August School

Here are some of our school activities for this month., We have had a busy month. The boys and Gracie are learning so much, but I think I am learning the most being their teacher!

This is our continent and oceans project for the year. It is an idea I have adapted from a great resource, a book by Barbara Curtis called, Mommy, Teach Me! We have made a folder for each continent and one for all the oceans. As we read different books and learn about different countries, cultures, animals, and foods, we look it up on our globe and figure out which folder the item belongs in. We have a reading list inside each folder that keeps track of our books.
Then Mommy sometimes prints out pictures of animals we read about for us to place in the folder as well. That way, at the end of the year we will be able to look back and see how many different parts of God's World we have studied!


The boys also enjoy hands on math. They love counting backwards because Mommy sometimes lets them knock down things like these counting bears! :)


We have discovered a really fun way to work on handwriting our letters and numbers. Mommy fills a bag 3/4 full with paint. Then we draw with Q-tips. We squish the paint to erase and start over again. This has been a favorite this month!




Another way we practice our writing is by painting with water on the sidewalks. Beware if you try this at home! After awhile we discovered splatter painting with the paintbrushes which quickly turned into a paint brush water fight! :)





This is one of the morning activities we made for fun. We have been collecting water bottle tops to make this Capital/lowercase letter matching game.



As part of our math this month we have been working on patterns. As a fun activity we made pasta necklaces, working on making patterns. To make the colored pasta you just put a few teaspoons of vinegar with some colored dye in a Ziplock back and squish (but be careful, cause our bags were cheap and we got dye everywhere! :( Then just place the pasta on a cookie sheet with paper towels to dry. I put a bread tie at the end of the yarn to make it easier for the kids to string the pasta. We also used the Neon colored dye which made the pasta much brighter and more fun. We tried Rigatoni and Ziti this time, but the Rigatoni worked the best! The Ziti was a little too thin to string easily.







Our big news of the month is......Luke is starting to read!!!! Yeah, Luke! Here he is after he read his first two books!



We have actually not even started our formal reading and language arts program for the year, so this is so exciting! (We introduced Math, Bible and some handwriting and letter review, along with lots of library books, and planned to add in the language arts and our Sonlight curriculum after we took a week off for Ben's tonsillectomy.) We have been just spending some time each day playing games with letter sounds, alphabet magnets and flashcards, etc.

Luke has known all his letter sounds for well over a year, but reading just has never "CLICKED". He would guess, or add sounds and get frustrated, and so would I! So we took a break for a bit and just "played" reading games.

I absolutely LOVE the book, Mommy Teach Me to Read, by Barbara Curtis. Several of our reading games I got from her book. We had looked at several other "Teach your child to read..." type books that I checked out from the library, but none of them seemed to really fit Luke. I knew the minute I read Barbara Curtis' book that her ideas would work with our Luke and give him the confidence to read!

One day this month he surprised me by reading a page out of a book, and I knew it was not from memory. I looked at him and he had a twinkle in his eye and I knew it had clicked. Today I asked him if he wanted to try to read one of his early reader books and he jumped at the chance. I had found the boxed sets of Bob books at Costco a few weeks back and was excited to find them cheap! Earlier they had frustrated him like crazy, but now he is begging to read more. He is walking around the house telling everything, animate and inanimate that he can read, it is so cute. Ben is quite upset that he can not yet, but he is only a few steps behind. His time will come.

We have a long way to go, but to see him so PASSIONATE about learning to read now has been such an encouragement to me! I had promised both boys that this year when they learned to read Mommy was going to buy them each a bean bag reading chair of their own....so now I need to start researching bean bag chairs!