GBBC- Great Backyard Bird Count

As part of our nature study we did the GBBC this last weekend Feb 18-21. Oh how fun that was. I just love our birds. Mike bought me a deck mounted bird feeder holder and each of us a feeder for Valentine's Day.

Lucas' is the barn on top. Mine is the one on the left. Sophie has the suet feeder. We have a female downy woodpecker that comes many times a day to eat the suet. We have lots of dark eyed juncos- slate colored that eat the seeds that our chubby squirrel knocks out of my feeder onto the deck and ground. Other visitors include Eurasian collared-doves, house sparrows, blackbirds, cardinals, robins and one blue jay. I will add some bird pics later. I don't have them downloaded yet. The kids color pictures of the birds we see and add them to their nature journals along with some general facts on each bird. Lucas is becoming very good at looking at the picture in our birding book so he can color it the right colors in the appropriate place. Oh he is just so cute. Sophie likes to color her birds also but at 3 she is just not so detail oriented yet. She enjoys it and that is all that matters to me. The GBBC website has an award to print out for the kids for them being involved. Awards are always a big hit for the kids.

Galloping the globe

I am putting together the binders-notebooks for the kids for this fall when we start Galloping the Globe. I just can't wait to start. I think they will have so much fun and learn so much. I am going to use this as an intro to maps, geography, history and science. I wanted to use something prior to history in 1st grade to introduce places, people and events. I felt this would be a great fun way to do that. I now just need to add all of the extras to the notebooks and lesson plans. Fun research ahead for me.

Need to catch up

Oh I have so much to update but just need to get down what we did today and will come back and get caught up on last week. Yikes!

Calendar time- We just started last week working on the months of the year song. They are doing really well with that. That is in addition to our days of the week song and the weather song. Sophie tends to be the one running for the deck door to check the weather for the chart. Lucas is usually first to count up to the day of the month with his pointer. Oh how he loves his pointer. Sophie does this also. I just created a new calendar companion board. I got my inspiration and design from Homeschool Creations. Here is the picture..

The actual calendar is hanging above this. I just got a whiteboard calendar from Walmart a couple of days ago. Before that we had one I pieced together and had on foam board that I had bought from the $ tree. Things are finally coming together in our school room.

Okay back to today. We are expanding on our Get ready for the Code and working on letter F activities. They did Fish patterns with the pattern blocks and sheets. Made lowercase f craft I got from totally tots. Worked on ladder blends. Lucas has already started Pathway Phonics and we are blending. Sophie does this with us (as she sees fit) but just started her on Get Ready for the Code. Lucas is doing this with us also and we just love it. Not nearly as dry as Pathway phonics so it adds some spice into our "phonics" life. Lucas did a 1-10 fish dot to dot and colored that. He also played with the geoboard a bit as well as the tangrams. He was deciding how he could make a fish out of them without following any patter and got a bit frustrated with that so decided to build fish lips with the linking cubes. We also went to the library today and picked out some books to go along with "f" and "b" for our next letter. Both of the kids know most all of the letters but the repetion and the addition of letter sounds for Sophie is great. She picks them up so quickly which is so different than Lucas. Alright that is all I can squeeze in for now. I will finish up tomorrow.

Everything Valentine's

We have been spending the week learning and reading about Valentine's Day. Lucas has been fixated on making play dough heart shaped "cookies" every day  this week. He got a new rolling pin at the Children's museum so if the play dough comes out, so does the rolling pin. Beans is not quite so good with her rolling pin yet so she requires mucho Mommy help. That play dough is just a bit stiff for her little muscles. We have done numerous  worksheets- upper and lower case V's, pre-writing "/" , 1-10 heart dot-to-dot, coloring and cutting out hearts, V (for Valentine) and L (for Love) letters for Alphabet book. I also found some heart number stickers and made a math game for them. I just stuck the stickers on index cards and they have to put the appropriate amount of pom-poms on them. Later today we are going to make our Friendship Blossom valentine's to give out and them make some garland out of the hearts they colored and cut out. Can you tell "LOVE is in the air"? I still have many other things on my Valentine's lesson sheet (okay really it is just a piece of scrap paper that I have been jotting things down on as I find them or think of them). I do hope to print them up so I can keep it for next year though. The kids took Luke's quilt off of his bed after lunch and acted like they were having a picnic in the livingroom, so I got them some fruit snacks (aka gummies) and we had a picnic snack and did phonics. We then worked on reading Fat Cat.

My goal for the weekend is to get all of my pictures uploaded and categorized. If I write this down it makes me hold myself accountable or so is my plan. We'll see what my post on Monday looks like and that will tell the tale.

Fall 2011 Curriculum

I think after endless hours of research, reading and having been glued to my Rainbow Resource catalog I have finally come up with our curriculum for fall 2011-2012. We will be doing Pre-k and K.

Kindergarten:

• Math- Miquon 1
• Phonics- Phonics Pathways which we have already started, Explode the code 1 & 2, Bob books
• Writing- Teaching writing in Kindergarten
• Geography- Galloping the Globe, Geography Practice wkbk A, Scholastic Success with Maps Gr.1
• Science- Singapore Science Earlybird start-up
• NATURE STUDY- I saved the best for last! Burgess bird book for children, Handbook of Nature Study, birdstack.com., and anything and everything the kids find of interest.

For math I also will have lots of other fun manipulatives and games for both of them to use. Beans (3yo dd) is already listening in and participating in phonics but will begin a bit more serious with her in the fall. She really enjoys phonics where Little Man (4yo ds) wants to learn but gets frustrated SO easily. We will all be Galloping the Globe together which I am REALLY excited about. I have always loved History and can not wait to start it in 1st grade but I thought I would take this coming year to introduce it from a geography perspective and of course the history is unavoidable. :) Lucas also loves to draw so I will also be sneaking in some handwritting with Draw, Write Now which we can use for the animals on our gallop.

That seems like a lot writing it down but we will go at our own pace and let it all fall into place. Ahhhh.......the beauty of homeschool!

My very first post!!

I can not believe that I (the most technologically inept person I know) just created a blog! Whewwww! Now just to fix it up a bit. Okay, tweak it a LOT. Then I will be up and running with a fun new spot to chronicle our homeschooling journey. Oh this is just so exciting. I am off to dabble in the world of "HTML". If you only knew me you would know just how ridiculous that sounds.