Weekly Update

We are excited about Thanksgiving this week. We have "themed" out the entire week in most of our core lessons and especially in our extra-curricular activities. We are learning about Pilgrims, Indians, Pocahontas, giving thanks, harvesting, and much, much more. We have had some new packages arrive this week and we are eager to either get started or really delve in.

Take a look at some of the activities we have been working on this past week:

1st: Tot Trays! 
I have incorporated some alternative ways to keep this fun and exciting for my tot.

2nd: Geography!  
We have began our "Road Trip USA" curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler. It has wonderful lessons and plans and my son is enjoying himself. We will be charting each State Insect/Bird/Animal as we explore the 50 states!

3rd: Countdown to Christmas! 
My boys enjoyed creating this calendar. We will be counting down our days and celebrating Advent along the way. The pack is called Everyday Emmanuel from What's in the Bible? Later this week, we will be stuffing our calendar pockets with fun-filled family things to do for the 4 weeks leading up to Christmas. We will keep you posted!

Helping Kids Write

My son loves to free-write, but formal writing is another animal! We have been practicing very hard on writing a personal story this week. Because my son is an aspiring artist, I thought of a way to make writing fun! We introduced colors and he thought is was so cool to begin writing on construction paper. I created a PDF as a guideline to help other teacher-moms who may have creative, unmotivated, or struggling young writers. My son was excited about his final draft and he has been talking about it all week!

Hopes this blesses someone, MissMom.

You can click here to view the PDF!

From brainstorming to final draft, Peanut mastered the writing of a personal story, 2nd grade!

What are we getting into?

We are all on track this morning and ready for learning.

This week we are adding Tot Trays for Chipmunk and Geography for Peanut.

We had a mini preview of tot trays yesterday and it was a hoot! He enjoyed counting finding his ABCs, and making the letters of his name. We are thankful to Carisa for the idea. You can visit her page here to learn more.

Today we will be adding cutting, painting, and 1-2-3 counting to his trays. He is working with a new distance learning curriculum as well and he his loving his two teachers. He has mastered all the letters in his name...now we just need to get them in the correct order! :-)

Peanut has a mini-preview of the 50 states as we take a year long road trip through our country! We begin with our nation's capital--D.C. He visited early this year and is excited to learn some new thing and read up on some of the landmarks he's seen. We chose the curriculum from Erica of Confessions, you can visit her site here.

Today we start unit 2 in all of our subjects. In math, we are learning place value, greater than/less than, expanded form, and rounding. Peanut is very excited about math! In Social Studies, we are planting and learning about farms, past and present.In English, we are working on how to use the thesaurus and dictionary.

I will check back in later today with updates of our day!

I have a class to attend this evening and all my "worthy" caretakers are unavailable, so off to class they go with me. This will be my first time taking them with me, so let's pray!

2012-2013 Student Interviews

I loved this idea from Carisa at 1+1+1=1. It was quite fun interviewing my guys and hearing what they had to say. Because we transitioned from school to homeschool, I am a bit late in the year with all of the homeschool tenants of education, so forgive me for posting this in November!

I have created a basic template for this, for those who want one. If you send me an email address I will send it to you as I am not sure it would post here without losing the formatting. Even with the template, you would still have to insert your own pics, obviously. I created mine a bit differently than Carisa, b/c I have no photography software skills and it was getting late and I wanted to feel like I had accomplished something by staying up 3 hours over my "bedtime." So, it's not perfect, but it's ours. If you are savvy with photography software, then yours will look better than mine. Oh, and I let my boys choose their color scheme, so forgive me if it does not "match." I like to let them be creative.

So here's to trying (and a little inspiration!).......