Our Science Plans

I am really excited about our upcoming "year" that begins in a few weeks. Along with our sweeping overview of American History that I posted about earlier, we will be studying Human Anatomy in depth.

The girls absolutely LOVED learning about the Human Body as part of NOEO Biology I this past year, so I decided to take a whole year and go in more detail and include more hands on projects. After debating over various spines, I decided to stick with the Usborne First Encyclopedia of the Human Body again, even though we just finished reading it in December. It is really well done and since we didn't have a working computer at the time, we were not able to utilize the Internet links the book provides, so this will definitely add a different element.

We will be looking at all of the major systems of the body, with varying amounts of detail. The two units I am looking forward to the most are about nutrition (tying in with the digestive system) and reproduction. The girls started asking a lot of questions recently about babies, which definitely kicked up during the holidays when they saw Nanny Dani's adorable pregnant belly. We will be using the God's Design for Sex series, along with a few good picture books I found at the library, that will focus on age appropriate information and on the miracle of life.

I am sure you were expecting it, since I shared my "pitch" for American History, so here is the corny, catalogy-sounding description of our science plans for the upcoming year that I put together for my husband, who does such a wonderful job of smiling and putting up with my dorkiness! Love you, baby!

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made
A Human Anatomy Course for Young Scientists

Investigate, discover and explore the intricacies of the human body and learn how truly wonderfully we were created! This year long course will focus on our body’s systems, senses, parts and needs. Utilizing popular children’s literature, vivid picture books, entertaining and enlightening videos, and picture filled children’s encyclopedias, your future scientist or doctor should find plenty to feed their delights!

This year course is divided into six, six week blocks, giving ample time to discover each topic and avoid burnout. Unit topics include: Cells – the Building Blocks of Life, The Beautiful Brain and Nervous System, Our Magnificent Muscles and Strong Skeletal System, Respiration and Circulation – Pretty Important Stuff, The Miracle of Me, and Nutrition – Fueling My Body for Service.

Living books will be your guide on this exploration. The basic “spines” that you will refer to throughout the year, Usborne’s First Encyclopedia of the Human Body, has been specifically chosen for its gentle, age appropriate information and pictures. Supplementing this selection is the DK Guide to the HUMAN BODY, which will be used mainly for additional pictures and any delight directed rabbit trails you encounter!

The rest of the literature package includes selections from the Magic School Bus series, Lets Read and Find Out Science series, Young Genius books, and children’s picture books that are sure to make science a joy. You will finish the year with a unit on nutrition, the food pyramid, menu planning, healthy grocery shopping and nutritious cooking. Come enjoy science with us this year!

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Gearing up for American History

We are in the final weeks of Sonlight K and I am putting the finishing touches on our new curriculum that I put together myself.

Because I am a huge nerd (HA!) and wanted to let my husband know what I was thinking of doing when I presented him with my ideas for the coming "year," I put together a little description similar to one you would see in a catalog. I titled our program Welcome to American History For Young Historians, and I thought I would share my description here so you can see what we will be exploring next!

Welcome to a year full of fun age-appropriate literature that is sure to whet the appetite of your young historians!

Explore the new world with Christopher Columbus, travel and establish a settlement with the Pilgrims and experience the world of our Founding Fathers. Discover what life was like for the Pioneer family, fight on a Civil War battlefield, ride with the Pony Express and learn the art of Victorian decorum. And end your travel adventure by experiencing the world of the 30s and 40s through the eyes of two young girls, eager to help their families through the turbulent Depression and World War II eras.

The year will be divided into eight unit studies. The first semester includes the following topics: Explorers, Voyage to a New World, and Revolutionary America. The second semester covers: Pioneer America, the Civil War, Nation Expansion and the American West, Victorian era, and World War II America.

Your children will become friends with real American Heroes and be exposed to concepts in a very gentle and enjoyable way. Literature selections rely mainly on D’Aulaire biographies, American Girlhood and Magic Tree House historical fiction and a variety of ‘I Can Read It’ selections hand picked to focus on real people and events to truly make American History come alive.

Hands on projects include notebooking, lapbooking, crafts, cooking period meals, field trips and more! Join us for the fun!

Of course I realize that most of you will not be able to physically join us on our adventures, but I will post our plans here, and if I can figure out how to do it, I will even post my 36 week schedule I put together.

The only difference between what I wrote and what we will actually be doing is that we will now be flip flopping the semesters. In putting together our homeschool budget, I decided to cut it in half in order to get the girls a Nickelodeon Netbook, which will be a huge hit but did cause me to have to make some decisions. Field trips are really important to me, but so are my biographies, so I faced the possibility of cutting out some trips. . . until I noticed that one of the local living historical farms will be having a Homeschool Day May 28th that will show time periods from the Pioneer days thru Victorian era!

While I am sure it could work to have them experience it first and then learn about it toward the end of the year, we decided to flip the semesters, so we will begin with the New Nation and Pioneers in a few weeks, go all the way through the 40s, and then do the "prequel" so-to-speak, and cover the beginning of American History. I am really excited!!!

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The End of Preschool

You can tell that I was ready for something new by my notes. I started the year documenting every single thing we did -- books read (and when we read them), crafts done, side notes to self on how the lessons went, etc;

As you could maybe tell from my last post, my notes started to include less and less. . . now that I am looking at our final month (4/20 - 5/31) it is a simple spreadsheet that was pre-typed that listed the date, the letter focus, what day in the Bright Beginnings book we were using for Math, Language Arts and Bible (at this point, I knew we weren't going to use it for a full 36 weeks so I was picking and choosing the lessons that I thought we could benefit from since most were pretty simple anyway), the animal focus, the job focus, the geographic focus and any literature units.

I also knew by this point what we were going to be doing for Kindergarten. Sometime in April, Gregg and I sat down and decided that it was time to move on from FIAR and try Sonlight. I wanted to make sure I covered the remaining FIAR books that I was interested in (and that my library carried), so we just added them in.

4/20-4/24 brought us the letter "M." What a fun week this was!!!! My wonderful friends from Homeschool Share and various blogs from around the globe, along with our amazing family members, sent our girls postcards and letters this week so we could focus on Mail! Our occupation was Mail Carrier and our literature unit was Meerkat Mail. I used this unit from HSS, along with lapbook pieces from Mailing May, Boxes for Katje, and printables from USPS and Enchanted Learning, to learn about the mail system, writing letters AND track the mail the girls received from around the globe. My favorites were postcards from England and South Africa!!! What I failed with was getting letters sent back out. . . I had wonderful intentions but I STILL have not gotten any stamps (just ask my two father in laws who have yet to get the lovely Fathers Day cards that are sitting waiting and addressed! Luckily for my father, he lives next door so I couldn't mess that one up too badly. Martha Stewart, at least in this regard, I am not!) Just thought I would be real there for a moment about my correspondence flaws. . . now, where was I? Oh yes, school. Our animal focus was Meerkats and mice, and our geographic focus was Mexico. We used a wonderful unit from HSS for this -- The Old Man and the Door -- and we absolutely loved it! My favorite part of this week was eating Mexican food every single night! Since moving to Houston, I have fallen in love with Mexican dishes and collect recipes whenever I can (so if you have any, please send 'em!)

