The General's Doing

This is the General's doing . . . I find things organized into shapes, organized by colors, divided by kinds. I love finding his "projects" around the house.

Expedition Earth: China

Here we come China! Thank you to Confessions of a Homeschooler's Expedition Earth for a great journey!

An Asian sensory box. This is more for The General but the other kids have fun exploring it. It includes RICE, plastic white tigers and panda, fortune cookie messages, red pom poms, chop sticks, bamboo spoons, a special fabric case with a carved ivory stamp.











Practicing Chinese characters 1-10 and their names (and whatever that is that Agent E is working on).

A guest story teller (who happened to bring Dilly Bars - YUM!) Thanks Grandma!

We're kind of a taco & pizza type family so I'm trying to expand our culinary experience through this geography study. :) Here's our Chinese buffet done in a way that I hoped it would be eaten. Honey-glazed chicken wings (The Kid's Multicultural Cookbook), chicken broth with chinese noodles, egg rolls (store bought), and fortune cookies.

And finally our Wall of China (sculpted out of all the mixed together colors of Play-doh, time for some new doh)!

I'm keeping a collection of online resources to share with the kids on Pinterest. Here's a link to my China board.

Intro to World Geography

This first week we broke in our new assingment folders, cracked open our new workbooks, started reading some new story books, and did a general study of the continents with our Expedition Earth curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

"Excuse me Momma, I need help with my stickers."

Story time at the kitchen table. Keeping hands busy with some pop art beads.

For our Intro to Geography, we played with our continent hop cards from Spell Out Loud.

Made our "Me on the Map" from Counting Coconuts.

Painstakingly dipped & layered for our paper mache' Earth . . .

. . . which, um, didn't turn out.












Even Shortcake got in on the geography studies.

Oh the pies! How could I forget the pies! Over the weekend we read How to Bake An Apple Pie and See the World and of course I baked an apple pie (and a cherry for Papa). Yum! I just found myself wishing we still had some around. . .

It started out as a painted puppy face . . . until his thoughtful big brother left the paints out where he could reach them.

Notice: I love the matching game The General is playing there. It's one of the activities from Preschool Activities in a Bag. My parents bought it as a birthday or Christmas gift and then mom made up a bunch of the activities for me. Bless her!

Tot fun & Schooling

This past week was a pretty good week in school despite recovering from some fevers and coughs. We're playing a bit of catch up since we ended up taking an extra week off after little sis was born. Currently our routine has settled in at having a snack and doing some reading together at the kitchen table around 10AM. We've been reading a lot from my favorite kid's magazine God's World News. Then I try to have some tot trays/activities set up for The General, and I'll do some preschool with Agent E while Agent H does some independent work. Later in the afternoon while the other two boys nap Agent H and I work more on his studies.













Fort-building. A very important skill!


















Discovery Toy's Castle Works












Colored scarves
First we covered him and then he would burst out of them. Next we sorted them and practiced the names of the colors. Then we just tossed them in the air and watched them float downward.













Agent E asked to take some pictures. The General and I are checking out some DuckTales on the view finder.















The General has been sleeping with the book Brown Bear, Brown Bear for a few weeks now. I thought it was time that we pull out our Brown Bear, Brown Bear mini activity book that we made from 1+1+1=1. This is the animal front/back match up game that we are playing. I'll try to get a better picture of our book for another post. I think this was his favorite activity from the book.














And finally here's a shot Agent E took of Agent H working on his Indian medicine pouch. It was hard for him but he kept at it and now he's very attached to it. It fits a Lego guy perfectly! I'll have to get an up-close picture of this too. (Done, here it is)

Brother-to-Brother Playtime

I finally have kids who are at the age where this works! In order to have some quiet school time with both Agent H & E we started a special playtime for LE Babe with his brothers. Every morning we meet together for circle time, then snack time, then we break up into groups. Agent H and LE head up to my room to play for about 20-30 min while Agent E and I do his preschool. Then we switch it up and Agent E and LE go to LE's room to play for about the same while Agent H and I get some time together. We are on week three of this and it's working wonderful. Admittedly the first week had a few bumps but we revised things to do snack time together before we break up and that brightened everyone's spirits. (By the way, Agent H who is in 2nd grade spends about an hour or so after lunch working-during rest time on the rest of his work)

