I'm Back

I have had computer problems so I haven't been able to be on the computer much but we have been keeping busy as always! We started back to school after taking a few weeks off and although we all enjoyed the break we were all excited about starting back. I haven't made many changes to our curriculum but I have added themes back into our school weeks. Ellie is still trucking along with:

Explode the Code - Book 1

Math U See Primer

Happy Phonics - Still one of Ellie's favorites

Handwriting Without Tears

Learn to Read 100 Easy Lessons - Ellie's reading is really taking off

Five In A Row - I will blog soon about the last book we rowed

Our themes we will be working on the next 8 weeks are:

finishing up Halloween, scarecrows, turkeys, the book There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed a Pie, Thanksgiving and Christmas

I am also making circle time a priority because we slowly stopped incorporating it. I got motivated after reading this post by My Montessori Journey. The girls LOVE circle time so I don't know why I let it fall to the way side.

Home From the Mountains

We just got back from a wonderful trip to the mountains with my sister and her family! We were there for 4 days and the weather couldn’t have been more perfect!! We had such a great time and other than a few sleeping issues with Emily I wouldn’t have a changed a thing:)

 

   

How To Make An Apple Pie and See The World

 

Several weeks ago we started Five In A Row. It is such a great and fun curriculum where they have picked good quality books and you do several activities like math, geography, art etc. using the theme of the book. The Five In A Row curriculum has great ideas but I also love to supplement with Home School Share and Five In A Row’s Forum. Several weeks ago we rowed How To Make An Apple Pie and See The World with our friends. I also incorporated some activities with our workboxes the next week. How To Make An Apple Pie is about a girl who wants to make an apple pie and so she travels the world to pick up different ingredients.

Here is what we did:

Read the story

Found the different countries on the globe

Listened to an apple felt story (basically I told the story and they put the pieces on the board)

  

Apple Tasting. I made a chart with 4 different types of apples listed and a yes and no column. Each of the girls tasted the apples and came and marked whether or not they liked the apple. Then they each ate one! They loved this!

We painted apples that I traced on a brown paper bag (both front and back), cut them out, stapled the pieces together and stuffed them with toilet paper. I can’t remember where I got this idea. Sorry!

Made apples out of paper plates by cutting pieces of red construction paper and gluing it and then adding a stem and leaf. I got the idea from My Montessori Journey.

Colored flags from each of the countries that she visited in the book. I printed them from Homeschool Share. We are keeping everything in a binder.

We made mini apple pies. Basically we took crescent roll dough, put a dollop of apple pie filling in the center, baked them and topped with ice cream.

We weighed, measured and answered questions about apples. We filled out the results on this sheet:

We cut out pictures of new vocabulary words from the book and glued them by the words. I printed the pictures from Homeschool Share. I didn’t know how much Ellie was paying attention to the new words but she asked me to coax Emily to go back to bed one day. I was so proud:)

     

We went apple picking and had so much fun not to mention we brought home a ton of apples. I made cinnamon applesauce, unsweetened apple sauce, mini apple pies, apple chips, and apple butter. We also munched on quite a few.

After each book we will put a mark on our world map showing where we visited. Even though we visited a lot of different places we put our first mark on Vermont, where the girl in the story picked up the apples.

 

Edible Acorns

The girls and I made edible acorns for our family bible study night. They were so easy, so cute and so yummy! The best part is we had fun making them.  I found the idea on the Family Fun website. All you do is put chocolate icing on the top of a doughnut hole than roll the icing in crushed pretzels and add a small little pretzel on the top. Poor Emily didn’t actually get to taste hers because she wouldn’t eat her veggies at dinner but we enjoyed them.

Tot School

~Emily is 34 months old~

We had such a great week of school this week. Emily loved adding in some fall activities!

Hammering golf tees into egg carton

 

Playing with wiki sticks

 

Using dropper to put water into tray (she didn’t enjoy this as much as I thought she would)

Spooning acorns and pumpkins into pumpkin ice tray and putting stickers on paper

Playing with plastic shapes and painting Halloween picture

Making a scarecrow to match the picture. She loved this activity!! I printed it from Kidssoup. It is a paid membership but worth every penny.

That pretty much wraps up our 6th week of school!

Countdown to Halloween

Our family just loves fall and all of the fun activities that happen during this time of year like fall festivals, going to the pumpkin patch, the leaves changing colors, the fair and of course trick or treating.  This year I thought it would be fun this year to make a calendar to countdown to Halloween. I loved the one I saw here so I made my own version. I took little colored envelopes I found in the teacher section of the Dollar Tree and glued them to black poster board and added cut outs, stickers etc. to decorate them. I will put a long black slip of paper in each one of our activity for the day.

Some of my ideas so far:

Paint a pumpkin, make goop, go to pumpkin patch, carve pumpkin, go to the zoo, family Halloween/dress up party, make candy apples, various Halloween/Fall crafts, walking in the woods, Halloween movie night, the fair, and that is about all I have for now. I plan on getting all of the slips of paper filled out and put in this afternoon. What fun things do you have planned for October?