This weekend, Gregg's dad and step mom came up for a visit and we all went to Texas A&M for their Vet School Open House. As I mentioned, Jordan says she wants to be a vet, and even though she is young and we definitely won't pigeon hole her, it is a total fit. . . just like Cali, my dare devil child, saying she wants to be a firefighter is a total fit! Anyhoo, we went down there and had a wonderful time. They make it so child friendly, and our first stop was the Teddy Bear Clinic! They brought animals from home, and after getting dressed from head to toe in Vet gear courtesy of A&M, they were led into an exam room where they became Assistant Surgeons!!! They received diplomas with their picture taken "while in surgery" and felt very proud of themselves. Afterwards we had a tour of their three different huge buildings -- where they do large animal surgery, small animal surgery, where they kept reptiles and the like -- and went out to the petting zoo they had set up. We saw zebras and camels, pigs, goats, horses, donkeys, and other animals, and then -- an interesting highlight -- we were allowed to stick our arms INTO a "fistulated cow." I trusted them at the moment that it wasn't hurting the cow, and looked it up later to make sure (it doesn't. . . go ahead, google it. . . I'll wait. Crazy huh?!?) but what an experience! We ended the trip through the reptile exhibit where the girls took a picture with a HUGE snake wrapped around their neck!

4/27-5/1 The letter "N." I must admit here that while I added my own ideas for animals here and there, many of them were used from our Zoo Phonics curriculum. Their animal for letter "N" is Nigel Nightowl and since we hadn't studied owls yet, I thought "Why not?" We read Owl Moon and Owl Babies along with a few others that I didn't record. We read New Coat for Anna as well. Our occupation was News Reporter and this was SO much fun! We read lots of different non fiction books on newspapers, watched a Blues Clues episode on it and I told them things I learned in school (Broadcast Journalism major at LSU) and then we made our own newspaper. The girls also had to interview my husband and my mom, and they did very well -- they had to choose their own questions and then ask them, I wrote the answers of course. Our geographic focus was New Orleans and I used the Louisiana Multi Book Unit Study I wrote for Homeschool Share, along with all the books listed there, and had a blast! Again, we ate food the entire week that went with our geographic focus, but that wasn't that strange since we eat like that normally, ha!

5/4-5/8 Was a combination of "O" and "P." We learned about the Octopus and Penguin, officers in the military and police department and Paris. We read Officer Buckle and Gloria, Lentil, Oxcart Man and Paul Revere's Ride, which strangely enough the girls absolutely LOVED! We did a variety of octopus crafts and dressed up like Penguins, watched lots of videos on both animals, and did a few lapbook pieces from HSS. I pulled pieces from the Officer Buckle unit and a variety of other sources for a lapbook on police and safety, and pieces from the Lentil unit for a lapbook on our military and patriotism.

5/11-5/15 "Q and R" had us doing a fun lapbook on rabbits -- pieces gathered from a variety of books on the HSS website -- and on Queens and royalty. We learned about Russia and read Little Red Lighthouse, Miss Rumphius, and Muncha!Muncha!Muncha!. We had fun this week, gradually getting lighter and easier with our days and falling into a lot of more cuddly reading and watching videos that went with our topics -- maybe that coincided with the increasing temperatures outside, ha!

5/18-5/22 "S and T" We were supposed to learn about snakes, tigers, surgeons, tailors, and Texas. . . we didn't do any of that. We did read The Boy Who Held Back the Sea, Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening and Truman's Aunt Farm. The lapbook on that got scrapped and I did forget to purchase an ant farm, BUT as luck would have it, a HUGE ant pile appeared outside our front door so we were able to watch the real thing, ha! The only real learning that happened that was structured was an impromptu lesson on Scotland. My father is a personal trainer and massage therapist. I workout with him on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, followed by a short P.E. lesson he does with the girls. After he is finished with us, he then has a massage client meet him at his house (next door) who happens to be from Scotland. I casually asked if he could ask her for ideas, and she actually came by with tons of goodies for the girls! She gave them thistle soap (apparently that is the flower of Scotland), a stuffed bear with a sweater of the Scottish flag, a beautiful decorative statue and pictures to look at! The girls loved it all and hearing her voice -- and they were very interested after that. Luckily, HSS is amazing, so I was able to hop on the Internet and print out lots of great things from Wee Gillis, Frog Went a Courtin' and a few other units, as well as crafts from DLTK, Enchanted Learning and a few other sites, and had a lapbook ready to go within the hour. I think my dad was pretty impressed with what we were able to come up with so quickly, and the girls loved role playing the different stories we learned about Scotland for the rest of the week!

5/25-5/29 "U - Z" HA! As I mentioned, we were in combining mode and I was in burned out mode, PLUS my girlfriend Sandra was coming over with her girls for a playdate and she was interested in both Bright Beginnings and Zoo Phonics. I decided to just finish it all up, picking and choosing my favorite lessons to finish out the week.

Gregg and I took the girls to the FEAST homeschool conference in San Antonio (awesome) and we went to SETHSA here in Houston (really good), and the girls and I did two units in June -- Pirates and a combo week on ice cream and chocolate (the units are at HSS, along with complete book lists....the girls loved all the pirate books and we all loved The Parrot Tico Tango)

The rest of June was spent organizing the house and deeper cleaning, and LOTS of relaxing! I also got everything ready for the new adventure of Kindergarten that started at the end of the month. I am SO excited to start sharing about that journey!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

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Preschool in Review - Post 3

It is funny. . . I knew we were learning a lot and having lots of fun at the time, but I don't think it really sank in until now, having to sit down and type it all up so quickly!

I realize I am not explaining the crafts of the various lessons that we did, but I am trying to cover the highlights and at least get my book list in here. We have read some amazing books the past few years and not only would I like to remember them, but would recommend almost all of the ones I list in these posts (I say almost because it is possible that I forgot to scratch a stinker or two off my lesson plan!)

So, onward we go:

The week of St. Patrick's day brought lots of fun! We began the week with a visit to Katelyn and Ashley's house (friends from co-op) to learn about The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Marlene did a wonderful job with this lesson! She had the girls make sock puppet caterpillars, then cut out sequencing cards for the story, and all were stored in decorated old coffee cans. Now whenever the girls want to act out or retell the story, all the materials are together! We ALL made Fruit Loop caterpillars, and play dough caterpillars. Marlene also had HUGE cut outs of all of the items the caterpillar ate in the story that she used to retell the story for the children, and finally, we looked at a poster of the life cycle of a caterpillar. On St. Patrick's Day we watched the video from Veggie Tales and read a paragraph about him in our History book. We talked about shamrocks and how he used them to tell about God. We then colored pictures of them and leprechauns, and looked at pictures of Ireland.

It was around this time that we got our catepillars in the mail to raise our own butterflies. This was so much fun -- for the entire family! It was amazing to watch the caterpillars form the crysalis, to attach to the top and then sit and watch as they emerged as butterflies! We kept them for about a week and then put them out on the milkweed plant we have potted outside (it is their host plant). Since then, we have had several caterpillars feeding on the plant and forming crysalises! The girls get so excited about the whole process and brings learning to life! I LOVE HOMESCHOOLING!!!

The rest of the week focused on the letter "I" bringing us ice cream, India, Italy, the DVD Bilingual Baby - Italian (SUPER CUTE!!), Tigers at Twilight (Magic Tree House), Italy A to Z, My "I" Sound Box, The Sundae Scoop, Maya Angelou's World - Angelina of Italy, There's a Dolphin in the Grand Canal, Opera Cat, Ice cream: The full Scoop, Madeline and the Cats of Rome, Stregna Nona (girls LOVED this!!), Big Anthony, Elephant Dance: Memories of India, Baya Baya Lulla-by-a, The Story of Little Babaji, writing our names in icing, and watching Bollywood dance videos and cardio tapes (total workout!). We also began History lessons with History for Little Pilgrims this week. I had planned on waiting till we started Kindergarten, but while I was looking at it for planning purposes, the girls kept picking it up to look at and asking me to read it, so I figured I would go with their interest! We did a simple poster board Timeline with this and they really enjoyed it.

