10/40 Window Study for Younger Children

My older kids are doing Sonlight's Core F this year and I wanted something for Sunshine, who is in 4th grade this year.  With his auditory processing issues, he's just not able to handle longer chapter books yet, and he's definitely not ready for Core F.

I've looked and looked for a resource to use for youngers each time I've done Core F. This is my second full time through it and I planned to do it once with these kids several years ago but changed my mind at the last minute and did something else.  I've attempted to plan out fun hands-on activities for youngers before and it always ended up being too much.

This time around I found Expedition Earth from confessionsofahomeschooler.com.  It's not perfect, but it's the closest to what I've been looking for.  There are a lot of elements I've pulled into my plan and I think what it really gave me was permission to do "less is more."  Even after putting together my full plan for each week, once we actually began doing it, I cut some things out.  For instance, it's just not necessary for Sunshine to know the population or land area of each country.  Those super large numbers aren't that meaningful to him yet and there are other things about each country or culture I'd like to stick with him (like WHERE the country is).

I've also made his schedule to only loosely coordinate with Core F with each country he studies taking only two weeks.  Here is the schedule:

Moneywise Kids

Moneywise Kids

This is a great little game I picked up 5 years or so ago.  Sunshine and I have been playing it during Special Time all week and he's really catching on to the premise.  I see his math improving so much in just 3 days!

You begin the game with a $100 bill.  There are tokens face-down in the center.  The object is to collect all 6 tokens, which must be purchased for anywhere from $5-30 each AND have $100 in savings in order to win.  You can either shake the dice and earn money (a 1 is $10, all others are face value) OR choose a token.  There are also 4 "pay a bill" tokens--2 each of SICK or POTHOLE.  If you've purchased either the Medical Care token or Paid Your Taxes token, you won't have to pay the bill.  The only other rule in the game is that whenever able, you must trade your money for the biggest bill you can.  So when you've collected 5 ones, you must trade them for a 5.  Two fives must be traded for a ten.  Etc.  It's great for helping kids learn to make change and learn what each bill is worth, plus the idea of budgeting (to buy your tokens) and saving (the $100 to win at the end).

I already see Sunshine knowing how much change he'll get from a $20 to pay for a $15 token, and understanding that if he has 5 ones and a 5 and a 10, he can trade up for a $20.  He's also checking for himself what bills he'll collect from his roll.  Upon shaking a 4 and a 3, he recounts to tell me that for the roll of 7, he needs a five and 2 ones.

Hurray for simplicity and fun in a board game!  (and no lottery tokens!  Boo to PayDay!)

Bison Paintings

 Banana Boy

 Pepper

 Sunshine

We got this fun idea from this blog.  I thought they were so cute, and the kids are always begging to do art. 

I did some sample bison and then the kids did theirs.  When they went to put their paintings together, I shared some of my bison with them.  BB's two front bison are his own.  BB decided to add a bison skull and a rock to his, as well.  He was initially very frustrated at his bison drawings, but once we got to the painting and gluing part, he took off.  I love how he cut one in half to make it walking into the scene.

Pepper's bison are all her own.  She hates drawing animals, but I think her little bison turned out really well.  Better than my childish stick calves!  Her lying-down bison is also really well done.

Sunshine's two HUGE bison are his own.  I like his sun and how he remembered to tuck the feet of the back bison behind the head of the front one.

Daily Calendar Math with Sunshine

Sunshine, 2nd grade, struggles a bit with math and I've been struggling to find ways to help him understand and retain the math concepts he needs for 2nd grade.  You'd think, as a person with a math teaching background, this would be an easy task for me, but I tend to draw a blank on ideas.

He loves to play games, so we've been playing lots of math games and more math games.

I signed him up for DreamBox, and while I think it's an excellent format that makes ALL the games educationally relevant (unlike many video math games in which kids can too easily spend time playing the "reward" games of no educational merit), the concepts quickly outpaced his math skills and he grew frustrated.

We're still using Singapore Primary Math and I started him out in book 1A this year, which is a good fit for him.  We're moving very slowly through it.

So, thanks to the wonders of Pinterest, I've finally hit upon a great tool for efficiently working on the many skills he needs to keep current.  A daily math "calendar."  It's really more of a Number-of-the-Day, with the number being tied to the calendar.  He doesn't need practice with actual calendar concepts as he is schedule-driven and came to understand those ideas quite young.

So without further ado, here is what we have going:

 This is on our white board in the dining room, where we do school.  I think the skills are fairly self-explanatory.  For the addition and subtraction sentences, I give him the format _+_ = 3 and _-_=3 and he fills in the blanks.  He can choose any numbers that work.  I am reminding him that for the subtraction sentence, the initial number has to be larger than the answer (I know, there are technical terms for those numbers--even as a math teacher, I never learned them.  One is a subtrahend, I think, and the answer is the difference.  Don't really care.)

