Cultivating Childhood

After our set-back last week, I'm looking forward to actually getting through some of our fun bear activities this week and even adding a few more! Everyday Read or talk about Van Gogh.  We will be displaying one of his self-portraits this week. Start up listening to Saint-Saens again as our composer of the month of February. Bear songs  from 1+1+1=1 Might also borrow a few from Little Giraffes Read the passage about Bb from  My ABC Bible Verses Work on memory verse "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." - Matthew 5:9 Work on our week's habit -brushing teeth first thing in the morning  (we're already good at this at night). We will also continue to work on our shoes.  It's a skill that has been learned, but not yet mastered. Monday Letter Bb Do-A-Dot activity from  LOTW  (Alphabet) Pull out our Valentines Sensory Bin This will be my first time trying this concept out, but it looks like so much fun on other blogs that I th...

Well, this week started out well.  We had a great Monday, but then I decided to sprain my foot at MOPs on Tuesday morning which totally threw off the rest of the week.  At least letter Bb didn't stand for Broken Bones.  Consequently, we didn't keep to the plan after that first day.  Instead we did a lot of the following... The indoor playground is always a hit. By Wednesday, I was at least able to walk, but looked like this. Button likes the indoor playground too, but refused to let me take off his coat. Lots of train tracks were made.  I heard a lot of  "Mommy, come play with me." And he heard a lot of "Honey, it hurts mommy to get down on the ground with my hurt foot."  He took it pretty well though. I learned to give him activities to do at the table.  It would have been best if I could have stayed motivated to do what I actually had planned this week, but being hurt really made this hard.  We played a lot of playdough, and we got out our ...

Bears, Buttons, and Butterflies, Batman!  So many great Bb-themed activities that it was hard for me to choose which ones we are going to do this week.  I finally settled on bears as we have a lot of bear books already which both of my boys adore. Something new we will be adding is a "life skill."  As eager as Little Buddy is to do school stuff, he refuses to do even the simplest tasks by himself.  We hear "I can't do it" more times than I'd like during the day.  I think that a lot of it comes from him being a firstborn.  He wants to be able to do things perfectly every time, so if something is hard or he can't do it just right, he just doesn't want to try.  This goes for feeding himself with a spoon, going potty, taking his clothes on and off, etc.  Even crafts were a challenge at first because he wanted everything to look exactly right, but he didn't have the coordination to color within the lines or draw a perfect line.  We've adopted the ...

Our first week back was a success!  I've loved having all the activities to do with Little Buddy, and they really haven't taken very long to do.  Our first day, we were done with everything by 8AM!  Other days we spread the activities out throughout the day, but we usually got through everything. Something extra we added to our curriculum this week were  apple songs  by 1+1+1=1.  She has a whole apple section on her  fall fun page  that I didn't discover until Monday. Our first day back was super easy.  Phil read to the boys at breakfast from My ABC Bible Verses, and then I picked up where he left off.  The Do-A-Dot Aa worked out very well.  I thought he'd need help with the paint, but he picked up on what he needed to do right away.  These paints worked especially well for Button to paint at the same time without causing a big mess. We also enjoyed eating our apples.  I made some taffy apple dip to go with them which was ...

I always get so excited when starting a new plan.  We're going to put our "workbox" idea on hold until we get our homeschool room set up (hopefully around mid-February) where we actually will have room for workboxes.  In the meantime, I'll just plan on doing whatever I can get done in a day with Little Buddy. Our artist for the next six weeks or so will be Vincent Van Gogh.  I got some fabulous prints from Costco Photo Center's new Art & Image Gallery , and so we will be rotating through the paintings every week or so.  We also picked up a few books about Van Gogh from the library.  We are really enjoying Vincent van Gogh: Sunflowers and Swirly Stars  by Joan Holub and Camille and the Sunflowers: A Story about Vincent van Gogh  by Laurence Anholt.  We are also hoping to get Mike Venezia's Van Gogh  in book and DVD soon as well. I think we may review our composers that we did last semester.  I really enjoyed them, and repetition is gr...

So, we're back finally!  We've actually been back from our California trip for a while, but we've had company and then my husband left for a business trip for a week!  We still have some Christmas decorations up, and life is slowly but surely getting back to normal.  In the course of these events, doing any sort of preschool activities has been put on the backburner.  We've enjoyed our busyness, but I'll be glad to start being intentional with my boys again. Another reason we haven't been doing much here on this blog is that I've been at a loss for what to do with Little Buddy in terms of preschool.  My original plan was to do a lot of what we did before, but add on a letter of the week curriculum so that he could learn his letters and their sounds.  Then, unexpectedly, he learned them all from the LeapFrog Letter Factory DVD , leaving me confused on what to teach him next.  He's not yet ready for writing, and I'm not sure how ambitious I feel about ...