homeschool recap

I initially downloaded the free sample preschool lesson from Peaceful Press, the same creators of Zoey's early elementary curriculum, and I loved it but I noticed it gave instructions to do things that I had planned on doing with Des anyway. I decided to not purchase the curriculum and just create my own, and get inspiration from other mom's doing preschool online. This week we transitioned to focusing on the letter B. Here is some of what we did:

I personally don't like incorporating religious aspects into all of our learning, but we do have a devotional each day. Since we focused on the letter B this week, I put our focus on learning about baptism. We talked about what to expect when they get baptized at 8 years old, and we talked about when Jesus Christ was baptized. I used a lot of printables from lds.org, we sang different baptism-focused songs from The Children's Songbook and read from the scriptures and the illustrated New Testament book. 

For Zoey I had her also illustrate what she imagined it might have looked like when Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist (you can see below) and she also did copy work of different words surrounding Jesus' baptism.

Other things Zoey focused on this week were timed math facts. I remember doing those math addition sheets as a kid and loving it, so I wasn't surprised that she loved it too. We also did a lot of weighing with a scale, and that was a major hit. 

For history we finished up learning about Pocahontas, and I really enjoyed learning with her. All of my knowledge of her was based on what I had seen from the disney movie. I swear we didn't learn about her growing up, which is a major shame. What an amazing person! Now that she knows the truth about her, we plan on watching the movie this weekend and I can tell her that they changed the story quite a bit for entertainment purposes. 

We are still working on reading Little House on the Prairie for our language arts focus. She has been loving the series and has done really well giving me narrations after our chapter readings.

  

We had so much fun studying bees this week! We found some fun ideas on Silvan Reverie including the honeycomb counting printable.  

a. Transferring "pollen" with tweezers to the beehive. I used playdough and a hexagon shape to make a crappy looking beehive, but hey, they got the idea. This was really great for Desmond who is needing to strengthen his fine motor skills.

b. Using the honeycomb printable, Des used honeycomb cereal to count out the amount needed. He has been doing so well counting with manipulatives and aloud. 

c-d. I also got this idea from Silvan Reverie. I used an egg carton to look like a hive, and filled them with baking soda to be the "pollen". And I mixed vinegar with yellow dye to be "honey". They played with this activity for a long time. Transferring the vinegar with a dropper was another great fine motor activity.

a. Using a gumball printable from The Measured Mom, Des used glass beads to count. He loved this! I often use pom pom balls for this activity, but I liked the connection of blue beads and the letter B.

b. This printable was from Simply Learning. They enjoyed this art activity of decorating a bear and adding texture.

c. We read Blueberries for Sal and acted it out as we read kerplink, kerplank, kerplunk while dropping blueberries into a metal bucket.

d. Invitation to play with a lot of B themed things. I'm always amazed by the stuff the kids come up with when I set up a play tray.

Tea and poetry time is a big thing in the Charlotte Mason style of learning. I'm not huge on tea, but the kids must have adopted a love for it from Ted. They guzzle herbal tea! Right now they are loving sweet rose tea sweetened with honey. We always have a snack with our tea, and since we focused on blueberries this week, we made some homemade blueberry muffins.

a. Another printable from Simply  Learning. They sorted their berries big, medium and small. 

b. Des using dot to dot markers to make upper and lower case B. The wooden blocks are from Handwriting Without Tears.

c. Making the blueberry muffins.

d. Tea time and poetry reading. We usually read 3 poems and then discuss our favorites. We read from The Llama Who Had No Pajama.

Books we used this week:

Blueberries for Sal by Robert McCloskey

Bee: A Peek-Through Picture Book by Britta Teckentrup

Bees: A Honeyed History by Piotr Socha

Nature Anatomy by Julia Rothman

Farm Anatomy by Julia Rothman

National Geographic Readers: Bees by Laura Marsh

Pocahontas by Ingri d'Aulaire