We spent a second week (for those curious, we are now at the week of 3/23 - 3/27) on the letter I as there had been so many geographic locations that were fun to expose them to, I wanted a second week to focus on the animal and career. We learned about inchworms this week and had so much fun! This week we read Papa Piccolo from FIAR which was very cute and did LOTS of inchworm crafts (Dot-to-Dots, play dough, connect the dots, etc), measured things, crawled like inchworms and sang songs. Our occupation was Investigator and we used the Detective unit study/lapbook on HSS -- it was awesome! In all, this was just a week full of experiments, crafts, and lots of glue!

"J" focused on Jellyfish, Japan, judges, jello, the lapbook for Grandfather's Journey, a tour of Bluebell Ice Cream Factory with our Co-op and a family trip to the zoo. Having spent a week learning about jellyfish, it was so much fun for Gregg and I to watch the girls be so excited to see jellyfish up close! They kept coming back to the display and just sat, staring, for a very long time :-) We did a variety of jellyfish crafts and read several nonfiction books. We did read lots of other books this week -- I know lots of Allan Say books -- but I did not write any of them down this week. I will say that while the information about Japan was interesting to the girls, they did not enjoy the Allan Say books very much. . . their highlight was jellyfish!

"K" focused on kangaroos, zoo Keepers, acts of kindness, kittens, karate, karaoke, ketchup, Katy No Pocket, If I Ran the Zoo, Animal Strike at the Zoo, the zoo lapbook on HSS, Mrs. Katz and Tush, and Katy and the Big Snow and the lapbook on HSS. Our Co-op this month was on your own but it was on Bunnies and Easter so this week we also read The Bunny Who Found Easter, Rechenka's Eggs, Over in the Meadow, Clifford's Easter, and of course, Peter Rabbit. We had a blast learning about kangaroos this week -- we learned that they can jump 40 feet, so we measured that length in our backyard and recorded how many "Mommy" "Jordan" and "Cali" jumps it would take to equal one kangaroo jump!

Focusing on kindness was great -- we instituted "The Blue Plate of Kindness" this week, where someone gets to eat off of a special blue plate if they are noticed doing something kind for someone else. We also made lots of paper hearts with the word "Kind" on them -- the idea was to look for random acts of kindness that can be done in secret and then, again without being seen, to take a heart and leave it where the act was done. One example from the week -- Mama's shoes were left out in the living room and Jordan grabbed them, put them in my room and left a heart where the shoes had been. Jordan LOVED this game! I also had a poster board up in the kitchen where we would write down acts of kindness that were noticed.

They also loved the zoo keeper lapbook we made from HSS. Jordan wants to be a Vet when she grows up and both girls love learning about animals -- one of the reasons it was such a focus point this year. This was a great project to show off what they have already learned and be exposed to new things.

April 13-17th: "L" brought us lizards, love, lions, The Little House (and the lapbook), lifeguard, London, Shakespeare (London tie in!), Stage Fright on a Summer Night (Magic Tree House book about Shakespeare), the library, and lollipops. This week doesn't have lots of notes, but I know the girls loved the lapbook for The Little House, and we had fun role playing being lifeguards and learning about water safety.


One more post will definitely finish up our preschool adventures! We went into super fast mode at this point -- I was getting a bit burned out on what we were doing, was ready for a change, and we decided to sell our curriculum in May and take a few weeks off before starting K in June -- so we started combining letters.

I will try to sneak back on in the morning to finish up the preschool series, but if not, I'll finish on Monday. I can't wait to begin journaling our Kindergarten adventures! It has been a total change, but I am loving it!

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Preschool in Review - Post 2

Two days in a row, I am on a roll!

I realized last night that while I am glad to have just this little bit on here, that I did not take out their various notebooks from the past few months which are full of fun things, great narrations and crafts. . . at the end of this quick review, I may go back and record a few of those highlights as well. But, for now, I will pick up where I left off yesterday . . . the wonderful letter "E".

We took a second week for "E" the week of February 16-20th. Gregg had chosen so many wonderful picture books on engineers and I had found some really cute minit books on Homeschool Share to go with them, that we stayed with this topic for a bit. We reviewed all our previous Scripture memory verses, did some narrations of Bible stories and caught up on our occupations notebook, as well as learning about Thomas Edison and Benjamin Franklin. This week we also went to the park, spent a long time watching Nutria, had our Preschool Co-op where we made bird pizzas and chef hats, and went to the library for story hour. Friday of this week was our "Big Girl Day!" The Paci Fairy had heard how mature our girls were and thought it was time for their Big Girl Day (totally got this idea from an episode of John and Kate plus 8!). The girls left out a snack, along with their old pacifiers and blankets the night before, and when they woke up on Friday the Paci Fairy had left them a huge keyboard! It was totally approved by their musically gifted Godfather and has been a lot of fun! We started the morning with breakfast at McDonald's, followed by a visit to the Children's Museum and lunch and play at Chuck E. Cheese. :-)

At some point in February we took our co-op field trip to EJ's Pizzeria, where the girls not only had a wonderful behind the scenes tour of the pizzeria, but were then able to make their own pizzas! It was a BLAST -- for kids and moms!

The letter "F" brought us fishes, feathers (and birds), fire fighters, fairy tales, France, farmers, fairies, friends, Feathers for Lunch, The Little Bird (Mother Goose), Fishwish, Flotsam, DK Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales, Big Red Barn and A Chair for My Mother (book and Reading Rainbow episode that showed fire fighter training). The week before at story hour, the focus was fire fighters, so we learned lots of cute songs and it tied in so nicely:-). We had our Tea Party with our co-op friends where we did picture study, listened to Mozart and a cute Rossetti poem. This week we also went to The Depot to meet up with the cowboys riding into Houston for the big Rodeo. We got there early and parked to wait for the riders and before we knew it, we were literally surrounded by horses and riders on all sides! The cowboys were so sweet and let the girls ride the horses, feed and pet them, and it was simply a blast! We also went to several different parks and nature reserves this week.

The letter "G" week began with a small birthday party for Dr. Seuss! We focused on his books all day, reading Green Eggs and Ham, Oh The Thinks You Can Think, ABC, Mr. Brown Can Moo, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, and Hop on Pop. Along with our yummy cupcakes (which we baked while doing fractions lol) we watched the animated versions of Sneetches, Zax, Green Eggs and Ham and Horton Hears a Who. We played a game I found online for Pinning the Egg on the Plate, we created silly stories and did lots and lots of rhyming games! Cali enjoyed coming up with rhymes for Cat (hat, rat, that) and Sad (bad, dad), while Jordan came up with the following story -- I should note that the girl LOVES to tell stories and has been known to go on for over a half hour with stories that flow completely, have wonderful characters and everything but this was an assignment to go into a very small Dr. Seuss hat minit book, so I cut her off really short lol.


