Inexpensive Fun for All!

Thursday? Yay, we are that much closer to the end of the week and I needed it. I needed it so bad that I doubled up on the work load yesterday in order to have the school day off today. We will take in a casual Science lesson on planting and a quick geography lesson in States & Capitols by way of a fun game but that is it. My heart and brain need a break. So, while it may not really be the weekend, today is a day of relaxing and taking it easy. A day to just reflect on all that is good in the world and not focus on the negative. Is it possible to just enter a bubble for today? Anyway, I am here today to show you that it's not always necessary to $pend, $pend, $pend, in order to make awesome fun happen at home with your kids. Time and simplicity is what really describe heaven to a child. Here are a few fun things that we have been up to this week.

Take some simple dot stickers and a marker and create a large Dot-to-Dot for your child! Don't have dot stickers? Use colorful highlighters to make dots and put the numbers inside the circles in black marker! It's simple and so fun for everyone!!  

Turn an old closet door into a dual play surface! We had some large track that came with a playset just lying around and never being used that my husband stapled onto an old door that we took down when we moved in. The other side remains flat for block building and lego play. Don't have road? Make your own! Black Electrical tape and a white marker are perfect for doing such a job and the best part is that it peels up to re-do it! 

Felt squares became a hop scotch game, that quickly transformed into a game of LAVA floor where you had to only hop on the squares. That quickly turned into an obstacle course. These little squares were so inexpensive (Michaels pack of felt with a 40% off coupon!) and have been the source of so much fun! 

Felt to the rescue!! After taking some of the many felt squares they have, the kids sat down with scissors and went to work creating. I love how things from around the home can turn into a source of such fun and imagination at work.

We spent some time reading in our classroom library and the fact of the matter is that no matter how old they get, sometimes a good picture book is exactly what we all need! Enjoy the day my friends and be sure to let every moment count!

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Wordless Wednesday...In this Moment...

In this moment, I felt the love going through all of them.

As we sat working on a puzzle of Sweden, they worked together and made my heart soar.

YES!

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Summer 2013 Bucket List with Linky!

It's that time of the year, you know, when Summer is on the brain and the excitement of what is to come stays on your mind. Every year, we do a Bucket list of things that we hope to accomplish that Summer, and 2013 is no different. Well, it's actually a little different! We are planning on keeping school going year round but will loosen our schedule a bit. 

We will take 1 or 2 days off a week as part of our "Summer Break", which is why some of the tasks on our list are rather simple, they allow us to still check things off on our school days as well. All of these museums and Zoo trips and the like are where we are members at or have recipricol membership due to our purchased ones so in reality we are making it a low $$ Summer. Summer is about the memories, not about the money spent. It's about the feelings we have, not about the things we buy. I want us to continue to grow closer as a family and to make memories with my children. 

Memories will cost you next to nothing to create. Your children only want you and your time, they will be happy with a pot of water on the back porch if it means that you will sit there next to them pretending that it is a gourmet soup that needs flowers and twigs and dirt to make it perfect! They will create lasting memories, even if all you do is freeze ice cubes with food coloring and little toys of theirs in them and then pop them into a bowl and let them chip away at them with play hammers or see who can melt them the fastest...memories are what the past is made up of, make yours count!

Make your memories count!!!

Do you have your bucket list ready yet???  Grab the button to put in your post & Link up below!!

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Just Mommy N Me!

Hello Tuesday! Today has me chatting about the Mother/Child relationship. I aim to make this relationship one that they will treasure always. I am not looking to become their buddy, but someone that they can always come to. I want them to know that as a Mother, I make decisions that they will not always like, but they are always for the best. I want them to understand that though I may lose my temper, I always love them. I want my children to understand that even though I have 3 children, there is room in my heart for each of them. In 1 day, there are only so many hours that I can spend with each child as an individual, so I wanted to find ways in which we could always interact and if need be communicate without the rest of the world around.

After a posting from a reader that spoke of Mommy N Me notebooks, I knew this was just the thing. I quickly made up notebooks and explained their purpose on page 1. Each child gets a notebook in which we exchange notes or pictures or anything at all that may come up in the day. We take turns writing in it and when we are through with it, we put it on the receivers pillow. There are colorful pens and colored pencils that we use for just our notebooks. Every now and then Daddy will sneak in a note and it's always a random surprise for the kids and even for Mommy!  

1-on-1 dates are always fun for the kids. These make them feel special to have undivided attention from mom. Our dates usually take up about 3 hours time and can be anything at all that the child requests. Gabriel usually loves to go out for Ice Cream and then Go Karting, Miniature Golfing, Train Ride or the Science Museum.

Princess Autumn absolutely loves Mommy Time and it usually ends up with us getting Mani/Pedi's and going to a movie. Sometimes she mixes it up with a request for a Fancy Dinner out or reading books for hours while drinking tea at Barnes & Noble.

Roman is easy to please and always predictable! He loves sweets and chocolate milk and will often suggest a bakery. He likes to play in parks, no matter what the weather and then end our time together with a new matchbox car. The crazy thing is that he can find a matchbox car and often come up with the memory as to when he got it. It's pretty cool. 

How do you spend time with your kids?

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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.

Enjoy the day everyone!

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Classroom Coordination

I should be sleeping but instead I am still awake blogging. I seriously need to get on a better schedule but all I do is say that and never work towards it. Must work towards it! I have a tour of my classroom coming up this week for you all but for now I wanted to share the way I display my posters in the classroom. If I have multiples that are similar, I hang them back to back on cup hooks. This allows me to change them out regularly and it also gives me the added bonus of adding on coordinating flashcards for the kids to use as they interact with the poster.

My Solar System border sits at the top of the wall but right below it on a cup hook are planet flashcards. They have the exact same photos as the ones in the border, which make it super easy for kids to see the planets in their correct location and learn even more about them. Also in the photo, you can see a cup hook holding a Presidents Card, this hook holds many government Flash Charts all in one spot. I don't have to keep them hidden away in a binder, which makes them do double duty! They are a decoration but ALSO they can and often times are just grabbed and read!

This corkboard USA has a ring of matching state cards directly below it but the best part of this piece is that we have started marking the states we have visited. It's so much fun to begin learning with the places we have been. Little by little as we travel the USA, the kids are getting HANDS ON learning but even better is that they sit by this map with the cards and look at where they want to go next.

This MASSIVE world map takes up a large chunk of wall space, it is so detailed and perfect that the kids and I often just attack it with Dry Erase markers making notes of where we have been and where we want to go. To the left of the it, is the hook that holds the Countries and Capitols cards. As we discuss where we would LOVE to go, we read all about it. 

Our Government section. The Flash Charts that I mentioned earlier along with the cup hooks holding multiple posters that can be changed out. These are all laminated as well because they are really PLACEMATS!! It allows the kids to take them down and write on them. Using the coordinating flashcards, this is an easy CENTER in the room for use during Quiet Time.

I also have an ever changing display in a small nook of the room. This has a topic of the month that will change out periodically along with coordinating books. On the clothesline above it will be changing topics, art work or anything at all that we can think of! 

The Multiplication Table chart is one of the reasons I came up with the cupholders, I like it out for the kids to work with along with flashcards but when it was time for a test, I wanted to have it covered without making an extra mess or having to do too many steps. 

The Numbers chart is another sign on the cup hooks with the Multiplication Chart that I switch out with when needed. It's so easy to do that the kids often help me out.

Enjoy the weekend my friends!

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