Thursday was so much fun, as you will see from the barrage of pictures.

The day’s topic: Caring for Pets

We started out with a logic puzzle, where I cut out the pieces of a bird for Natalie to try to reconstruct in her cage.

As you can see, Natalie was a little distraught that the beak was listed first. She kept asking me questions like, “Where do I put the beak? Can I put the head down first? I don’t know how to just put down the beak.” I wanted to just let her figure things out on her own, so I told her she could make whatever choices she wanted.

Bingo. What the girl (and really any girl) wanted to hear. From then on, it was smooth sailing.

Brother watching on, engaged and mistaking his current project with the chip he left laying on the table. Dangers of multi-tasking.

Haha, I let him get a committed bite out of it before he realized his mistake.

Project complete.

Meet Friley the bird.

Next came the Spanish activity, compiling a little book called “I love my pets” with the Spanish version written at the bottom of each page. There were pictures of each pet for them to match to the correct page. I love this concept!

Natalie was very interested as I read each page, pointing out the names of each animal in Spanish. “The word for cat in Spanish is gato?” “Pescado is a weird name for a fish.”

Peter picked up his cover page and immediately started reciting “I love you so much.” This is what Natalie is most famous for writing in her notes to her loved ones, so much so that now anytime Peter sees something with a heart, he says it. I am so tempted to have him do it in public and convince people that my two-year-old can read.

Look at those sweet duck lips.

Peter got to pasting as Natalie finished up decorating her cover page.

Of course he needed to copy sissy’s design, adding a little yellow crayon before grabbing and committing to the red marker.

Marker is his medium of choice these days. Nothing else seems to hold his attention like markers.

Booklet complete.

“Smile for the picture.”

“Again. Uh, thanks goof ball.”

Still going…

Ta-da!

Then we moved onto some review hand-outs that were provided in Day 20’s materials. I put them in page protectors so the kiddos could reuse them in the future.

I don’t know what it is about the power of a dry-erase marker, but those kiddos were so excited. That’s it! I’ve decided that everything must be laminated or page-protected from now on. Gotta milk this for all it’s worth.

Peter experimenting with the eraser.

Once again, power of a marker. The never-expiring energy of Peter has been contained to a seated position for over 5 minutes now. Ahhh (insert angelic singing)

And goofball holding up her bone she has colored white.

I love Peter’s expression here. Not sure if he’s curious, thinking that she’s being ridiculous, or concerned she may be encroaching on his dry-erase marker time. The hubs says he looks like he’s about to stab her with it.

We wrapped up time at the table with our best bird impersonations with the remaining tortilla chips from snack time. Not sure who won – Natalie or Peter’s duck lips from earlier. Either way, both are pretty darn cute.

And finally we went into the living room to play ‘fetch’ with the newly decorated bones. Surprise, surprise, Peter colored his with red marker.
Natalie placed both bones on one side of the room, and then asked me to be the owner and tell them now many steps (crawls) to make the two puppies to their bones. It was fun to see her imagination and how she can so easily create a game out of an object.  And then I let the two ‘puppies’ play while I went to make lunch. A fun, full morning was had by all.

 

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.

So I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking today about motivation (or lack there of, depending on if you’re a glass half-full or half-empty-kind-of-person).  What inspires this topic today is this little girl right here.

 

Most days, she is like this. Ready to embrace the day, the first words out of her mouth usually consisting of some sort of request to play the latest game she has invented before the hubs and I are even setting our feet on the floor for the first time, let alone consumed the required amount of coffee to keep up the Sweetness.
(We have a hard time keeping our breath trying to keep up with this one, much like my run-on sentence above).

But some mornings, it’s more like this.

This morning was one of those mornings where we were five minutes (if that) into a lesson, and she was ‘exhausted.’ Bless it.

To hold back my laughter, I quickly picked up my coffee cup and took a big gulp. And prayed. Because this is where our morning comes to an intersection sometimes.

I can choose to go left, lose my patience, start the usual speech about ‘cutting it out’ as if she knows what that means, and insisting she get going on my time table. (Just keeping it real, folks) OR some mornings, when Jesus is apparently directing my heart and focus, reminding me of the real reasons we’re doing this thing called homeschool, I can choose to go right, take a breath, see the levity in the situation, and choose in that moment to hold back what so often comes out in a rushed default.