I can't imagine why it took me so long to get on the rotating toys band wagon but now that I have, it's been awesome. I have a schedule written up so that I know who gets to play what, when during those play times. It's just a list with two activities for each group for each day of the week (I only pick one of the activities a day for each group). So . . . they should play with each activity twice a month. Then I'm thinking we switch the H&E column the following month so there is a whole new list for the big boys. Here's what it looks like.

	Agent H & LE	Agent E & LE
Monday	Bowling/Ring Toss/Air hockey game Race cars and track	Little People Duplo blocks
Tuesday	Rescue Heroes Mr. Potato Head	Play tools and benches Doctor play set
Wednesday	Plastic dinosaurs Elefun/Lucky Ducks	Wooden cars/trucks and road blanket Stickers and a large piece of paper taped to the wall
Thursday	Puzzles Bristle blocks	Balls, baskets, basket ball hoop Big trucks and fire engines

Extra activities: Puppet theater, castle marbleworks, plastic zoo animals, fort, movie, dominos, trains, play mailman, lacing/stacking toys, Leap Frog alpha and animal magnets.

I just happened to think that part of my motivation for toy rotation has come from reading the book The Well-Behaved Child. In the book the author talks about not making your kids' room into the Garden of Eden (i.e. removing most of the play factor). He thinks alone time in your room is a very good tool for getting your kids to come around. There's much more to it than that but you get the idea. So their toys have been gradually sifted from their rooms. Really, they haven't even noticed.

Our first week of Mighty Oaks

Yes I changed the name of our school again. My brother and SIL sent us this plaque last Christmas that I just love: Might Oaks From Tiny Acorns Grow. I posted it above the door to our schoolroom and love it. So Mighty Oaks Academy it is.

Our first day was pretty light. We took "first day" pictures, did a little circle time, gym, and a bit of desk work.















Sometimes you take what you can get. Can you see his mouth forming the "ooooo" in " Mooooooooom"





The boys constructed and reconstructed paths out of the alpha mat letters that LE Babe got for his birthday. Then they raced along them and jumped off the end. This literally consumed two hours of their day.








LE is at his desk playing with another of his birthday presents. Magnetic pom poms on a cookie sheet. I LOVE these. This is where I found how to make them (you really don't even need directions) and here is where you can get printables to use with them. LE just enjoyed lining them up along the edge or the cookie sheet.

















Agent E at his desk area and some active preschool time. We're using the Play-doh alpah mats from Homeschool Creations.
















Agent H at his desk area, no real dress code as you can see. Up next he's modeling our "globe". We wrote the continents and oceans on index cards and he had to tape them to the correct locations on our balloon.

That's a quick glimps at our week. Don't be deceived by the drawers at the desk stations. I am NOT doing the workbox method this year - I burned myself out on it last year. I am glad that I did it though because I learned a lot of things that I like from it and being a part of a workbox Yahoo list provided me with tons of great free schooling printables, ideas, etc.

Tot Activities

Ebug and I have been having tons of fun doing ACTIVITIES! together. (Hearing him wrap his little 3 year old tongue around the word "activities" is enough fun in itself for me.

These are my FAVORITE activity books ever!! First Steps Workbooks by Kumon. We have the Let's Sticker and Paste book. The pages are filled with cute critters that you progressively peel and stick, and snip and glue. One of the best parts is that they are super easy to pick up at Target!

I love sticker books! However they are thoroughly confusing for a tyke to figure out what goes where and the fight to keep those pages open is impossible. I cut the pages out of our newest book. I know, gasp! and horror! It completely goes against my grain to mutilate a book of any kind. But I'm telling you it was wonderful. I filed them into a plastic expanding file folder and now they await our next stickering adventure.