Once upon a time there was a cat in a hat. He was singing lots of songs until he bumped into something.
He thought he bumped into something . . . but, it was just lightning. It was going to rain and then he thought he was going round and round, but it was just the rain going Pitter, patter, pitter, patter

The rest of "G" week focused on gardens, goats, giraffes, Guinea pigs, gorillas, Greece, grandparents, The Golden Rule, Galileo, Planting a Rainbow, The Tiny Seed, Good Night Walk, Growing Vegetable Soup, Flower Garden, My Two Grandmothers, Good Morning Gorillas (Magic Tree House), gratefulness, grace, I Completely Know about Guinea Pigs (Charlie and Lola), G if for Goat, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, The Secret of the first one up (groundhogs), Gladys goes out to lunch, Good Night Gorilla, lots of nonfiction books on animals and geology, George Gershwin, Paul Gauguin, Van Gogh, D'Aulaires Book of Greek Myths, and Galileo for Kids. The girls also created stories this week that they asked me to type up and make books for, which was fun.

The beginning of "H" week began with a REAL TREAT! We went to a Family FARM! A wonderful woman in our co-op mentioned back in September that she was raised here in the Houston area on a farm, and how much her children enjoy going there. As I was planning the week for "F" and was trying to find a good farm to visit, I remembered this conversation and immediately reached out to her. While we had some scheduling conflicts, the wait was well worth it! This family was so gracious and kind, and we had a total blast! This was better than anything I could have found and we were able to do way more than a farm open to tour groups. We collected eggs, fed their chickens, sat and observed the chickens and roosters for awhile (and where they slept, how they got around, etc), helped them plant a garden (zucchini, tomatoes, and peppers), observed their TONS of cows and baby calfs, played in a creek (spent lots of time here, watching water flowing from higher ground to lower, examining rocks, skipping rocks), fished in their pond -- and caught 2 catfish(!!) -- played in sand, road bikes and skateboards, observed a wide variety of trees and just HAD A BLAST! Thank you so much Sinitieri family!!!!

The rest of "H" week focused on Hawaii, our read aloud was High Tide in Hawaii (Magic Tree House), horses, horticulture, history, Haydn, Handel, My H sound box, H is for Horse: an Equestrian Alphabet, My First Horse and Pony book, tons of Billy and Blaze books, Hans Holbein the Younger's painting of Edward VI as a child, Hooper Humperdink by Dr. Seuss, happiness, Luka's Quilt, Hula Lullaby, Grandma calls me beautiful, watching Hula for Children and having lots of fun dancing around, A House for Hermit Crab, Milton Hershey, Sam Houston, John Hancock, and hygiene.
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Well, I guess that is good for today :-) I am feeling better already having some of this on here as a record of our schooling, so I really do hope to have all of preschool updated and online within the week. Then it will be back to taking a week at a time and including posting our fun family moments in with the lesson plans!

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We are still here :-)

Well HELLO!!!

I know it has been forever since we have updated. In fact, our first official "year" of preschool has come and gone -- we only did it from January 1st until the end of May, as the girls flew through it!

This is just a quick little update post to let you know that I will be coming back (even if it is just a couple times a week) to post pictures, review the school week, keep up to date on family stories and events, journal my own thoughts, and express a little creativity!!

We are now on our fourth week of Kindergarten using Sonlight K, Math U See, Horizons Health and NOEO, along with a few other things here and there (like HSS, Moving Beyond the Page, Bob Books, extra read alouds, Draw Write Now, Donna Young, etc;).

Now that we have a computer back up and running (WOO HOO!), Gregg and I both think it is important to get back to updating this blog, at least once a week. As my wonderful husband just said, "I just know we'll regret it in a few years (or longer) if we don't start doing it."

So, what have we been doing since I last posted in November? WOW, that has been awhile, huh?!? We used Bright Beginnings, Zoo Phonics (thanks Heart of the Matter!!!), FIAR and HSS for our five months of preschool. Gregg and I used them to create our own trip down alphabet lane. While the girls did create a few complete lapbooks, we mostly used a variety of notebooks to scrapbook our learning -- we had an animal science notebook, an occupations notebook, and a hodge-podge notebook full of various lapbook pieces on cardstock for our different literature units. Each week we learned about a different animal, career, and geographic location that began with the letter of the week, and pulled together TONS of fun picture books on a wide variety of topics that related back to the letter of the week.

Bright Beginnings was our main spine for Bible activities (loved, loved, LOVED this part), Scripture memorization (Gregg made huge posters each week with the verse to remember and the girls LOVED it), Health, and Character lessons. We did many of their math and language arts suggestions, however we did skip many as our girls knew a lot of the information. . . but what we did use provided a WONDERFUL foundation!! Jordan (currently age 4) is reading up a storm -- using Sonlight Language Arts 2nd grade and is doing wonderfully -- and is in Math U See Alpha for first grade. Cali (currently age 3) is using SL LA 1st grade and while we are supplementing with Bob Books, Starfall, and totally going at her own directed pace, she is doing awesome! As for Math, she is using MUS Primer for K, but is FLYING through!! This is week four and she is on lesson 12! Since there are 30 lessons total, I know she will be in Alpha before the year is through.

Our schedule currently consist of Bible, Scripture and Health with our breakfast, then Jordan comes up for an hour to do Language Arts and Math while Cali watches her favorite show of all time -- Blues Clues -- then Jordan has free play while Cali has school for 30 minutes. Cali's schooling is always at her own pace and is driven by her desire to learn and be like her big sister! :-) After that is free play till lunch, which is eaten with History and Science read alouds, then they go to their room for our literature read alouds in bed before Quiet Time. After Quiet Time is over, we have Tea Time with poetry and other fun stories, then it is free play till Daddy comes home.

Back to Preschool:

Zoo Phonics is a WONDERFUL program! We used this a little differently than is suggested, spreading it out in the beginning, so that we can keep with our one letter a week concept. They suggest two a week before moving into more advanced phonetic concepts. Doing it the way we did I think was a good middle ground for my girls, with Jordan way beyond what we were doing but EXTREMELY enjoying every single lesson, and Cali really learning and reinforcing what she knew while having lots of fun. Zoo Phonics has TONS Of ideas for a well rounded curriculum so between the two, along with the tons of ideas we came up with, I had way more than enough, but I thought that was a good problem to have :-)

So let's see:

We began the year the first Monday in January with a family breakfast at IHOP and a fun trip to NASA to coincide with our "A" week! Also, this month, our Co-op learned about Ping and China. We went on a trip to the Imperial Gardens in Katy, Tx (followed by a yummy lunch at The Rainforest Cafe with the girls best friends Skylar and Emy), and a day at our house with the girls learning about what sinks/floats, and other cool related things that are escaping my mind at the moment.

"A" brought us alligators, Africa, astronauts, apples, animal crackers, Armadillo's Rodeo, finger painting in apple sauce, aerobics, adding, scurrying like ants, Adam and Eve, and Noah's Ark, among other things.

"B" brought us bears, Brazil, ballerinas, throwing balls, BINGO, Berlioz the Bear, Flight of the Bumble Bee, how to make books, Tower of Babel, balancing, The Wheels on the Bus, Baking, and Babies being born.

"C" was for Cats, China, Canada, Chefs, Cookies, Clouds, Eric Carle, Being Capable, calendars, crawling like crabs, cheese, crackers, catching, cardio, calisthenics, Courage, catching balls in containers, cornbread, cooking techniques, Cook a Doodle Do, counting, and conducting music. Wednesday of that week also brought a WONDERFUL day of story hour with our good friends, a half an hour of exploring a trail at the park and then tons of free play at the park playground. Gotta love Nature Study time when the Houston Texas weather is actually bearable -- um, unlike NOW!