The second day we added a few things:  the spelling of the number (four), and some dots to illustrate whether the number was odd or even.

 The math tools we're using include Base Ten blocks (my favorite!) for the Tens/Ones work and a Hundreds Chart for the 1More/10 More/100 More work and for the skip counting.   We also pulled in a number line with negative numbers today to find what was 10 less than 4.  He hopped his pen down the number line and recorded the answer, but I didn't include much explanation about the concept.

I'm really excited about this simple way to daily practice a number of basic skills!  I'm thrilled that I thought of it at the beginning of the new year so we can begin in a place that is easy for him to experience success, yet we'll be able to gently progress to quite an advanced level as we work up to 365!  And he thinks it's really fun, so that's an added bonus.  It will be a daily routine, which he thrives on, so it will be easy to maintain.

For now, we're doing it on the white board, but I may print it on a piece of cardstock and laminate it for him to erase and do daily with an overhead marker. This would be an easy way to do it with multiple kids, too, and avoid competition over the whiteboard.

I also found a page for Pepper that I may have her do which includes arrays, prime factorization, rounding and reduction of fractions. I have to modify some of the skills to be relevant before I give it to her.

Rosie's Walk

During our Read-Aloud time I....read aloud to Sunshine. The first book I chose was Rosie's Walk and he's been obsessed with it for two weeks. Each day I throw in a new story, but every day he also wants Rosie's Walk.

He's actually always been that way, latching on to a book and having us read it day after day until we can hardly stand it.

Anyway, his latest love is Rosie's Walk, so I thought I'd throw in some fun extras for him.

We watched this Scholastic video on YouTube:


I printed this book to make. The link downloads the pdf of the book. I think we'll make the book to practice reading the words (he already read this out loud to me one day, just to shake things up). I think we'll also use a copy of this to work on the position words (prepositions) and he can move Rosie over, under, around, etc.

We didn't do this, but here are discussion and activity ideas for reading the book.

If you had older children you wanted to incorporate into the lesson, you could do these higher-level sequencing activities.

We'll do these activities until he loses interest in this book. Then we'll find a new obsession for him.

1st Grade Summer School

Sunshine has been in public school this past year for kindergarten.  The plan is also for him to go to public school for 1st grade.  He still needs speech services pretty intensely.

However, HE thinks he will be homeschooling. Every time I mention school in fall he mildly says, "No, Mom. I homeschooling!"

Ok.

So I promised him we'd homeschool this summer and he's been LOVING it! We have a little schedule with a chart and stickers to mark each subject we accomplish. He's very motivated by stickers and prizes (thank you public school!)

Every morning he is sitting at the dining room table with his binder and his books out.

So far, he hasn't be the least bit interested in any of the workbooks I have, which is fine, I guess. Hands-on, living learning is better anyway. I may have some kindergartenish workbooks for sale later this summer!

Our schedule consists of:

Calendar
Maps
Phonics/Reading
Math
Bible
Read-Alouds
Speech
Electives (one a day: Science, Nature Journal, Art, Music, Workbooks)

I went to Target and picked up a few things I thought he'd like for prizes: Flip-Flops and a tiny pot with seeds from the dollar spot, new watercolors, markers and colored pencils, gum (his very favorite thing in all the world). He also wants his own camera, so I'm thinking of a cheap digital camera for an end-of-summer prize. (he excitedly told someone how at the end of summer homeschool he was getting a camera and a phone! Uh, no, not a phone, sir!)

He's already earned one prize and for his first reward he picked.... (drumroll) the pot to plant marigolds! REALLY. Of all the things in the box, I'd have pegged that for last. huh. Next on his list of desires are the flip-flops. Another surprise.

He's also scheduled for (rather, he's been "invited" to (ie: targeted for extra help)) public school summer school for 5 weeks, but if this keeps going so well, I'm thinking of having him skip it. He's intense with this and we're spending about 2 hours at it, but it beats driving him in twice a morning every day. We'll see.

1, 2, 3!

Sunshine has begun working in his new "school book," Counting With Numbers, part of Rod & Staff's preschool series.

He had been working through the 1st book in the series for about 2 years now and FINALLY finished that one.  He has an attention span at least a year behind his age, likely because his family age is only about 2 1/2, and prior to now he had not been interested in academic work of any kind.

Which is fine by me.  I've never been a preschool-pusher.  Ok, yes, I was when RoseBud was little, but that was because I didn't know any better.  I learned my lesson with her.

