New Year, New Ideas

Well, we're finally back on top of things (for now), and I'm hoping that we can continue to stay that way.  After our break from the holidays, we started back to school with a bang.  The boys were really excited.  Sawyer didn't even want to go to preschool, and he insisted that we don't do anything "fun" until he got back on those days!

For the past year, it's sometimes been a challenge to begin our day.  Hayden is a little slow to wake up some days, and if the t.v. is turned on while they're eating breakfast, it takes them 10 years to finish, move away from the television, and get dressed.  It's always a fight to get them to brush their teeth (especially Hayden), and then, of course, all they want to do is continue watching t.v. or play with their toys or go  outside.  And, really, who can blame them?  They are 3 and 5 years old, they're boys, they can't be still.... they need to be active!

So, I changed things up a bit this year.  This week, I began morning chores for the boys that they start as soon as Daddy leaves for work.  By the time Daddy leaves for work, both boys will have eaten breakfast.  Once he's out the door, morning chores begin.  These chores are:  get dressed, brush teeth, make bed, and clean the romper room (aka playroom/schoolroom.  After that, we immediately begin our school day.

To start off our homeschool day, we've always said the Pledge of Allegiance, and then we'd do the calendar, a nursery rhyme of the week, and sometimes a musical activity with shakers, bells, or wooden rhythm sticks.  Again, I changed things up a bit.  We still do the Pledge and the calendar, but we pretty much exhausted the nursery rhymes, and the musical activity would just get them all worked up.  So, I decided to save the musical stuff for later in the day, I took away the nursery rhyme, and I added some new things to the calendar.

Calendar Wall

So, here's our calendar.

• Each month will have a pattern (this month it is AAB/red, red, blue).  
• We've also been keeping track of the number of days we've been in school, but now I have a place value chart so it's more visually appealing to them (see red pocket chart to the left of the calendar).  
• Below that is a clock, which is new for us.  The goal of the clock is to teach them the concept of time by changing the hour for each day of school.  After we get around the clock, we'll change to every half hour.  After that, we'll change every 5 minutes, and after that, we'll change every minute.
• To the right of the clock is a tally chart.  We add a tally mark for each day of the month, circling every 5 days, and writing the number 5 below.  Then, we count the number of days together.  
• To the right of the calendar at the top are the days of the week.  Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  Sometimes, we go through the whole week saying the days of the week in order.  Sometimes, we take the laminated days, and I have Hayden put them in the correct order.  Most days, we just say, "Today is _________.  So that means yesterday was __________ and tomorrow will be __________."
• Below that is the season and weather, with a weather graph (newly added) below that.  We look or go out side to see what the weather is that morning, put the correct word on the weather chart, and now we also fill in a bar on the weather bar graph.  At the end of the month, we'll be able to see how many days were sunny, rainy, windy, rainy, and/or snowy.  I'm thinking that after a couple of months, I'll start changing up the type of graph we use just to keep it interesting and make them knowledgeable of the different types that there are.
• Last, but not least, we have a code date and the entire date written out on the chalkboard (which you can't see in the picture).  The code date is the month, day, and year written in numerical form (i.e. 1-9-12).  Then (as an example) I write out:  Today is Monday, January 9, 2012, and we say it out loud together.

This week in math we did:

• Days of the Week Sequencing.  Kind of like I mentioned above with the calendar.  We did a refresher lesson to start off the week after we did our weekly "Measure Mommy's Belly" activity.  Hayden is getting much better at recognizing the days of the week, although he's not able to spell them on his own yet, if you asked him.
• Feltboard Ice Cream Math.  I made a felt board activity with ice cream cones.  The cones have the numbers 1-10 on them, and the ice cream has either an addition or a subtraction problem whose answers equal one of the numbers on the cones.  I'm trying to do more felt board activities since they really enjoy them.  Plus, once we've done them together a couple of times, it will be something that they can come back to on their own when I have to do one-on-one with each of them.

