OurWanderingAdventures : Weekly Round-Up!

Sorry for the delay in posting, it was a crazy weekend, followed by a busy Monday morning! I hope your weekend was wonderful. Yesterday, we woke up to little 'snowy' footprints leading us to a gallon of GREEN milk and green sprinkled donuts!!! The note we found explained it all! Our Elf on the Shelf Charlie had decided to see if he could beat the leprechaun to our house and when he found that he did, he was sooo excited! The children were thrilled and it was the start of a fun day.

A library used book sale gave us the ultimate find of fun books! I love these sales for so many reasons! They help us uncover so many treasures, bring out a love of learning, give money to libraries and so many more.

Our 5-A-Day books from last week were all sooo good that they were mostly read twice a day! Chicka Chicka Boom Boom is an old school favorite from the Preschool years but I am pulling it out again because it is an easier read for a new reader.

Stopping in at a local thrift had us finding these awesome books that of course were a LOTTERY find, because many are on our homeschooling book list for next year! How awesome is that?!

Beans Beans Beans! These letters are all hidden in the beans and Roman had to dig through them to find the letters he needed for his sight word flashcards. This was by far one of the most fun activities for him.

A great combination of early learning skills is put together in this CENTER. Roman has to spell out his sight words by looking for the correct letters but also with the ADDED challenge of matching up the Lower Case Letters with the proper Upper Case letters.

There is absolutely nothing in the World I love better than to see my children working together in a warm and healthy environment. With all that is happening lately, I know that my husband and I made the right decision. My son is actually now ahead of the game when it comes to Kindergarten and my 2 children are 1 grade higher than they were when they were in school. (The school curriculum that we purchased tests the children to find out what level of learning they are at) My home has heat, no fear of bullying, friends and so much love that it must be bursting out of the windows. In this home, there are no politics, favorites, protected parties and no fear. The school they left is getting worse and many families are joining us in this homeschooling journey. I often sit and wonder what Seton (our curriculum) thinks when they began fielding calls from all of us at the same school. At the moment there are 4 families that have left that school with 9 children and there are more coming. After knowing all that, you would hope that the school would begin to sit and think what exactly they are doing wrong. Oh well, for now we are all happy and healthy as the children still see their friends and continue to learn at a pace that was designed for them!

When learning about mazes in class, we decided to make our own out of LEGOS and you should have seen their faces at this challenge! It was a good thing that this activity was saved for the end of the day, because it was one that certainly occupied a few hours time!

B,P,D,Q are all letters that seem to get easily confused when in their lower case form. I purchased a large, blank foam die and filled with with the letters (one on each side) and put a line at the bottom of each letter to identify which one it was. He got to roll the die and circle the Upper Case letter that it was. I gave him different colored markers so that he was able to keep it all separate. After all of that, I had him WRITE the lower case letter beneath the upper case one that was on the chart. A simple activity to put together, but one that really helped him get his letters straight.

These tiles were a steal at 6.00 from STAPLES. They link together Upper Case, Lower Case and a Beginning Sounds photo all in a train of Alphabet tiles. This is one of his favorite centers.

Creative writing is one of my favorite classes to grade the papers of. Reading all these amazing tales really makes me smile. I wrote up a deck of writing prompts and put them on a book ring to keep them together and then the kids pick a number daily and that is the prompt they are given. They always look forward to finding out what they will write about!

We found these fun little easels and canvases at an art store and I immediately knew they would be put to good use in art class. The kids could hardly keep their hands off of them and of course wanted more when the task was through!!! They are all now decorating my living room.