Mommy Monday Hip Homeschool Hop!

Dolls, Barbies, fingernails and hairbows!!

On Monday's we stay at home and have "mommy day".  This is our day to do fun homeschooling and projects.  Allie loves to play with her dolls and barbies.  Her favorite thing to do is cook and she loves learning anything that has to do with cooking!

Allie is getting very good with her fractions because of all the cooking she does.  She can go in the kitchen all by herself and make the whole family scrambled eggs and she even adds bacon, cheese, dill (and one time even raisins!)  While we are cooking I always grab that teaching moment.  We talk about volume. measuring, adding, subtracting, dividing equal shares and fractions. 

 

This is one of our math songs!

For reading today we read Aesop's Fables.  We did a comparison chart and we discussed why Aesop chose certain animals for his fables.  She chose her favorite fable and told me why she chose that fable.

Her favorite fable today was the one about the peacock.  She liked how the goddess pointed out the peacock's strengths and how everyone has something they are good at and everyone can't be good at everything. 

Allie as a fairy in Peter Pan

After we talked about the peacock story she told me what she was good at.  She is good at acting, singing, cooking and riding horses.  For her writing assignment today she made a bubble map all about her.  She then used her descriptions to write an acrostic poem about herself.  She really enjoyed this creative writing assignment. 

We use the Workbox system for homeschooling.  A few of Allie's workboxes today were her contraction snowmen (see freebie!) and clay suffixes

making clay words with suffixes. 

For art we are just finishing up our Polar regions unit.  Here are the projects she did for this unit.  She also made a Polar bear mask.

Here is her torn paper landscape with polar bears!  I think she did an awesome job :)

Here is her Inuit Native American and her igloo made out of Styrofoam blocks.  This was a great math project!  She had to cut the cubes and spiral them in tilting towards the middle.  I put on the hot glue where she wanted and she placed the cubes.  The little man was made out of a wooden clothes pin, paper and fur.  Allie made his arms and legs out of pipe cleaners and then wrapped the paper around them and taped it. 

I love homeschooling!!!  We had a great day, I would love to hear a comment about how your day went!

Word Work Wednesday!

Today is word work Wednesday!  On Wednesday's I teach Kindergarten.  We are working on writing labeling and writing 3 part stories.  We always start our day with journal time but recently I have been using that time to do our mini lesson on writing.  I forgot to take pictures of our anchor charts today.  Next week I will post all of our charts.  We started our mini lesson with a review on drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. 

Writing workshop, they are drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. I learned these ideas from Crystal at www.kreativeinkinder.blogspot.com  at the  Virtual Teaching Expo Everything K

Here is one of the pictures (these are in their journals so it is on wide ruled paper)

This student is extremely detailed.  You can clearly see he drew in pencil, labeled, and colored using at least 5 colors!  He is 5 years old!! 

Today our writing workshop was so much fun because usually I have them write a sentence and then illustrate what they wrote.  Today I told them to draw, label and color their picture and they didn't have to write a sentence.  They all wanted to write a sentence and did without me even telling them to!! 

Here is the sentence that goes with the picture above.  It says "Sneakers is planting the flowers."  The only thing I had him correct was the N needed to be lowercase and asked him to tell me what special sound was at the end of flower.  He remembered and corrected it on his own.  I love this!  "Sneakers" was our "elf on the shelf" ;) they still talk about him!!   

Later on in the day we had our writing lesson and our regular writing workshop where they are working on 3 part stories.  To help us remember how to write stories we have "Steve the Story telling caterpillar"  He is a puppet and we have him on one of our anchor charts. 

Steve the Story Caterpillar.  I read about Anchor Charts in the book Teaching with intention.

We brainstormed about how to write a story, then we did interactive writing and we all wrote a story together on the board.  After that everyone chose a title for their stories and began writing.  When they were finished I met with each of them individually to discuss their stories.  I was amazed and proud of their stories!!  They were so creative and original.  I will post them next week after they finish illustrating them. 

During our writing workshop and reading groups we had word works or literacy centers.  Here are some pictures of what we are working on.  Everything that is out on the language shelves is all review to them and they work independently. 

This is the Moveable Alphabet.  She is working on her "pink words" , they are 3 letter short vowel words.

This is the "insta learn board".  I believe this is an absolute must for every classroom and homeschool room!!  I could and should write a whole post dedicated just to this board.  Zack is working on spelling words with digraphs.  This board is leveled and self correcting. 

This little girl is working on long vowel, rhyming words.  The children have to figure out how to spell the words and it will not fit if it is spelled incorrectly.  The cards are color coded so they always know what level they are working on.  Like I said... A maz ing!!!!  They also have a math one, but that is for another day! :)

Sight word horse races from scholastic.

Letter and word poking (kindergarten does words and preschool does letters)

After I teach morning Kindergarten we go home and finish our day homeschooling!

This is Allie doing her word work, compound word magnets from the good ole' Dollar Store!! 

This is another fabulous Dollar Store find!  A word wall spinner with commands.  Allie LOVED this work!!

One of the commands on the spinner was to define a word, so we just expanded on this and defined several words. 

After that Allie chose a word in the dictionary to be her new vocabulary word.  We call those our magic words and she gets a sticker on her chart every time she uses the magic word correctly!

We do some type of "word sort" activity everyday.  This one is from Hillary Lewis at Rockin Teacher Materials  Her Spelling has improved 100% since we started doing word works!!! 

Allie finishing up her polar bear research report during our writing workshop. 

We finished up our day with writing workshop.  We also have anchor charts in our homeschool classroom but they are a little more advanced.  Allie has discovered that she does like to write stories when she knows how!!  Homeschooling for her has been such an incredible blessing!  Tonight, the last thing she said before she fell asleep was..."Thank you mommy for homeschooling me and always planning fun things to do!"  It just made my heart melt and all the late nights laminating, cutting and printing are so worth it!!! 

Sorry this post was so long, I guess I had fun writing and doing word works today too!!  I hope you enjoyed it too!

Snowman Contraction FREEBIE!!!

Here is my first freebie!!  Finally!  Feel free to share at will.  I will be working out the kinks as I learn and will make another one soon.  Snowman-Contractions-Freebie click here

Our California Adventure 2011 part 1

Disneyland for the holidays!!  What a wonderful surprise for my kids.  We picked them up early from school and just kept driving.  By the time we got to Idaho they were all wondering where we were going but we just said it was a shopping trip.  As the sun rose up over the hills in the early morning we were already in California.  The warm breeze and palm trees gave that away instantly, however they still had no idea where in California we were headed.  Our first "fun stop" was to La Brea tar pits in Los Angeles.  This was an excellent introduction to our homeschooling journey.  We learned A TON!!  I remember visiting the tar pits as a child and always loving it, but forgot just how much you learn. 

As we explored the museum I noticed the kids were quite interested in the teeth of the animals.  It gave me the idea to discuss the difference between herbivores and carnivores.  We did a scavenger hunt through the museum to find and classify the herbivores and carnivores.  Later, on the drive down to San Diego the kids made vacation journals where they drew and labeled all the carnivores and herbivores they found.

After searching for herbivores and carnivores, we discussed predators and their prey.  This led to a hunt for predators and a critical thinking activity of what their prey might be. 

This is a giant ground sloth, prey to a saber tooth tiger.

Finally, we had the opportunity to have a private lesson from a docent in training about tar, the properties of tar and what the native Americans used tar for. We were able to explore ancient artifacts that were found made out of tar.

Next stop, Anaheim!!