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Little One has wrapped up the alphabet. And in celebration of her success, I made a notebook of her letter papers that she has done through the year.
For my birthday, I asked for a binding machine, and I’ve already had such a blast using it! In addition to this notebook for my daughter, I also made a sermon notebook for my son and re-bound one of his books that had come apart. Of course, I have many more projects in mind for this new toy as well, so stay tuned.
Most of her book are the coloring pages and dot pages that we have worked on from Erica’s Letter of the Week material, with a few other pages and projects sprinkled in among them. At the back, I’ve added a few of her number pages that she has worked on, and at the front I included her end of the year assessments (again from Erica’s blog).
My official K4-er
And, in honor of my daughter’s absolute favorite book and a core resource for this year, I made a copy of the Chicka Chicka Boom Boom cover and pasted her name down at the bottom as the author.
So this officially marks the end of her preschool year. Next stop: K4!
(And just so you get a complete picture of our new school arrangement, the baby was crying his head off the entire time I was putting this book together, with big sister trying her best to keep the pacifier stuffed in his mouth.)
I like to have official assessments for my kids, even though I often have a very good idea of what they know before we sit down to assess. My main reason for doing them is just to have my kids used to being tested and assessed so that it is never a cause for fear or trepidation when they are older.
So, when the little one wrapped up letter “Z”, I pulled out my fun Chicka Boom Tree assessments and some stampers (like these). The first time I used these assessments with my son, I admit I was at a total loss as to how to use them, and I made the whole ordeal much more complicated than it needed to be. This time, though, I just relaxed and let her tell me what she knew. She chose which letter to do each time, told me the name and sound of the letter, then stamped it before choosing another letter. It went very smoothly.
For the numbers, I once again handed her the stamp and sat back to see what she knew. She found each number in order as she counted, up to twelve and then got stumped. I praised her, put the stamp away, and then we finished counting the numbers together.
Her end-of-the-year preschool accomplishments:
She can identify all her letters and sounds for capital and little letters.
She can identify her numbers up to 12 and can count to 20 unassisted.
She can count to 100 when assisted with the tens (20, 30, 40, etc.—she gets stumped at these transitions).
She knows her colors and the names of basic shapes.
She has lots of fun memories and can’t wait to start reading.
And if nothing else, that last accomplishment tells me we’ve had a very successful year.
I had no intention of celebrating Dr. Seuss’s birthday when it came around. Being very pregnant at the time, it was all I could do to make it through a day of normal school activities, much less plan anything special. But then, I woke up that morning and saw the adorable posts everyone had up and suddenly felt the urge to do something. And with that “something” I learned an important lesson.
There was no advanced prep and no lesson plan. The day was an impromptu celebration in every sense. I googled a few activities, printed off a few pages from the pbs.org website, and then went to the kitchen to brainstorm breakfast.
I stood in the kitchen for a few seconds and listened to my own cravings. Waffles sounded good. With sprinkles. Anything’s a celebration with sprinkles. I opened the fridge to survey what I had there for more ideas. There were some thawed strawberries swimming in their own juices; a little strawberry juice would make a nice sugar glaze for the waffles. And the green punch (compliments of my baby shower) would add the perfect finishing touch.
Then, we made Thing 1 and Thing 2 from popsicle sticks and a pom-pom cut in half. We made a Dr. Seuss bookmark, colored a few pages, read several Dr. Seuss books, played our Dr. Seuss games, and overall had a very memorable, fantastic day. The kids talked about it for days.
My important lesson? It doesn’t take much to make a memory, just a sincere effort. I didn’t spend hours planning the party. And it took very little effort overall (besides breakfast and the Things). Yet, the result was extremely rewarding. And honestly, it really would have been a shame not to join in all the fun. Happy Birthday, Dr. Seuss. And thanks for all the many happy memories.
I’ve got it. I’ve got it bad—the summer itch. The weather has been so beautiful lately that I can hardly contain myself. I absolutely can’t wait for summer and summer school!
Call me a glutton for punishment, but I’ve loved our year-round school. And after last summer’s frolicks, the kids can’t wait either.
fishing
Now for the record, my idea of summer school is not to maintain the same schedule. Oh, no. Instead, I use the summer to tackle all of the fun we couldn’t cram into the year: nature study, drawing, art, and music. For instance, last summer we did a nature study and learned about our five senses, studied Van Gogh’s art and Handel’s Water Music, and continued our phonics lessons.
