Update to my out of date BLOG

What is going on in OUR BUSY WORLD:
* I have an 8 year old!
* We will be starting on our 2nd year of homeschooling on Monday
* We have a lot of field trips and special events planned for the next 2 months
* We will be using Heart of Dakota (Bigger Hearts for His Glory) for History, Bible, Geography, etc
* We will be restarting Math U See Beta for Math
* Homechool Co-op starts in 2 weeks, I will be an assistant for Science for 3rd and 4th
* A friend and I are co-captains of our Relay for Life team
* I am part of Event Leadership for Relay for Life this year
* Trying to visit my Dad every 3 months, he is in a nursing home and wheelchair bound and has dementia
* Still working part time in Mental Health
* Researching and exploring work at home options (Suggestions welcomed)
* Just got chickens last week and 4 of 8 have already died :( All 4 were from the same farmer, 2 of his alive, 2 from someone else
* My garden was a BUST this year. Lots of time, energy and $$ with ZERO (well almost zero) return
* Going to plant a fall garden anyway
* I need to PURGE stuff and am struggling with it
* R reads chapter books
* Budgeting with irregular income is HARD

Our Winter learning theme

So, our learning theme for the week  last month has been Winter. We have learned about snow, ice, icicles, hibernating animals, and winter clothing. I have been a MAJOR slacker these past few weeks with Christmas and vacation and just general laziness. Sad to say but our book reading has been minimal along with everything else. However, we have managed to read a few books and complete a few activities/projects.
Our books for the Winter theme:
Animals in Winter
                                                                                                  Snow Day                                                                                                   First Snow
                                                                  Sugar Snow
                                                                  The Snow Lambs
                                                                  Marven of the Great North Woods
When Winter Comes
Callie Cat, Ice Skater
and more of course.
My favorite is Sugar Snow :), and R's is First Snow. The illustrations in First Snow are phenomenal. The look so lifelike and I think that's why R likes the book so much.
Our activities have included making model magic snowmen, painting with ice cubes w/ food coloring added, melting ice with salt, epsom salt painting, coloring snow men, snow pictures (shaving cream with glue), playing outside with our gloves/mittens and scarves on and if you count Christmas-playing in the snow and with icicles.
Hopefully we will get back on schedule this next month and I won't be so lazy.

Our theme for the past few weeks-FARMS and What My Child Is Reading This Week(s)

Little R is having fun with our Farm theme. I have been a little slack, umm lazy and the theme has been sparse on activities and a little lengthier than I intended. We once again checked out LOTS of books on the subject and spent tons of time reading.
Some of our books on Farms- Cock-a-Doodle Quack!Quack!, Little Farm by the Sea, Cows, Cock-a-doodle-hooooo (R's favorite), Chicken Joy on Redbean Road (my favorite), Once Upon a Farm, Seasons on the Farm, All Pigs Are Beautiful, and many more.














A few of our activities-cotton ball sheep, TP roll horse, painting cow spots, picking cotton (random spot on side of road-I know, bad mommy), stopping to look at cow farm, lots and lots of Old Macdonald Had a Farm, and others.
By far the funniest thing that happened was on Halloween at the mall. Little R went up to the Chick-Fil-A cow, waved and then proceeded to try to lift up the front of his costume near his umm..unmentionables. I was horrified and then she oh so sweetly she looked at me and said "Mom, where's the udders for milk?. I couldn't help but laugh. LOVE that girl, she makes my heart smile.

More Bugs-our Themed Activities

As a part of our "unit" on BUGS, little R and I spent time completing a few projects, learning about different bugs, and exploring the great outdoors.
We made a wooden bead, pipecleaner and pony bead spider; clothes pin and coffee filter butterfly, and a clothes pin and pipe cleaner dragonfly. Little R and I had tons of fun watching caterpillars turn into butterflies and learning about the life cycle. We have watched quite a few tiny caterpillars grow big and turn into butterflies. I think the most fun was exploring our yard for different types of insects. Just in our yard we found roaches, grasshoppers, spiders, ants, beetles, roly polies, bees, moths, earthworms, caterpillars, aphids, butterflies, flies, stink bugs, and a praying mantis. I was thrilled to find the mantis :)
Little R learned the three parts of a bug, but not really where they are on the bug. The most surprising part of this for me has been R's lack of fear. I try soooo hard not to let her see my fear of bugs, but she sometimes picks up on it. I do insist that only Daddies touch spiders though :)
Other activities we completed:
2 videos from the library on Insects and bugs
Counted with bugs
Talked about flyers versus walkers
Watched a lizard eat a bug

Happy learning.

What My Child Is Reading This Week-Bugs and Insects

We have checked out LOTS of books over the last 2 weeks relating to our bugs and insects theme. Some have been a hit, some not so much. The hits have been The Very Ugly Bug, The Caterpillow Fight, Bob and Otto, The Big Bug Ball, and I Know an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. The first 2 were read over and over and OVER again. Little R was able to recognize the covers to the first 3 after a few days and would say, "read Bob and Otto" or "read the Caterpillow Fight" when she saw them. Love it!!
Some of the not so liked ones- Manuelo, the Playing Mantis (just didn't hold her attention), Insects Are My Life (probably a bit too advanced), and On Beyond Bugs.
We also read a few books we already had around the house-Ten Little Ladybugs, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and A Bug's Life.
I will post soon about some of our bug/insect themed activities.

