Madeline

The last book that we rowed with our friends was Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans. Madeline is about a young girl who lives in a boarding school in France. She has to have an emergency appendectomy and all of her friends get to visit her in the hospital. It is such a great book and we had a lot of fun with our activities. Here are the things we did:

Read Madeline

Played Madeline's house board gameWorked on symmetry by having the girls finish the rest of the pictures. I got this idea and most of our activities from Five In A Row's website under the message board. There are so many great ideas on there!They colored a Madeline picture that I printed from herepainted Madeline hats that I made out of plates. I got the idea from here but I used Styrofoam and the paint just peeled right off. Oops!
Some of the other activities that we did were:

Watched a Madeline movie, watched this hospital tour on You Tube (over and over), played doctor, made crepes which surprisingly the girls didn't love, and read Big and Busy Body book. This is a fun interactive book that we read quite often! The girls favorite activity was building the Eiffel Tower out of wafer cookies. I copied the idea from this post on Walking By the Way blog. She has wonderful FIAR ideas!! I started helping the girls build the tower but it kept falling. Luckily, dad came to the rescue and the girls were SO proud!!! Not proud enough not to devour it though:)

Halloween

We go to the library about every two weeks and when we get back we always have a tea party with our new books. The girls look so forward to this and so do I! Since it was going to be the last day to read our Halloween books before I pack them away we decided to have a tea party after lunch with our books and instead of tea I put dry ice in green punch to make a "special potion".
Soon after it was time for trick or treating. Ellie was a queen and Emily was a princess. I love this picture because Emily just noticed Ellie's hot pink eye shadow and told Ellie how beautiful it wasto which Ellie responded by giving her a kiss. It was so sweet especially since they were just fighting 5 minutes before! I just can't believe I actually captured pictures of it!

Tot School

~Emily is 34 months old~

Emily's 1st week back to Tot School after taking a few weeks off went great! Here is what she was up to:

Matching Pumpkin Faces

I think I printed this from here but I can't remember for sure:(

Acorn sizing printed from here. I didn't think she would be able to do this correctly but she did fantastic!

We all made toilet paper monsters. I got the idea from No Time For Flashcards.

Read lots of books

Tracing shapes

Drawing in her workbook (Still one of her favorite activities)

Adding letters to our coconut tree

Using pattern blocks

Stacking and knocking down our Curious George blocks

and making peg castles

That wraps up our week!

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.