Why do summer school at all?
For one, I honestly can’t stand spending the first six weeks of a school year re-learning everything we covered the year before.
Two, I love the structure that school brings to our day. We all miss it. The kids can’t stand taking Saturdays off (I draw the line there). Though we definitely enjoy our breaks, after a little vacation we’re all starving for that structure once more.
And then, we honestly just have fun. I’m not saying that we don’t have any struggles or that every day is a walk in the park; but overall, we have fun learning together. If it’s been awhile since we’ve enjoyed school, I re-evaluate everything.
funny face portraits
What’s up for this summer’s fun?
Monet and Mendelssohn, more nature study (continuing our study of the animal classifications in our own backyard), and we’ll finish up our geography study with a summer of U.S. geography (learning the 50 states and some history facts). Cuisenaire rods for math, maybe some drawing. My son will continue his phonics and reading, and we may experiment with some cursive writing since he’s been curious about it lately.
How do we plan to tackle all of that and still have time to play?
Van Gogh sunflowers
I recently ran across a brilliant scheduling concept dubbed “one more thing.” This homeschool mom tackles the electives after lunch, only one per day—a day for art, a day for music, a day for experiments, a day for whatever! I immediately saw the potential of this concept, allowing me to fit in all of the fun that appeals to me.
I plan on having a schedule to follow (which I’ll post a little later) but no daily lesson plans necessarily. I have an overall curriculum, but I don’t want to be regimented by a daily list of items to check off. We’ll tackle phonics, math, and nature study every day; the other subjects will fall into our “one more thing” routine (i.e. U.S. geo-1 day/wk; art/music or drawing/music-2 days/wk; cursive-2 days/wk).
Phonics and math will take about an hour altogether; nature study will take as long as we want it to (nature study = explore the outdoors). Then our “one more thing” will take about 1/2 hour max. Really, it’s not much school time at all, but it makes for a lot of fun memories.
What am I using? (In other words, how do I budget summer school?)
That’s a great question, and honestly summer plans could easily push the budget a little bit. But when planning last year and this year, I asked two questions: What do I want to teach? and What do I have to teach with? Sometimes, what I want to teach changes after I look at what I have (or what I can pick up for cheap). So here’s what I’m using and how much it will cost.
As we head into the countries of Europe, I’m picking up the pace a little. For one, I’d like to complete the continent before Baby gets here. Two, there are a lot more countries in Europe to cover (I had selected three from each continent, but how do you cover only three European countries?). So, instead of a two week study, we’ve shortened the next few to only one week, but still packing in a ton of fun.
First, we learned our geography and completed our notebooking pages. The Greece flag was a little tricky for them, with so many alternating stripes. And it wasn’t perfect on the first try, but a little white paint covered the mistake rather well.
We read about Yannis in our Children, Just Like Me book. As always the kids were most interested in what his religion was (Greek Orthodoxy) and what he ate (ham souvlaki in a pita wrap).
Now, my husband and I are pretty big fans of Greek food. So I took this as the perfect opportunity to capitalize on my children’s interest.
We found a casual Greek restaurant and embarked on the experience. What do you order the kids at a Greek restaurant? Well, I didn’t want them to get confused when we studied Italy, so I stayed away from pasta. Instead, we ordered a couple of appetizers: pita bread with tzatziki sauce and chicken souvlaki (essentially, grilled chicken on a stick). It was the perfect kid’s meal! They loved it all, and my son was even brave enough to try a bite of gyro (pronounced “Year-o”, per the menu).
Greece really made an impression on my son. He loved the food, quickly learned to find it on the map, and decided he definitely wanted to go there some day. In the meantime, he’s asked if he can mail Yannis one of his Bibles. I love getting to know the heart of a child!
I mentioned in a previous post how much I have enjoyed notebooking with my littles. It has been a great fit for what I know I’m capable of tackling and for my kids’ creativity, not to mention a terrific record of what we’ve done this year in geography/science.