"D" brought us Deer, Denmark, Dentists and Doctors, feeding ducks, Dandelions, Daisy-Head Mayzie, doughnuts, Jacob's dream, dreams of all kinds, dancing, drums, dogs, Dvorak, A Dance of Friendship (Angelina Ballerina), and Dependability. Wednesday brought us a repeat of the week before (still wonderful weather in February) and Friday brought us a field trip to the Dentist where they got their teeth clean.

"E" brought us Elephants, Egypt, Engineers, Horton Hatches the Egg (which Jordan related to our story that week of Joseph being sold by his brothers, as Horton was sold to the circus for money, too!), eggs, excellence, encouragement, and eye care. We went to the Children's Museum with friends this week, and we also really enjoyed the Mrs. Wishy Washy series, The Poodle who Barked at the Wind by Zolotow, and our Stuart Little read aloud.

This week we also did some narrations from Bible stories. I will finish this post with these narrations, and will come back by tomorrow with a few more weeks worth :-)

2/17 I asked Jordan (she had turned 4 3 months prior), to tell me the story of Adam and Eve without re-reading it (although very familiar with the story, we hadn't read it for over a month at this point). This is her narration:

Eve got two apples, but they weren't good. They tried one, but they thought they were better than God!! And they had to leave the forest. The sun was sad. Before they ate and tried the apple, a man disguised as a snake said to try one of the bad apples.

They thought they were better than God.

1. {said very emphatically here} God made a person.
2. Made the sun
3. Made all the animals
4. Made Adam
5. Made the world.

At this point, I asked her how the animals got their names and she said, "Adam saw them and said what they were called." Imagine a "No duh, Mom" look on child's face.

Then I asked how God made Eve:

He made Adam go into a deep sleep. He closed up his skin where he took one of Adam's ribs and said, "Let there be a woman out of this rib," and then -- POP! -- a woman came!!"

Can it GET any cuter than that??? Well, maybe so. . . here is Cali's narration (just turned 3 at this point) of Noah's Ark:

He tried to find his animals. . . a hippo. . . an alligator. . . his Mommy. . . .

{Cali, did they get on something}

A Boat!

{Then what happened?}

He tried to draw a picture of Jesus. The End!!!


Here is Jordan's narration of Noah's Ark:

Noah builted an ark and he counted each animal by 2 by 2. And then God made a flood! Then they floated, and then he sented a dove out, BUT before that he sent a black bird out. Then he sent a dove out again and again and again and again!! Until the flood went away and they saw a rainbow!

IT"S NOT OVER YET!

The ark was on a mountain. Until they saw a rainbow over it -- it was HUGE! They couldn't touch it, but they were still happy. They still had food they could eat and water so they could drink.


Now Jordan's narration of the story of Joseph -- I think she got a bit confused between Jacob and Joseph, but that just made it all the more adorable, ha!:

Once upon a time, Joseph's Daddy Jacob was really old. He couldn't see. His father made him a coat of many colors! And then his brothers were ANGRY, they wanted one, too!!

And they saw Joseph and they ripped his coat off and threw him in an empty well, and they sold him to Egypt. But he was in jail, but he was still happy because God was with him! He got out of jail and the King of Egypt had a dream about skinned cows and fat cows; The skinned cows were eating the fat cows. And then Joseph came to the King of Egypt and he became the Prince of Egypt! And he pretended his brothers were spies, but he still loved them. And they became happy, too. And he hugged them really tight and kissed them. And then he told them that God stays with us and Jesus always loves us!


Now, just in case your heart isn't completely melted, here is our final narration by Cali on the life of Joseph. Remember, she just turned 3 at this point.

I want to be a firefighter that saves him!! {meaning from the well}

____________________________________________________________________

I have a feeling it is mostly only family that is still around following this old blog, which is actually great because you all have to love me regardless of how well I keep this up to date, but if anyone else out in blogland is still around, I'd love to hear from ya!

Have a wonderful Tuesday everyone!

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I am the Featured Homeschooler this week!

Good Morning :-)

I must tell you that I intended to start back blogging slowly, however my computer has been unwilling to turn on for the past few weeks! The only time I have to be online lately has been when Gregg is home from work at night with his work laptop, but it is important to me to reserve a lot of that time for family. . . and watching our newest passion: The Tudors, Season 1!

I did want to direct you to the interview I did with Heart of the Matter about our homeschool. We are the featured homeschool of the week!

I hope to have our computer fixed soon. . . it has been an interesting challenge to have our online resources so limited, but it has also helped me to keep my priorities in line. We have been having such a blast the past few months! LOTS of crafts (we are ALL finally at the age where we enjoy them lol), reading great books, nature walks, tea parties and science experiments inspired by the new PBS show Sid the Science Kid. I can't wait to share with all of you the MANY pictures we have taken!

Have a wonderful Sunday with your family. . . for us, we will be going to an Indian Pow-Wow in town and getting a wonderful introduction to our Indian unit next week!

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Ok, let's try that again

Dare I say that I am back? :-)


I was already behind in posting things on this blog and all the events of the past month certainly haven't helped things! I will be posting throughout the coming weeks on the following:

• Our Hurricane Experience -- We lost power the Friday it hit and got it back Tuesday afternoon. Since then it has been interesting trying to get back into a groove. While I will go into a lot more detail on that post, I will tell you really quickly that both my home and my parent's home (they live behind us) were spared any damage! Besides a few minor scares and inconveniences, it was actually a pretty great experience for us personally in that it provided LOTS of family time full of talking, reading, and memory making. We watched minimal television (we did have a generator and watched some things, like Saints football of course), and taught our girls (and myself) how to wash clothes with a washboard and hang a clothes line!


• Our Camping Pictures, lapbook and recap -- Yes, I know dear family members/readers, that you are chomping at the bit to see ME camping, much less the girls delight in the whole experience, and it is coming I promise!
  
• Horse Week pictures -- We had so much fun with this unit! It lasted two weeks technically, but with Gustav hitting in the middle and having my brother and his adorable girlfriend here for one of those weeks, we still kept it pretty simple and fun. We have a lapbook, fun pictures of all the books we devoured and of course, our pictures of our family trip to the Race Track to see the horses up close!


• Trip to San Antonio -- Wow, that trip was awhile ago, huh? But it was fun, educational and definitely one I want to document. We visited the Alamo (which has a really cute treasure hunt for the kids to make it fun) and the Riverwalk.


• Butterflies -- Just because I am so upset with myself for not posting the pictures of that unit since it was one of the girls favorites, I will post the pictures from this unit that we did I think back in June?? Wow, talk about BEHIND!
  
• Olympics/China -- I have pictures of our Lapbooks and of course, our Harris Family Olympics! There are SO many pictures though, that I want to use one of those cool slideshow thingys but every time I try to upload pictures into it at photobucket, it doesn't work. Any experts out there willing to help a sister out, please let me know!
  
• Children's Museum -- Ok, this trip was back in May!!! But again it was a fun family event that needs to be documented!
  
• Anything else that comes up between now and then!
  

But for now, I am off to clean up a bit and then have fun with my girls :-) I will leave you with these pictures of the breakfast Jordan made for us last week! The day before, she had woken up REALLY REALLY early and had decided to feed herself Tootsie Rolls for breakfast (we have a Tupperware container in the pantry with a few treats leftover from potty training). That day, I put some pop tarts, cereal and raisins in Tupperware in an easy to reach cabinet for her to have easy access to in case she ever did it again. . . well the very next morning, she woke up like at 5am or some ridiculously early hour.