All of our Ocean Theme Activities

As mentioned in a previous post, our first theme for practicing preschool was Oceans. We did lots of craft projects, read many books, and watched Shark Week and a few ocean related movies (The Reef, The Little Mermaid). I thought I would combine all of our craft and learning activities into one big post with pictures :)
Things we made/did:
craft foam crab
Ocean theme collage with magazine cutouts
Mixed media collage with stickers, seashells, tissue paper seaweed
painted seashells
counting with seashells
paperplate fishbowl
bead covered cardboard starfish
sticker fish/fishbowl counting
ate Goldfish and whale crackers
Fed the fish in our saltwater tank
Observed fish and hermit crabs in our tank
Field trip to St. Andrew's Bay

AND a still have to do-hand and footprints in wet sand. Bad mommy for putting this one off :(

More ocean theme activities

R and I have been doing a few projects relating to our ocean theme the past few days. We made a collage of ocean/beach themed pictures on painted posterboard. R painted and glued on pictures I cut out of magazines. We also made a collage of foam fish, crabs and whales(leftover from her 1st b-day party), seashells, and rolled up tissue papers and streamers for seaweed. R once again painted the paper, stuck on the stickers, seashells, and tissue paper. I put the glue down for her but she was definitely not happy about it. :) I got the idea for the mixed media collage (sound so fancy that way) from this blog-http://thelittletreasures.blogspot.com/2010/06/under-sea.html
We also assembled a crab from foam. Don't remember where I found the template but I traced it on to red foam, cut it out and let R put the pieces together and add wiggly eyes.
I like using a theme-it gives me the direction and at least a little bit of organization I need. Pictures coming soon.

Normalcy

I am trying to maintain at least some sense of normalcy in the household throughout these trying times. This week R and I (and Dad too) have worked with hearts-coloring, counting and identifying smallest and largest. We will use some of these as Valentines for the grandparents.
Last night all of us made a devil's food cake to take with us to Alabama-with a few slices sampled of course. R did most of the adding of ingredients, turned on the mixer, and helped pour the batter into the pans. She was so proud! She kept saying "my first cake". Precious.
I have to include how the cake baking came to be.... R and the hubby went to the grocery store on Wednesday. When hubby went to check out, there was a cake mix in the cart he didn't put in there. Our little chocaholic snagged it and added it in. Hubby says she insisted on holder her chocolate the entire way home and he spent quite a while explaining to her she couldn't eat it right then.

Homemade playdough

R and I had a fun time making playdough this past week. We used a recipe from a craft book we have but there are TONS of recipes out there.

We used:

2 cups flour
2 cups warm water
1 cup salt
2 Tablespoons vegetable oil
1 Tablespoon cream of tartar

The recipe recommends slowly adding the water to just the flour and salt mixture-I just dumped everything in and stirred alot over medium low heat. I stopped cooking when the mixture was hard to stir, then let it cool for awhile in the pot. I then scooped the dough out and put it on waxed paper to finish cooling. The dough still felt sticky to me so I sprinkled some corn starch on it and kneaded it in.
From there I added a little orange essential oil for fragrance and hopefully preserving. I separated the dough into 4 parts and added food coloring. R chose which colors except for orange-that was my idea.
The results were great!! Well, except for the orange which looks kinda like pureed pumpkin- not what I was shooting for.
This could be a great lesson for ratios, measuring, color blending, and the science behind how heating a mixture of liquid and powder makes a solid mass.
Playing with our creation was even more FUN.

Fun filled days of summer

R and I have done a lot the past few days-painting with watercolors, talking about weather, lots of coloring, blowing bubbles, and checking out
the yard- especially the caterpillars.
Watercolors- R likes to paint but scrubs the brush on the paper, likes washing the brush off but not drying, and enjoys painting the sidewalk, her body parts and mine. I got the paints on sale for 1.99 at the local teacher supply store and they have more paint than most sets I have seen.
Weather-We have window clings up and talk about weather when we remember. R doesn't really get it yet but she can identify sun and rainbow.
Coloring-R breaks crayons, peels the paper off and colors on anything she can. I'm thinking chunky crayons are better for toddlers. However, I have a plethora of crayons new and old. BTW-Target had the 24 pack for 24 cents, can't pass that up. I can always used them for shaped crayons later.
Bubbles- R and I blew bubbles-well, mostly me and she chased them. The bubbles were huge...one of our neighbor's kids commented-those things are as big as balloons. I used regular bubble liquid but added dish detergent and glycerin. No measuring just poured it together and stirred. I made improvised wands from pipe cleaners and used a pie pan for the container. I didn't like the pipe cleaners, too flimsy. Next time we will try metal clothes hangers bent into different shapes.
Our yard-WOW!!!! We have caterpillars. There were some on the parsley and some on the fennel-today I only saw them on the parsley. None so far on the purple passion fruit. I plan on buying a butterfly habitat for next year so we can observe the life cycle of a butterfly.