Really though, this year was just a taste. Next year, we really plunge into the depths of notebooking and all of its capabilities. Because of the timing of baby #3’s arrival, I have most of next year planned (as far as resources and curriculum go), so I know just how much notebooking I intend to do—history, Bible, science, handwriting, art/music
And, to make sure I had the budget and the resources for my major project, I’ve done some searching. Here are some resources that I’ll be using:
Notebooking Fairy is a website I just recently discovered and absolutely love. Not only does she have a number of free printable pages, but she also has an ebook on notebooking with some really terrific instruction for first-time notebookers and those who might just need a little inspiration. She covers how to use notebooking at the different grade levels, what to include for each grade level, and a number of notebooking pages to get you started. I was greatly encouraged by her info and eager to do more. She also periodically posts links to other notebooking resources, like her February Round-up post.
Notebooking Pages is another website with a wealth of notebooking pages, some for free and some for purchase. The yearly membership is way out of budget, but a couple of the notebooking packs that she sells looked perfect for us: one for nature study, which we’ll probably use for this summer; and one for anatomy, which we’ll pick up for the fall.
I also stumbled upon some really cute subject dividers from Disney’s Family Fun website, of all places—and they’re free!
Most of my notebooking pages are included in the Tapestry of Grace curriculum, but I did notice in my search that there are a number of yahoo groups that include files of notebooking pages others have created for Tapestry of Grace and Apologia, and I’m sure there are others.
That’s what I’ve found in my brief search. I also found a number of resources for nutrition, but I’ll cover those in another post. In the meantime, feel free to comment with your favorite places to find notebooking resources. I’d love to check them out!
*This post does contain an affiliate link to the ebook Notebooking Success and Tapestry of Grace.
Our next stop on our geography adventure was the country of Russia, and a transition from the continent of Asia to the continent of Europe.
I was a little concerned that our geography song might be a bit difficult for them, but both of them did really well with the mouthful of words. Honestly, I think they liked it. Something about childhood that revels in a mouthful of apparent jibberish, the satisfaction of saying a difficult word whether or not you know what it means.
The Russian Federation,
Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan,
Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, Belarus,
Azerbaijan and Armenia—
These are the countries of the former USSR.
We tackled our typical notebooking pages, learned about a girl named Olia who studied dance in Russia (Children Just Like Me), and prayed for the missionaries and unreached peoples. Providentially, one of the daily emails that I get for the unreached people groups happened to be on a people-group in Kyrgyzstan. So, I pulled up the email during our prayer time and read about the Kyrgyz, who have just recently received the Bible in their language. After several prayer cards of people without the Bible throughout our study, my son got REALLY excited about this one. He was thrilled that the people finally had a Bible and, completely on his own, mentioned it every time he prayed that day. One of the highlights of this year has been to see the tender hearts of my kids react to the unsaved in other countries; their passion for the lost always ignites my own passion.
On the last day of our study, we has some particularly fun activities planned. We made our flip-books of Russian animals…
coloring the cover to her flip-book
…and classified our Russian animals in our notebook.
Then, we made Russian Tea Cakes. I’d happened upon the recipe in one of my books awhile back and saved it for our Russian study, knowing my kids would absolutely love them. The recipe was a very simple one (which was why I was bold enough to try it, and even then I was out of walnuts and had to do my best without them).
1 cup butter (softened)
1/2 cup confectioners sugar
2 1/2 cup flour
1 tsp. vanilla
3/4 cup walnuts
Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Cream butter and sugar. Add flour, vanilla, and walnuts. Form into 1-inch balls and place an ungreased baking sheet. Bake for 12-14 minutes. Watch carefully! While warm, roll in additional confectioners sugar. Yield: 4 dozen.
The kids helped me to count and measure, then roll the balls and place them on the cookie sheet. Of course, we had nowhere near the 4 dozen that the recipe said we’d have, but there was still plenty to go around.
While the cookies were baking, the kids played with our Animal Jigsaw Atlas, piecing the animal puzzles together for the continents that we’ve covered so far (Africa and Asia).
(Notice my little chef in her adorable hat and apron.)
Then, I was actually brave (i.e. foolish) enough to let the kids roll the warm cookies in the powdered sugar. Oh!!! I must confess I was very tense and nervous, but overall we didn’t do too badly. (Forgive me for not getting any in-action photos, but I wanted my full attention on the project at hand.)
And finally, it was time to consume! I didn’t have any caffein-free hot tea for the kids, so we settled for milk and Russian Tea Cakes as the kids reflected on Olia’s favorite meal of bliny (pancakes served with sour cream). We all agreed that we liked the tea cakes better than the idea of bliny.
