – See & Spell, M’s Collage and Trace ABC Book, a whiteboard and a little whiteboard ABC book (Target Dollar Spot!):

No photo of the bottom shelf – it held M’s Thomas the Train engines and track pieces, as well as his flannelboard sets which are there pretty much all the time. 

M chose each activity several times throughout the week, but the definite favorites were the Hammering Shapes and the Wedgits.  He worked very hard, with a specific design in mind, as he hammered in the little nails (more like tacks, definitely something that should be supervised, but lots of fun!). 

He made this boat scene, with the moon rising at night and the sun setting (I’m just telling you what was told to me):

The Wedgits are always a ton of fun, and M’s cousin S got in on the action too – she really loved them (despite the blank look on her face in this picture).  There’s a two year age difference between these two, so it’s good to know that they’ll still be interesting to M when he’s older!

I found an extra little fine motor activity for him at Target – these cute containers and some rub-on transfers (for scrapbooking or similar hobbies):He really enjoyed decorating the little boxes with “tatoos”, and loved placing each one where he wanted it and then rubbing it on with the little craft stick. Those little fingers got a good workout!
I learned this week that regardless of what I do or don’t do, M will learn.  In fact, it would take purposeful actions on my part to keep him from learning… he just learns.  That’s what he does.  When he is interested in something it’s almost impossible to keep him from learning.  This week, in which I did nothing in the way of preschool with him, he taught himself.  He taught himself all seven letters of his name and how to write them, using an uppercase ‘M’, then lowercase letters for the rest.  He also taught himself how to measure by building Wedgit towers and then measuring them with the little tape measure from my sewing basket.  Both of these things were initiated by him; he set out to learn how to do them, and mastered both skills by week’s end. 

He should be teaching me!

I guess he is. :)

To see some of our Halloween-themed activities, see this post from earlier this week.

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

Have a beautiful day! :)