Continuing on in our Superheros theme for August with Mother Goose Time, today we finished our personal superhero apparel as we counted down the hours for the solar eclipse. Still enjoying the casual schedule of summer, we haven’t made much progress yet into this month’s theme as of yet, so the kids were excited when I pulled out the box this morning.
On the docket today, Capes, Masks, and Belts. I didn’t realize until I started this post that we were having so much fun today, I forgot to take pictures of their work in progress, so I’ll highlight what we were focusing on!
Play Story Prompt: Wear the cape and find something safe to jump off.
Create a story about flying. (I didn’t even read this, but you know this was already happening.)
Play Challenge Prompt: Experiment by throwing different objects in the air.
Which items float and which fall quickly to the ground.
(Again, you can pretty much find this happening any day of the week around here, no instruction necessary.)
One highlight of Day 4’s Mask theme was the book recommendation, You Are Special by Max Lucado. This was already one of our favorites (I’m not sure why we don’t own it yet?), but this time around we got to introduce it to Daddy-man. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend it! The video is posted below! Great message about allowing God to define our worth and the importance of meeting with Him daily.
Here is my superhero crew!
I also wanted to make sure I included this month’s book, Super Friends! Each month, Mother Goose Time includes a book related to the theme, which we love to pull out early in the month to start enjoying.
Meet our characters, Ally, Billy, and Cody.
They have superpowers!
Our conflict arises!
The climax continues to mount!
Yep. I’m going to leave you with a cliffhanger folks. But not to worry, there is a happy ending.
More Superhero fun to come!
As an official Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador, I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum. Click here for more information on Mother Goose Time.
September will start a new school year for us, with Natalie (“The Sweetness”) starting second grade (what?!) and Peter (Little Prince) starting 4K. We are eager to get into a new routine, and by we, I mean me, the structured, task-oriented, lover of plans and routines.
We will be continuing My Father’s World with Natalie, starting Adventures in U.S. History, their second grade curriculum. We have been through My Father’s World Kindergarten and First Grade curriculum so far and have enjoyed it, so we’re looking forward to seeing what this year holds!
And Mr. Peterman, who turned four in March, will be ready to start a more structured program as well! Up to this point, he has tagged along with us when it made sense (or really, more like when it interested him), but this year we will be working alongside each other (fingers crossed) and getting used to a whole new flow. Prayers appreciated!
Over the summer, we started Mother Goose Time, a Pre-K curriculum that we enjoyed when Natalie was Peter’s age, and that he even tagged along with quite a bit even as a little Little Prince.
Here are some adorable blasts from the past!
(You can see here our handy-dandy manipulative rolling drawer cart. This is our old house in GA, where we primarily did our schooling in the kitchen, and so we kept all our monthly math manipulatives readily accessible for them to pull out throughout the day, for free play and school-related activities. We still have the same system, although I may need to invest in a second cart soon! We just now thankfully have a curriculum closet right next to our dining room table, so the kiddos can easily still snag them when they want to, but I can also close the door and provide some boundaries for us from our focused “school” time.)
We loved how hands-on the activities were back then and I really felt like it would be a great fit now to introduce Peter to a more structured routine as we prepare for Kindergarten next year (wiping away a tear).
The past 3 months have been a lot of fun, as we have had a pretty casual approach to the curriculum, enjoying a leisurely summer while still trying to get Peter accustomed to sitting a little bit longer at the table with us for school time. Both kids have enjoyed really just engaging with the curriculum, crafting and creating and building off each other’s ideas.
This September’s theme will be My Amazing Body, and so I wanted to share a little bit about that, but primarily focus on what we will be using for Peter’s first Bible curriculum (eek, so excited!)!
So I’ll do a quick overview of some of the resources in the Teacher’s Tool Bag this month so you’ll see some of the new stuff!
Here is our theme web for September, revealing that we will be focusing on Body Parts, the Five Senses, Staying Healthy, and Clothing. And since we have been making strides as a family this year to learn more about nutrition and being better stewards of our bodies, I’m excited that this will go hand in hand with what we are learning “outside school time” so to speak. And as we continue on what will be our third year of homeschooling, I’m learning that it’s all “school time” when you homeschool. 🙂 We’re always learning and God has an awesome way of integrating it altogether, as only He can do it, the Ultimate Lesson Planner. 🙂
New Design for the Teacher’s Guide this year! Love it!
Let’s peek inside Week 1’s Lesson Plans!
Here on the left of the columns are the daily topics (each will have a corresponding bag with supplies & a Daily Topic poster).
And following the columns to the right, we’ll see the different activities categorized by subject (Math & Reasoning, Creative Arts, STEAM, etc.). I will probably go more in-depth on this new layout later, but for now, I wanted to highlight what we will be using for Peter’s Bible curriculum this year! Mother Goose Time offers several additional programs for each month’s box, on top of the usual curriculum, which also correlate to each month’s theme so that each can be integrated very easily into the month’s lesson plans and flow! We have chosen Experience God. We did this for a couple of months when Natalie was four years old, and so I am really excited to give Peter the same opportunity now that he’s a little bit older.
This month’s theme, which correlates to our month’s theme “My Amazing Body,” is “God Cares About My Body.”
This month features the Miracles of Jesus and the Bible verse for this month is Psalm 139:14, “I praise You, God. I am wonderfully made.”