Anyway, he has finished the 1st book, Adventures with Books and is now in the counting book.  And surprisingly, he's working very well!  The first two pages had him tracing the numeral 1 and counting one object.  He could already count, with one-to-one correspondence up to four objects reliably and sometimes 5.  And he could make a reasonably straight line, so this first section, learning "one" was easy for him.

The second page spread jumped right into the number "two" and this was a little trickier, but he persevered through it and even began writing some 2's on his own (without having to trace them!).

I brought out my old preschool-standby favorite, "Comprehensive Curriculum of Basic Skills, Preschool" which I've always picked up at Sam's or Costco for $5.95 and found him the corresponding numeral pages.  He did some more practice with ones and twos.

And now he's up to 3.  "Around the tree, around the tree, this is how we make a 3," is the rhyme in Counting with Numbers and he's making lovely little 3's!

He astonished me the other day in the car by counting up to 11 correctly!

And this boy just LOVES books!  I'd forgotten how much fun it was to read to a preschooler.  Banana Boy has never been a book boy.  Sing to him, yes!  Read to him, not interested.

Sunshine has worn out our voices reading all the My First Little House books about "Lawla and Mary."  He has them all memorized and if you change a word, he'll let you know.

His latest passion is Richard Scarry.  We began with Richard Scarry's Mother Goose, which he called his "kitty book" because of the big cat on the cover.  Now he has discovered that we own almost every Richard Scarry book ever known to man and we are reading through them.  Needless to say, he really enjoyed Cars and Trucks and Things That Go (one of my very favorite books from MY childhood.  We are on our 3rd copy in this house.  Sadly, they don't seem to hold up well)  Can YOU find Goldbug on every spread?

We do our reading before naptime.  It seems to be the only dedicated time I can carve out EVERY day to read to him without interruptions.  We try to read one storybook, one poetry book (focusing on Mother Goose right now) and the Bible.

We are reading the Rhyme Bible For Toddlers together and are going through it for the second time.

And for science, he obsessively watches Sid the Science Kid.

There you have it: my accidental preschool curriculum.  All my past planning was wasted time.  It just goes to show that no two kids are the same.  I don't think I've done anything even remotely similar for any two of my five kids. 

Live and learn...

Our "First" Day

And here's our homeschool crew. They hate when I make them pose in the sun. Those flowers were just so pretty and there's not that much color in the gardens right now.

Banana Boy is mad because he's not going to public school. This from a boy who, just the other night, made me promise never, never, never to send him away for school again. Whatever. After this picture, he and his little attitude had a hiatus on his bed until he could think of three GOOD reasons to homeschool. Lesson 1 for the day: Look for the positive.


Here is Sunshine playing nicely for 5 minutes on his school mats. I have to deliniate a space or he's everywhere he's not supposed to be--like an anti-Visa.

For his school today, he chose from about 5 trays I set up for him. The first tray he chose was his snack. I let him cut open the wrapper with a scissors. Good fine-motor skills work, right? The next time I turned around, he was cutting his granola bar (one of those breakfast bar-like a giant fig newton things) into pieces with the scissors. sigh.

Next he washed and dried the tray in a sink of soapy water under strict instructions not to wash any of the other dishes on the counter. That went ok.

Next tray was the pompons you see above. This remains a popular activity with him. He was supposed to pick them all up with that scissorsy bug catcher thing, but he was lining them all up and naming them after friends. Hey, it kept him busy for about 7 min.

Next tray was a shape sorter. He wanted me to sit down with him and play, and the girls were busy with some independent work, so I did. I was surprised to see that he recognized the clover-shaped piece and knew he'd already put it in. He opened the lid to show me. We talked through the names of all the shapes. He knows circle, square, star, clover, diamond and triangle. AFter he put them all in, I gave him instructions to put them in a certain way, which made my little control freak mad. After a bit of fruitless negotiating and some firmness on my part, he finally complied. Obeying instructions was that lesson.

When BB was done with his school, I set to work with the girls on A Child's Geography, a new book we're trying out. Maybe they'll be too old for it, but the first chapter seemed a little yawn to me. I guess they were impressed by the facts, which Voskamp neatly put into understandable comparisons for a child. For example, when she talked about the enormity of the circumference of the Earth, she compared it to the child walking 10 hrs/day, covering 22 miles/day. It would take almost 3 years to walk the circumference of the Earth at the equator!

The exercise we chose to complete asked the kids to draw their house (teeny) then their street, town, state, country, continent and the Earth. The girls found two slates in a pile of stuff I was organizing and are insistent on doing all their work on slates this year. Here is Pepper's work.