I heard her in the hall bathroom (which is right by our bedroom), telling herself that she had an idea -- Pop tarts and Raisins! I got up a little while later, unable to sleep, and was greeted by a wonderful surprise! She had placed 4 paper plates on the table, with a pop tart next to each plate, sprinkled with a few raisins and the grand finale, a solitary Marshmallow on each plate (left over from our camping trip)! She yelled "Surprise!" and was just so happy with herself! It looks like my 3 year old is a budding cheff-er (her words) after all :-)

Have a wonderful day and I will be back soon with my mountain of updates and posts!

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We're back :-)

I want to thank everyone who has emailed me to check in with our family. I know we have been silent for awhile, but it has been for great reasons.

The tragedy that my friend is going through did rock our family. My husband has never met Marsha or her family (we kept saying we would all get together and we would try to make plans, but you know how that goes. . . ), but this affected both of us. We have both been actively praying and turning to God, trying to get any lessons He wants to teach us from this experience. So far, that has meant A LOT of family time and reaching out more at our church. One thing that touched us was the amount of support they have locally from their church family, and we realized that since we changed churches a few months ago, we haven't really met many people there (besides my wonderful parents who go with us!) . . . we wondered who we would call if a situation like that would occur in our family. As it turns out, our church is holding a meeting this Sunday to create new small groups, this one particularly for Married Couples! We are praying that we will be able to make some friends and establish relationships through this new group.

As for the family time, we have been BUSY! I will make separate posts about all of the things we have been doing, but I will quickly summarize here. The week of Christian's passing, we were in the middle of a Camping theme. Monday and Tuesday we read lots of stories about camping, made a make-shift tent with blankets and pillows in the living room, and watched some fun camping cartoons. Tuesday evening, while I was driving to Marsha's house, Gregg wanted to do something special for the girls to wake up to. . . I think we all felt the need to hug our children closer and let them know how much they are loved. . . so he put up the huge tent in the living room. He added a lot of soft blankets, sleeping bags, pillows and stuffed animals. He also laid all of the books out inside. It was very nice and the girls were definitely excited to wake up to it Wednesday morning! That evening we decided to take the girls out to dinner -- I was in need of a family night -- so we went to Pizza Hut. Not five-star dining but come on, they are preschoolers! We were so impressed by how well they did in the restaurant. . . we kept flashing back to what seemed like a short time ago when they would be climbing all over the place, not wanting to sit still, and crying. They grow up so fast, don't they?

Friday afternoon we set out on our camping trip. It was a hard decision to make for me, as that was the same night they were holding the viewing for Christian, but the major thing that we are taking from this experience is how important family is and how quickly things can happen. I knew Marsha would understand and want me to keep the date with my family. The girls were really excited! I will be posting pictures from that night soon . . . and I must say that my first camping experience, even in the midst of extreme Texan heat, was a great success!

Last week was all about HORSES! My girls love horses so we started a two week unit on all things horse and pony. It has been a blast and this weekend we took the girls to the Sam Houston Racetrack -- not to bet, but to see the horses. :-) We had a great time, and I am loving the idea of incorporating these fun family events into our units! I will have lots of pictures coming from that week!

This week we are continuing our Horse week, but we also held our first Preschool Co-Op meeting in our home on Monday! The girls are SO excited! I am a little nervous about leading so many children (what works for us may not work for others), but the girls are making lots of friends. Currently there are 7 families total with 15 children, and I think one more family will be joining us. Ever since they left, the girls have been asking for their friends to come back!!

So that is what we have been up to. Busy, but really, really good! How about you? I would love to hear what everyone else has been up to for the past two weeks. . . I have so much blog reading to catch up on!

I will be back soon with all of our pictures!

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A Camping we will go. . .

Yes, we are going camping, and the girls are SUPER Excited! While I was a Girl Scout, and did do a few camping trips that involved platform tents, my favorite "camping trips" with the troop were in hotels, so I am pretty excited, too! :-)

Being sick last week apparently caused me to lose my mind because I forgot to order any books until Thursday evening. . . so we will be adding to our unit table throughout the week as the books come in, but maybe this will be fun -- "What will there be on the table this morning?"

This morning, they had several books, and we have read almost all of them (my voice can't handle Amelia Bedelia quite yet, I am hoping my cough will be gone to read such a long book later in the week). As soon as they saw the books, they grabbed all of them (and the sleeping bags), and brought them to the sofa for us to read! After we read the stories, we laid the sleeping bags on the floor, climbed in and watched The Sneetches for their roasting marshmallows by the campfire and then Bambi. Since we will be in the park camping, I decided to also tie the woods, nature and woodland creatures into the unit. My favorite book for this is Play With Me by Marie Hall Ets. In it, the little girl is upset when all the animals run from her, but then realizes if she is still and quiet, that they will come back and "play with her." I thought it would be good to remind them of this before our trip this weekend!

While watching Bambi, the girls wanted to make a tent. We do have an outdoors tent, and we have a large castle tent upstairs, but what is the fun in that? So I took out a large blanket and grabbed two chairs. I draped the blanket over the sofa and two chairs, secured the blanket in place by large pillows, laid down a floor of sleeping bags and more pillows and voila! An indoor tent! The girls are LOVING this right now!

There are several camping episodes of their favorite shows saved on TIVO that we will watch throughout the week, as well. That is definitely a plus of planning so far in advance and knowing what units are ahead -- it makes searching TIVO that much easier.

We will continue to read the stories throughout the week before leaving for our camping trip on Friday. We have a YUMMY menu planned and we are really looking forward to it!

So that is our week ahead. . . any ideas or suggestions for this unit, or for good "scary stories" that aren't really scary (all the characters in the stories talk about telling scary stories and I am at a loss in this department!) I'd love to hear them! I'd also love to hear what you are learning this week!

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God Directed Lessons

This summer, I began a much lighter and enjoyable approach to our homeschool preschool. I am taking wonderful unit studies, along with my children's delight directed topics, and using them as jumping off points to create a fun learning environment.

What this has meant for us is not following the traditional FIAR approach of Monday - Social Studies, Tuesday - Language Arts, Wednesday - Art/Music, Thursday - Math, and Friday - Science. Instead, I am pulling together TONS of books and fun videos, reading whatever books they ask for (attempting to read each book at least once), and going over lessons as they come. There are several topics I go into the unit wanting to cover, and there are several topics that come as a complete surprise -- either resulting from something the girls ask me, or coming from a God-inspired moment. Often, this has also led to multiple units happening simultaneously!!

An example would be a few weeks ago. I believe at the time we were learning about Kangaroos. One day, after reading our books, we decided that for our movie time (this summer, we started a tradition of cuddling on the sofa together after lunch for movie time several days a week) we would watch The Land Before Time: The Time of the Great Giving. We had never seen this movie before, but really enjoyed it. The story is about a bunch of dinosaurs who are struggling because their water supply had been cut off. As a result, there is a water shortage and the trees in the valley were dying. Toward the end of the movie, lightening struck one of the dry trees and started a fire.

As the movie was ending, it started to rain at our house. We turned off the television, pulled up all of the blinds, and sat next to the windows, watching the rain. We talked about how that fire was started and talked about our trees and plants that had plenty of water and weren't dry at all. That led to conversations about what plants need to survive and various weather topics.