Felt Board Ice Cream Math

• Word Fishing.  This activity kind of combined several subjects.  The boys had to "fish" for number words and color words using a makeshift fishing rod with a horseshoe magnet and paper clips attached to sentence strip words.  They loved doing this activity.  It was very hands-on, and they were pretty good at figuring out the words.  I had them "fish" for a word, and once they caught it, they had to tell me what the word was.  With Sawyer, I'd give him hints by telling him it was a color or number word, and I'd start to sing a song he was familiar with that had that word in it.

Magnet Word Fishing

Close-up of words

• Tangram/Shape puzzles.  Didn't get a photo of this one, but if you aren't familiar with tangrams, here is a page that explains what they are, what they look like, and examples of things you can create with them.  I let Hayden do these for a little while before completing a review of number words on the computer website, www.ixl.com.

This week in language arts, we did:

• The letter Vv Mini Book from First School Preschool Activities and Crafts.  We've been working on these all year, and a lot of them Hayden did last year.  This didn't happen to be one of those weeks, however.  When we do these books, we usually read a short story about the letter of the week first.  Then, we trace the letter with our finger (mostly for Sawyer's benefit), and we read the thumbnail pictures that go with the book.  They color the pictures while I cut out the pages that they will match them up and glue them to.  Hayden cuts out his pictures, but I do Sawyer's.  Otherwise they'd be mutilated.  I do let Sawyer practice his scissor skills by cutting out the large letter on the paper that we traced with our finger.  This week was the first time EVER he cut out the letter without hacking it to pieces!  I was very excited for him.
• Word Sorting Activity.  This was just for Hayden while Sawyer was in preschool.  I got this idea from LocalSchoolDirectory.com.  He had to sort out the words I had written out on sentence strip cards into groups of rhyming word families.  

This week in spelling/writing we:

• completed two other activities from the same website, but in our own way.  One was to write the letter that came after the one I had written down.  The other was to write the lowercase letter that matched the capital letter I had written.  This was kind of a review for Hayden and a helpful one at that.  Probably something we should do frequently.

And Sawyer put together the Alphabet Caterpillar on the felt board while Hayden did the writing activities.

• Word Scavenger Hunt.  For this activity, I placed some words around the house for Hayden to find.  Once he found a word, he also had to locate it on a piece of paper where I had them all written down for him to trace.  He traced the word, read it out loud, and then wrote it himself next to the traced version of the word.

Finding the word

Tracing, sounding out, and writing out the word

There was no art this week.  We started a unit on magnets for science.  With this unit, I started a vocabulary corner that we'd add a new word to each day.  Hayden began a new lap book, and the boys did a lot of exploring and discovering with the different types of magnets that Hayden got for Christmas and the few that I picked up from the School Aids store near our house.  I found a pretty good bundle of lesson plans on Teaching Magnets to Kindergartners.  It was pretty well laid out with concepts taught, materials needed, procedures to follow, and a few worksheets to go along with each lesson.  It was written up for a large class, so I made some adaptations to fit our little homeschool of two/three.  

• The first lesson was an introduction to magnets.  The boys learned some of the different types of magnets and drew pictures of each one.

Drawing the different types of magnets

Exploring magnets

• The second lesson was on learning what types of objects are attracted to magnets and what types are not.

Dividing the objects that magnets do/do not attract

Putting together a mini book for the lapbook

• The third lesson was to determine which type of magnet was the strongest.  There was a big debate about this one, primarily because the magnets we had were different sizes as well as different shapes.  We added nuts to each magnet to see which would hold the most.   I'm not sure if we came up with the right answer or not, but it was the right one for what magnets we had anyway.

The horseshoe magnet

The bar magnet

• The final lesson this week was about magnetic poles.  For this lesson, Hayden was given 2 bar magnets with the north and south poles labeled and one bar magnet with the north and south poles covered.  He learned that opposite poles attract and alike poles repel.  He also learned how to identify which end was which.  

This week was all about initial exploration of the magnets.  I plan on doing more experiments with them throughout the next couple of weeks as we also do a social studies unit as well.  Hayden will use the next week or two to finish putting together his lap book, and once it's complete, I'll be sure to post pictures of it.

All in all, this was a great first week back at school.  We all had a great time.  The boys really enjoyed their learning experiences, and they were good about cooperating every morning and throughout the day.  Looking to more fun weeks of school like this one!