So this morning, I tried to put myself in her shoes. We’ve had a long, full summer – a great one, but still pretty long and full. We have not had a regular schedule of lessons, and therefore what momentum we had gained over the past spring has long gone out the window. And so we’re needing to start new, make new habits and exercise our muscles again. And it’s gonna be a little painful. And rightly so, we shouldn’t rush back in full-force without fear of straining something. In this case, something more precious to me than sore arms or legs – my precious relationship with this little girl.

So thankfully grace was apparently this morning, and I was able to let her take a little ‘break’ and redirect her focus back to the fun thing ahead of us that morning in the More Literacy book. One of the many great things about this curriculum is that it is really visually appealing. There are great graphics that always seem to catch Natalie’s (and Peter’s) attention, and we’re able to talk about something related to the picture or story or lesson that we’ve discussed already, so that it seems to bring in more fun to the process of tracing out some sight words.

I was surprised to find out that she recognized one of the sight words, “little,” all on her own as we were tracing. She apparently had run across a fun exercise on starfall, a website that her previous 3K teacher had recommended to us as we were transitioning her home full-time. And so it was fun to see how so many of the activities that we do outside of Mother Goose Time were fitting hand-in-hand with MGT’s lessons. This really encourages me as we will be staring a new curriculum with Natalie for Kindergarten this month, as well as continuing on with Mother Goose Time as a joint-lesson time with Peter. I can already see how it’s going to complement each other really well.

And because we’re ‘special’ and still working on May’s Growing Garden Edition of the More Literacy workbook, it was a great review to see what information she is retaining. Like I mentioned above, this morning was not full of motivation, and so she was not eager to sound out the sight words to discover what they were. And honestly, I wasn’t in for the struggle that morning, either. There will be other times for that. So I just asked her some questions about animals we had discussed that lived in gardens and gave a few hints for each one. “What is small, brown, has a great sense of smell and not great eye-sight.” “Mole!”

So the rest of the morning went fairly smooth, thanks to the Lord’s help in preventing me from falling into old, unproductive habits. We pulled out the More Math workbook, which is always a win for Natalie because she loves numbers and patterns.

This specific exercise had Nat completing each pattern line, circling the correction answer for the remaining object. At the very bottom, it had blank spaces for her to create her own.

As you can see, she jumped right on the tasks, even providing two possible options for the last choice and circling the correct one.

The next page asked Natalie to measure each animal and write the measurement in the space provided. You can see the little ruler that was provided at the bottom of the page that we cut out.

I just love this ‘contemplative’ expression. And a little known fact is that the girl hums or makes little clicking noises when she is thinking. It’s absolutely adorable. Love her.
Natalie decided to use the millimeter side of the ruler, and so we soon discovered we needed a decimal point in order to record the measurements accurately. She caught on to the concept pretty quickly.

We wrapped up the lesson with an ABC book, and ran across quite a few new vocabulary words.

Although she was familiar with marmalade because we had just watched the newest Paddington movie. A few others were more challenging to guess, like ‘egg cup.’

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.

I found this little fellow playing in front of our circle time board today.

Since we started Mother Goose Time this past May, he has loved when we get together for ‘circle time,’ a time when I play this little song and we sing and dance around the board. “1,2,3 come learn with me. 4, 5, 6 calendar and weather pics. 7, 8,9 it’s circle time.” This is the time where we talk about the day of the week, add the date to the calendar, identify what weather picture is appropriate for that day, and usually review the sight word flowers (what Peter is holding up above).

So he has always been a fan of the circle time board. I just didn’t expect to find him there by  himself today since we weren’t in the middle of a lesson.

He surprised me by role playing with the sight word flowers, calling the smaller ones “friends” and then making a family out of 3 of them (“daddy, mommy, baby”). And as you can tell from the picture, even wanting to sort them by color. It’s neat to see him develop these skills, because it was just a couple of months ago that I wondered if he was interested in anything other than shapes and categorizing by shape.

We had also already put some of our August material up on the board, so he took down the ‘b’ card with the blue ball on it, and matched the blue flower to it, and then found his red ball on the floor and put it on top of the ball picture. I just think it is so neat to see him utilizing all the different materials all by himself.

This was him explaining something to me, which I was having a hard time understanding, but he was so serious that I just let him get it all out.

I guess this just goes to show there is at least one blessing to not having a designated homeschool room that is off in another part of the house. When our school supplies are visible, they tend to take advantage of them. That makes me feel a little bit better about things seeming to always be a cluttered mess. At least it’s accomplishing something. 🙂

  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.