The next morning, we looked out our back window and saw a man climbing my parents' tree. . . I had totally forgotten that they were having it cut down! The week before that, we noticed that the needles were all very orange and brown, in comparison to the neighbors' trees that were lush and green. It continued to get worse throughout the week and it was obvious that the tree was dead. So that it wouldn't become a hazard (like the dead trees in the movie!), they had arranged to have it cut down. . . it was just a total coincidence that this happened the day after our big discussions about this type of thing! So lessons were scrapped for the morning as we sat next to the window and watched the tree being cut down.

Watching the process led to more conversations on what plants and trees need to survive, why that tree was dangerous and needed to be cut down, the observational differences between that tree and surrounding ones, how the man was being safe while climbing the tree (an intricate system of straps and rope), the tools he was using, and the process of cutting down the tree itself! We were just amazed by the entire thing, capturing it all in pictures -- much to the amusement of the workers!

That was just a two day mini-unit, but I just love how these things come together. . . and this is just one of several mini-units that have resulted the past few months. Being open to the world around me, my environment, the girls interests and questions, events that are happening and divine inspiration has led to exciting moments in our homeschool, and I pray that I can continue to be as open to His gentle leading throughout this journey!

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Dogs and Cats and Birds, oh my!

My apologies for not updating last week! I have Bronchitis and just about all of my energy went to spending time with the girls :-) I will be posting a final recap of our China/Olympics unit soon with pictures of our lapbooks and a slideshow from our Harris Family Olympics (we had a blast!)

Last week we learned all about PETS! There are tons of animals that fit into this category and it was my intention to become familiar with all of the different types of animals that people keep as pets. Last Monday morning was spent finishing up our Olympic lapbook and driving to the library to pick up the remaining books for our unit, so this week was a bit different -- Jordan helped me set up the Unit Study Table and had so much fun! Cali had fallen asleep during the drive and continued her nap on the sofa. I asked Jordan if she wanted to watch a video while I set the table up (and be surprised by the finished result) or if she wanted to help. . . She got so excited that she could help set it up and was very proud of herself!

We pulled together all of the books and videos, as well as a few toys. Jordan had fun looking at all of the items, grouping them together and trying to make them look pretty. After the table was set up, we had enough time to take a few pictures before we dove into all of the books! We read and learned about dogs, cats, birds, frogs, lizards, iguanas, turtles, horses, fish, chickens, salamanders, bugs and ants! We read so many wonderful books, many were re-reads, that I will just highlight here our FAVORITES!

Cali -- loves anything Clifford, and she likes the Biscuit books a lot. She also really enjoyed re-reading Harry the Dirty Dog and Angus Lost, and especially loved the videos that went with the books

Jordan -- Loved re-reading Harry and Angus, and was excited to see the other two books in the series as well (Angus and the Ducks and Angus and the Cat). She also LOVED The Perfect Pet, although I admit my humorous antics during the read alouds probably helped. . . I couldn't help it, this story was so funny! It is about a girl who resorts to having a pet BUG because he wasn't too big or loud and didn't jump, scratch or shed! Finally, she really enjoyed The Berenstain Bears' Trouble With Pets and Sesame Street Puppy Love, a Little Golden Book. I loved these books, too, because they really showed the work that is involved in having a pet.

Our favorite snuggle time movies this week were 101 Dalmations and Lady and the Tramp. We also watched a lot of My Little Pony throughout the week, while playing A LOT with all of my old ponies. . . and talking about how many people have horses for pets as well. Jordan is in a very big pony/horse kick right now!

I had planned on taking a trip to Petsmart again, one of our favorite FREE Field Trips, but we didn't make it. . . however, I totally recommend this trip to anyone else planning their own Pets Week!

Next up is our Camping Unit, ending in a fun family camping trip this weekend! What are you learning about this week??

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Our Olympic Week

This week has been so much fun! When we decided that Gregg would be taking a week off of work to help with "Mission: Potty Training," we thought it would be perfect timing to do it during the Olympics, and we were right. Having him here has not only lessened the burden in the potty training, but we have had a lot of fun teaching the girls together this past week!


Friday evening, we watched the Opening Ceremonies and had a carpet pizza picnic :-) The girls watched parts of it, and then we paused it (I love Tivo) to put the girls down and finish watching it without continually rewinding it to hear what the reporters just said! Saturday and Sunday was a light introduction to the Olympics and China by simply watching some of the coverage and pointing things out -- the majority of the time we were focused on potty training, which I will talk about in another post :-)


Monday is when we began our unit on China and the Olympics. We had covered China for two weeks earlier this year (posted here, here and here), so we chose to focus on panda bears for this unit and just recap all of the earlier information while reading stories like Ping and The Story of Chopsticks, and looking at pictures of China. I was BLESSED to win the Geography section of the Homeschool Share Blast and one of the prizes was an awesome prize pack from Jimmie that included Chinese money, post cards, Olympic stickers, Chinese character stickers, artwork, Chinese snacks and bracelets, decorations, map, and several other items. . . it was awesome! Those items filled in the majority of the fun decorations on the Unit Study Table (along with our fun dragon and tiger puppets Gregg had brought back from China that are shown hanging from either end of the bookshelf).


On Monday and Tuesday, our focus was China. We read the stories and did a lapbook on pandas. We made a fan craft from Ni-Hao Kai-lan and learned more Chinese words. We looked at pictures from Daddy's trip to China and looked at the Flat Stanley pictures he had taken of the girls that made it look like THEY were in China! We also began our Read Aloud, The Hour of the Olympics. We have had a lot of fun learning more about Panda Bears and I have been impressed with how much they remember. It has been fun showing them some of the snippets of video from the late (late, late, late) night coverage of the Olympics that included, a few days ago, an adorable segment on panda bears :-)


Wednesday we began discussing the United States of America. We got out a few flags, talked more about it in detail and looked at it up close, and we went over the Pledge of Allegiance and The National Anthem. We talked about what "indivisible" means, discussing how our family is also "indivisible", and we divided our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I also showed them the Pledge in Sign Language (one of the very few things I remember learning in Girl Scouts in the fourth grade!). They quickly picked up on how to say "America" in ASL and are having fun with that! Then we sang the National Anthem, talked a bit about it, and then hopped on Youtube. We listened to our country's best singers perform the anthem at various football events, listened to an adorable 6 year old sing it, and found an awesome video of a 3 year old girl say the pledge in English AND Spanish! We are definitely saving that one! The girls loved it :-)

Wednesday night was our Chinese party. We made Chinese lanterns from Nick Jr.'s Kai-lan site, put chopsticks on the table that Daddy had gotten for us in China, and dressed up. Cali wore a silky kimono that my mom had made for me when I was a toddler and Jordan wore a Chinese shirts with tons of Chinese characters on it. Daddy wore a Karate Gi and I wore a Chinese robe :-) We ate yummy homemade Chinese stir fry and dumplings. Our dessert was red, white and blue Popsicles! After dessert, we watched the Olympics while making some more Chinese crafts including a "fortune teller" from Kai-lan (I remember making these all the time when I was younger!) and origami art including a grasshopper, flower and Chinese tiger (ok, Daddy made these mostly but we all "ooh'ed" and "ahh'ed").