Finally I've been gleaning a few ideas from my favorite tot blog ever! 1+1+1=1. I'm going to wait until I take the time to take pictures though so you can see the fun first-hand. :) By the way 1+1+1=1 has started a new blog called Totally Tots. Crafting, faith, healthy eating inspiration and more goodies!

Thanksgiving crafts

Lapbooking is all the rage here! We did some cool math centers a couple of weeks ago (I'll post about them later) and recently we've been working on our Thanksgiving lapbooks. I pretty much just copied what 1+1+1=1 did. The boys love going back and looking at all they put into their books.

Computer time with Ebug

Tuesday nights Ebug, LE and I see Papa and Agent H off to AWANA. EH and a buddy go shoot trains (photos that is) while Agent H hangs out with friends for the evening.

Ebug has a hard time seeing them leave, so to help ease his sorrow I have been suggesting that we go for a walk to which he replies "Oh YES Mama, good idea mama, thank you mama!" for the next 20 minutes. Really! It melts my heart how something so simple means so much to him.

The rain kept us from walking tonight so we played on the computer. I really haven't had him on the computer yet, probably because Agent H usually lays claim to it. Here are some of the places we checked out:

Goldenbooks.com (Fairly nice educational games - skill levels are a little beyond his 2.5 years but we found some fun games and really cute printables)

Starfall.com (Phonetic games and some fun activities like decorating a pumpkin online or creating a winter scene - there is so much at this place, I should really do this with Agent H too).

Kidzclub.com (Online children's stories to listen to, nursery rhymes/activities, and cool flashcards. Be sure the check out their "Story Links" on the Stories and Props page!!)

Oh my goodness I can't wait to do petertherabbit.com with Agent H - it's so lovely! The music and graphics just make me all oohy and goohy.

Activity Bins

So those bins that I posted about . . . I love them! I read about them in a magazine and latched onto the idea. The idea is that you let your preschooler pick out a bin and that they play with it for 10-15 minutes, then you let them clean it up and pick out another one to play with. Hopefully this buys you time to work on schoolwork with your older child/children. I keep the bins exclusively for school time so that they hold some extra appeal.

Here is a list of what currently fills my bins. I think I'll probably switch things up in another month or two to try and keep things interesting.





- A wooden connect four game that was in the dollar section at Target
- Black beans and my Discovery Toys Measure Up Cups
- Mini books
- A chain of carabeiners to link and unlink together
- Colored paper strips for cutting
- Ink pad, stamps and paper
- Lauri lacing shapes
- Lauri Locktagons
- Lauri Fit-A-Space
- Foam alphabet puzzle, again from the dollar section at Target
- and of course Legos!

I had a bin filled with Papo plastic animals and a wooden collapsable fence (made by my Grandpa T) but it was in such demand for playing zoo that we had to leave it out for regular use!

If anyone has ideas about what to fill these bins with in the future, I'd love your ideas! I'm thinking stickers, more games by Lauri and . . . .?

Heel Pooch

As I was tucking H in for bed a few nights ago he was again pretending to be a puppy. He wanted me to give him a name . . . the only thing that came to mind was "Pooch", the name of my brother's dog when I was a kid. H loved the name and it has stuck. Tonight I was trying to think of a creative way to get him to obey me in a way that would avoid resistance. :) So I said that dogs are very obedient to their masters and whenever their masters say "heel" they come right away. It worked. Later as it was time to brush his teeth he even requested that I give him the command. I'm going to cherish this little gem and bring it out on "special" occasions. I can just see the looks now as I say "heel Pooch" to H in the grocery store.

Little E took a surprise dunk in the tub tonight. The way he leans over the edge of the tub as it's filling, I knew it was going to happen sometime soon. Fully clothed and soaked through and through . . . it took him a bit to gain his composure but he was smiling and laughing at papa's clowning around soon enough.

By the way, I just found a wonderful website for kids coloring and activity pages. Should have thought of this a long time ago: www.crayola.com. Great stuff for toddlers and older kids. Eddy has a printer to test at work so I'll be sending him lots of stuff to print out for us.