Here is the first lesson for the week (each month includes 4 week’s worth of lessons, each with 5 days): How Does Jesus Heal The Sick?
We will start out our lesson by reading the Story Card that is included for each week.
Front cover of Week 1’s Story Card
(I love that you can hold this up while reading so that my kids can see the images while listening to the Bible story. Great functional design!)
Bible Story found in the middle of the Story Card
Back of the Story Card
Here are some examples of the activities that we’ll be focusing on each day of the week as we review the Bible story.
The last day’s activity comes with supplies for us to create a craft, a medical bag to remind them that Jesus heals, including prescription cards for love, faith, and prayer.
Here is what our month’s worth of supplies look like for our weekly activities. I usually forget to snag a picture before I take them out of the bag, but I want you to see how organized everything is when it arrives!
Here are the examples of the four crafts we’ll be making this month as we learn about how God cares for our body.
Here are the supplies for our medical bag and our prescription cards.
And here is a close-up of the instruction sheet to walk me through Week 1, Day 5’s craft with the kiddos.
Here is Week 1’s Family Sheet that we can share with Daddy-man if we choose to do our Bible time each day after he leaves for work. This will be a great way to share with him each week what we are learning, as well as a gauge for me as to how well Peter is retaining the lesson.
And finally a coloring sheet to show what we’re learning!
I’ve said it a lot, but I am just so excited and thankful for this curriculum. I love how thorough of a job the team at Mother Goose Time executes to provide such an overall, comprehensive curriculum that is well-organized and so detailed that it really takes 99% of the work out of it for me, as a mom and a teacher, and frees me up to just enjoy teaching my kids. Because I am freed up from having to lesson plan and gather gobs of supplies each day, I can spend my energy and time where it really matters, in relating and connecting with my kids as they learn. Because at the end of the day, while I do hope and pray they are well-educated, I also really want to have a stronger connection with them than when we started. And this task-oriented mama can sometimes get distracted by the set-up and lose focus on what I’m trying to accomplish in the first place. And so Mother Goose Time is a blessing for me because it’s already prepared. We can just sit down at the table and enjoy. Kinda of like someone else is making dinner. You know how good that feels, to just feel like you’re being served and can just relax and enjoy? That’s what this is for me!
More adventures to come! Stay tuned!
As an official Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador, I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum. Click here for more information on Mother Goose Time.
As I mentioned in my previous post, this month’s theme for Mother Goose Time is Superheros! One of my favorite little resources each month is the Little Journal! This is something we’ll work through all month, with daily activities that highlight different letters or topics that the kiddos will be reviewing all month. A couple of months ago, with Alphabet Island, we decorated letters and had some letter-related fun. This month it looks like we’ll be focusing on numbers, which is so great because Peter loves them, but also seems for forget that 16 exists. So one goal for this month is to cement 16’s true identity in his head! Maybe we’ll even create a superhero sixteen!
I LOVE to journal, so maybe that is one reason I just gravitate towards this effective little resource each month, but regardless the reason, the kiddos love them as well. So we had fun this morning with our conversations revolving around questions like, “If you were a superhero, what would your power be?” “What would you wear as a superhero? What is your symbol to represent your power?”
It was fun to get our creative juices flowing first thing, and to also see their unique responses!
“Natalie, is yours going to have a cape?” “Mom, capes are the worst.”
Peter, as a superhero, originally started out with three legs. (I promise he told me it was a leg.) And then it turned into his arm, so I’m guessing his superhero persona has really been taking to the Cosmic Yoga that we’ve been dabbling in some of our evenings the past few weeks. And although you would probably then guess that his superpower was flexibility, don’t be fooled. It is tooting. “Tooting at bad guys” to be exact.
Yes, friends. Peter the superhero can knock you away with his toots. (Actually, it’s pretty literal). He is saving the day, one toot at a time!
And then he added super speed. So maybe that is what fuels his speed. (Boys…)
This was a super sweet picture of Peter genuinely excited that he did the maze on the back of the journal. Sissy came over to make sure he had done things correctly.
Here is Superhero Natalie with her superpower of stylin’.
As we got into Day 1 and really talked about symbols, the kids decided to go back to their super self-portraits and add their own symbols.
This day’s Make and Play activity was a shield, so the kiddos decided to add their superpower symbols to that as well. Natalie then added a handle on the back (not called for in the original design), which I am pretty sure she learned from last month’s Camping activity where we made backpacks! It’s so fun to see little tricks that she learns carry over to new tasks. And of course Peter needed to have his own handle as well. One cannot effectively protect themselves against villains while holding one’s shield incorrectly!
Super Style!
Super Toots (and speed)! (His design was a little cloud of gas, and then his sister helped to demonstrate his incredible aptitude by drawing him speeding towards the danger to help save the day!)
Day 2 focused on Glasses and we got to create a fun little looking glass of sorts with another Make and Play, showing the power of 3-D imaging.
This was a clever design, with perforated little looking glasses. We folded over the tops and glued down the red see-through paper inside.
Discovering the hidden images!
This mama is going to have to research a little bit more into how 3-D glasses work, because there were lots of questions I didn’t know how to answer. I love that curiosity and when they motivate me to go learn more, too!
As an official Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador, I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum. Click here for more information on Mother Goose Time.