Notes about what we read:

Pepper's World:

(photo hopefully to come soon. I can't get it to rotate!)

Bug Catching

I was snuggling Sunshine before school this morning and he was playing with his bug catcher. He kept picking up the cage with the scissor-catcher thingy. Suddenly, I realized how good he was with the scissor-catcher thingy and I had the bright idea to get him some "bugs" to catch. Perfect fine-motor work!

He was thrilled to catch all these "bugs" and put them in the cage.


I think we can add this to his Tray Work list!

In case you can't tell from the photo, he is "catching" pompons.

Sunshine's Tray Work

Here is Sunshine's first day with Tray Work (a la Tot Trays)

He put wooden sticks through the holes in a spice container (5 stars! said Sunshine)
We made this very special "Monkey Bow" headband ourselves!

He painted with water colors (Fun! and I'm good at rinsing my brush, said Sunshine)

We played a matching/vocabulary game (I like when Mommy plays WITH me, said Sunshine)

He didn't really say any of those things. He doesn't talk that much. But he was thinking them in his head.

For the matching game, we laid the cards out in a grid FACE UP (I would have chosen to use way fewer cards, but he was helping me lay them out and insisted we use them all). Then he and I took turns finding matches. Not that intellectually challenging, but a good way for him to get the hang of choosing two cards and understanding that they need to match, then putting them in our own piles. Maybe next week we'll try the more classic Concentration/Memory with the cards face down. With way fewer cards.

Sunshine

Sweet sweet Sunshine. We have been working with the speech person at Banana Boy's school and we've determined that he will qualify for Early Childhood for speech, so Monday morning (unless his nose is still so gunky), off he goes to preschool!

He IS making progress with his language. Last weekend he told Papa, "Papa, pease, teeth, Sunshine," asking Papa to help him brush his teeth. But that was a LONG sentence for him.

His latest obsession is "This one." "Right here." "There!"

He still is not using any personal pronouns (me, you, him, her, etc.) He uses very few verbs and then only in isolation (like "Run, run, run" when he is running.

He understands EVERYTHING and can follow multi-step directions (go in the bathroom and bring mama the towel)

He also has become obsessed with one of our Signing Times dvds. He watches "Alex and Leah" every day at naptime, sometimes twice. He is picking up all the signs in this video and will do them along with the movie.

The other day I noticed Mr. GT had bought pears at the store. I pulled one out of the bag and showed it to him. "Sunshine, what's this?"

"App-app," he said.

"No," I said, and signed "pear" to him.

"Pay!" he shouted and did the sign back. Pretty smart little cookie, huh?

Here are some pics of his latest adventuresI had to make slings for Pepper and him for their babies. He's obsessed with his baby lately and is quite a good little daddy.He was reading Banana Boy's Bob Books to his baby. Here is how he reads, "Bob sit. Bob cat. Bob waah!" Correction: He is actually reading a Fun Tales book in this picture, but he thought it was a Bob book. So did I, apparently.
Making something out of blocks (up)
and Playing dress-up with Daisy. (down)

A Few More Catch Up Photos

Teaching Sunshine about the color red

From SCHOOL SEPT OCT

Helping Banana Boy with math

From SCHOOL SEPT OCT

I hate math blocks (unless I am not using them for math)

From SCHOOL SEPT OCT

I love math blocks when they are not for math!!!!

From SCHOOL SEPT OCT

Awareness for WHOM?

June is National Potty Training Awareness Month

 

Like I am not aware.

 

Can I just say that it is not any easier the fifth time around?  Can I just say that I am sick of being kicked in the stomach while changing a poopy 3 year old who doesn't want to be changed?  Can I just say that he is SO cute wearing his "unders" and running around peeing in the weeds?  Can I just say,

 

"Listen, Son.  It is National Potty Training Awareness Month and so I would like you to be aware that you are 3, you can pull your pants up and down, you know perfectly well what to do and where to do it and preschool starts in the fall.   So in honor of NPTA Month, I'd like you to be aware that mommy is tired of diapers and you need to do the whole big boy potty thing.  Ok?  For Mommy?  Let's call it your summer homeschooling curriculum.  So, from now on, in the daytime, you are wearing unders.  Pee goes in the potty.  Everyone pees in the potty.  If your unders are wet, you'll have to take them off, put them in the wash and put on dry ones.  Got it?  I'm glad we had this little talk about this important subject.  If you ever want to discuss any of this with Mommy, I'm here for you, ok?  I love you and I'm so proud of you!  Now, go out there and POTTY TRAIN!"

 

A different picture for those of you who had to read this on BOTH my blogs