Thursday we reviewed what we had discussed the day before. Gregg and I had fun with the fun $1 bin Target finds that quiz you on all of the states (dry erase placemat that we used to test ourselves on states and capitals. . . let's just say that DADDY will be teaching all three of his girls this stuff) and looking at an old Fisher Price map that I had when I was little that shows every state's capital, landmarks, scenery, famous people, and fun facts! Unfortunately I woke up with a horrible headache and Gregg sent me to bed around noon, which I happily listened to, assuming I would take a quick cat-nap. Around 5:45 pm, the girls hopped on the bed to tell me it was time to wake up LOL! I guess staying up till 3 am the past few nights watching the Olympics coverage and then waking up at 7 am to bring the girls to the potty had finally caught up with me!! The girls had a blast with Daddy though, who was MUCH braver than I was and brought them to Wal-mart (remember we started potty training on Saturday)! Since it was a lazy day, we decided to celebrate America by eating some of America's finest -- pizza rolls and macaroni and cheese. Let it not be said that we don't provide wonderfully nutritious homemade meals here, HA!


Today we will be doing a few flag crafts and finishing our lapbook on the olympics (I glued two file folders back to back, so on one side you have a traditional red lapbook on China and panda bears, and on the other side you have a traditional yellow lapbook on the olympics). We will be going over the Olympic Oath, medals, looking at our various books and fun links and talking more about the different sports. Tomorrow we will have the Harris Family Olympics and an olympic celebration, complete with Olympic cake and then Sunday will just be a fun review!


I will post pictures of the Family Olympics and the completed lapbooks soon. How is your week going???

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Our week with the Kangaroo

*** My apologies for the lack of pictures in this post. Apparently it is not meant to be! At the original time of posting there were many Blogger issues. A month later as I am adding this update, I just sat for over an hour adding them again and it still isn't working. The pictures just showed them having a lot of fun and hopping around in aprons like Kangaroos :-) ***

Last week we had a fun and casual week learning about Kangaroos and Australia. We are really doing things lightly this summer, not really adding in a lot of extra pre-planned lessons to the unit or lapbooks, but simply reading great books, having fun acting them out and watching videos that bring the subject to life and going with the girls' delight. I have also been allowing myself some time during the day to get caught up on other personal things and household cleaning, and giving them a lot of extra free time to play and use their imaginations. I am so excited and impressed with how much their creativity has grown over the past few weeks! The elaborate stories they come up with (that all seem to involve different parts of the stories we have been reading), how well they are playing together and the imaginary worlds they create for themselves -- it is just so much fun to listen to and witness!

For the actual unit, however, this week we read Does a Kangaroo have a Mother, too?, Katy No Pocket, What shall we do, Blue Kangaroo?, and The Little Einsteins' Australian Adventure. We also looked through a few non-fiction books on Australia, koala bears, and kangaroos and found the continent on the globe. For supplemental videos we watched a few cartoons that came on with Kangaroos (it has been awhile and I can't remember them all but they were found with our lovely TIVO keyword finder -- I love that tool!), and some old videos my mom had saved of the Disney show Dumbo's Circus and the Winnie the Pooh show that had the people in costumes --do you remember that?!? Anyway, on Dumbo's Circus, there is a Koala character who talked about his love for eucalyptus leaves and Winnie the Pooh, of course, has Kanga and Roo! Yes, this was just a fun excuse to break out these old tapes, but the girls loved them!

Finally, we ended the week wearing our own aprons like Katy does in Katy No Pocket. For those of you unfamiliar with the story, it is about a mother kangaroo who doesn't have a pocket to carry her baby in and she is very upset. She goes to several animals to learn how they carry their babies around and the wise owl (there is also an Owl character in Winnie the Pooh, lol) tells them to go to the city to buy a pocket. When they arrive, they meet a very kind man who was wearing an apron FULL of pockets for all of his tools. He generously gives her his apron and Katy is overjoyed to finally be able to carry her child, as well as a few other animal babies, in the pockets! So, the girls got to choose an apron from our drawer and then we chose an animal for each of them to be their baby . . . we do not have any toy kangaroos, so we went with a dinosaur and a beanie baby creature (we think it is a dog?). The girls hopped all over the messy playroom to see if their babies would stay in their pockets. It was very cute!

So there you have it. . . a simple and fun week that exposed them more to Australia and the various animals that live there. We would have read Wombat Stew as well, but we had just read it for fun a few weeks back, so we just talked about it again for this unit.

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Family Relationships and Rainbows

I love when units just come together all on their own! Originally, this unit was going to be on two Frances books: Bedtime for Frances and Sister for Frances.

The day before I hopped on my library's website to reserve these books, I was doing a rough sketch of our educational future Pre-K - 12th, just to see if I could get an idea of how I want things to look. . . not totally detailed plans or anything, just a game plan of sorts. The more I read and learn, the more I have realized that I don't think I will be following a boxed curriculum. There are several companies that I absolutely love and will use their resources as supplements, and will always consider moving to one of their "box sets" if needed, but I just don't think that is the path I am being led down. So, for my own sanity purposes, I wanted to see what was in this head of mine, if I could come up with what I would want them to cover if it was totally up to me. I plan on using this rough sketch as an outline, pulling in tons of great living books and really relying on the methods in The Heart of Wisdom Teaching Approach and Real Learning.

Anyway, I was doing this rough sketch and started looking at the book list that Elizabeth Foss provided in the back of Real Learning. I hadn't heard of many of these books before, so I did a quick Amazon search on the books listed for the K-2nd grade years. I ended up finding some awesome books by Molly Bang and Charlotte Zolotow that I just had to dive into right away! Many talked about sibling relationships (went with our Sister for Frances theme) as well as enjoying being little (Jordan was on a kick where she was trying to act like an adult and I thought this would be a great way to show her the joys of childhood), relationships with parents and more! These books were all at my library so before I knew it, we had ourselves a brand new unit!

I pulled books we owned as well and some fun videos we have (like the best siblings in the world Charlie and Lola, as well as Big Sister Dora and others). The girls LOVED this unit and these books! Our absolute favorites were: When Sophie Gets Angry-- Really, Really Angry by Molly Bang (we still have this book because it is such a hit!), If It Weren't For YOU by Charlotte Zolotow, I Like To Be Little by Zolotow, and The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown. As you can see, there were TONS of books for this unit :-)

At the same time I was requesting all of these books from the library, I was also trying to request Rainbow of my Own for another week unit that I had planned. Unfortunately, our library did not carry this title, BUT it did have several other books on rainbows and colors that looked fun! So I went ahead and requested those, planning on having this be a separate unit. When I got all of the books home, however, the girls looked really interested in the rainbow titles and I decided to do a separate science unit at the same time as our other units. All of these books are being kept in a basket in the living room and we are talking about these casually over several weeks. It is going great!

In our Science Basket on Rainbows and Colors, we have Meet Rainbow Sherbet -- this is a Strawberry Shortcake book and the girls are just loving her right now lol, Run to the Rainbow -- this is an easy reader type book, not great in my opinion but the girls like it, Planting a Rainbow -- this is also a great book to use for a gardening unit, Maisy's Rainbow Dream -- has to be Cali's favorite book right now by far, and Rainbow Brite And The Big Color Mix-Up -- this was MY book when I was little and Jordan loves this! For videos we have watched my old episodes of Rainbow Brite (thanks, mom!) and My Little Ponies (this happened to be right after Rainbow Brite and it has a rainbow necklace in it so since the girls like it, we are going with it!). There is also the Magic School Bus episode Makes a Rainbow.

For fun, we watched Peter Pan because the girls had never seen it before. . . it was so fun to see that not only did it happen to include the topic of not wanting to grow up (enjoying being children) but it also has a rainbow by the mermaid lagoon that both girls picked up on so quickly!

We ended the week with a family trip with MamaRosie and Crawdaddy (that would be my parents) to San Antonio. A very successful week!

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