Week 2 of Homeschooling

YAY! Another homeschooling post to show Ryder's fun preschool homeschool learning!

This week, our theme was JUNGLE.

On Monday, we printed out a coloring page, and pasted it to our board.
I explained what the jungle was, and we had fun naming all of the different animals on the coloring page, such as Elephants, Snakes, Lions, Monkey's, Hippos (I didn't even know Ryder knew this one, yet, he named it right off the bat), and others!

The vocabulary word for this week was VINE- plants with long, thin bendable stems that grow on the ground or climb up trees, etc.  We colored a picture of a vine with some really pretty Morning Glory flowers on them and posted them to our learning board. Here is a picture of Ryder bringing me what he thought was a "vine" while he was outside working with daddy. How cute.

I played "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" song for Ryder. He thought it was quite funny when I sang "whoee, whoee, whoee oh um oh way!" and he got very silly jumping around at the wheem o whack o wheem o whack part! LOL. I don't know why I always call it that.

I also braved the Library for the first time with Ryder and the baby and we chose some books to go along with the Jungle Theme. Again, these are listed for us in the Brightly Beaming Free Preschool Curriculum- so we just went down the list and pulled the ones the Library had. Ryder had a lot of fun and I was glad to be able to document this FIRST for him. I can't wait for our weekly Library trips!



On Tuesday, we learned about the color GREEN. Ryder knows quite a few colors already, but it was still nice to go over it, and point out things that are green around the house and town while running errands. We also incorporated the color by wearing green clothing, and revisiting last week's shape by drawing and coloring GREEN SQUARES.

Our Library Books

On Wednesday, I introduced the letter of the week- which is B. We printed the letter out, he colored it, and we practiced words like BAnanna (this was great, since before we learned this letter, he was just saying "nana" for bananna, and now, he says it correctly!)

 





Here is Ryder showing his "B" picture to Baby Rhett.












 We posted the letter B on his learning board, and we did a fun Letter of the week project by creating a BEE to post up on his wall.

                                                

   

  

He has so much fun with these Letter of the week crafts! I think they are the highlight of his week. 

"B" is for BEE!

 Thursday, we discussed the number of the week, which is 2. Ryder has surprised me very much this week by counting all the way to 11 by himself! I am telling you, that Team UmiZoomi has something going on- he watches them all the time, and then I realize he is learning all these numbers! Teehee. Maybe I should limit his Team UmiZoomi time??

Sign of the week this week is TIGER
Poem for this week: I had a little nut tree
Bible verse for this week is B:  Be Kind To One Another, Ephesians 4:32


This week, we took a "field trip" and attended the MOPS annual playdate at the Pumpkin Patch and had a blast! I incorporated as much learning as I could during this trip, and am proud of myself for recognizing "learning" in regular everyday environments as a homeschooling mom. It's so much fun!
In both of these pictures, Ryder demonstrates his knowledge of the number "2" to me by explaining that he and Rhett are "TWO boys saying cheese" in this picture. Then, he poses with "TWO Pumpkins mommy!"

We talked about how Pumpkins grow on a VINE, which was our vocabulary word for the week...

I think we will use this as his 2012 School Picture!

and had other schooling opportunities as well...

Physical Education :)

Practicing Fine Arts- Photography

Science :)

During play with the other kids in MOPS, Ryder gets to act on his Bible Verse for the week too, as I remind him that Jesus says to "Be Kind To One Another". 

As before, I am ending this post with a picture of our Learning Board from this week: These are easier than you would think to put together, once you get the first one done. I am already excited about getting the one for next week started!

 Thanks for reading! I hope if you run across this blog, you are inspired as I was, to do some type of schooling with your young children! It is so much fun for them and for me! I am blessed to be able to stay at home and do this with my almost 3 year old, and I can't wait to use the same lessons for Baby Rhett when his time comes. Stay tuned for Week 3: Theme of "Kittens"!

Week 1 of Homeschooling

Well, it took me some time to get this post up, but I am proud to say it's finally done!
My first week of homeschooling went swimmingly well, due to all of the pieces being laid out for me via the Preschool Homeschool Blog I stumbled upon when I was looking for ways to get started.

So, here's what we did our first week:

Our theme for the first week of school was COWS.  Ryder already knows about cows and points them out all the time, so this was a fun refresher for him. We printed a picture from the internet of cows and posted it to our learning board.

On Monday, I introduced the theme to him, and we colored a farm and cut out some cows and pasted them on the farm, and we went for walks around our area that has cows and visited with some!

 The Vocabulary word of the week was CALF:  a baby cow.
We looked on the internet for a coloring page of a mama cow and a baby cow and talked about the vocabulary word. We posted the coloring page on the learning board with the word and meaning on it.

We chose a story from the reading list provided by the Brightly Beaming Preschool Curriculum, Two Cool Cows, by Toby Speed. We also went through his bookshelf and pulled out all the books with cows in them. He had fun sitting and looking through them.

Per the curriculum, I should be also sharing a poem with him, (which they also provide for us), but we didn't get around to that part :)

The song we chose to go with week 1's theme was Old MacDonald had a farm! Ryder is so cute when he sings "had a cow". Here is a video of him looking at some books and singing the song.

We are also supposed to practice some gross motor skills on Monday's. For week 1, it was to put on some music, and roam around the house making cow sounds. We didn't get around to this, but that video probably would have been funny!

In this curriculum, we alternate shapes and colors every other week on Tuesday's. So, week 1, we are learning about a shape, and week 2 we will learn about a color, and so forth.

The shape of the week was the SQUARE. We printed out a coloring page from the internet and Ryder colored a square, and we looked for items in the house that were the shape of a square and he played with them.
                                                  

After that, we reviewed the items that had been placed on the learning board (Theme,Vocabulary word,  Read another book from the reading list to do with the theme, sing our song related to the theme, and ending with the Shape we learned).

On Wednesday, I introduced the Letter of the week: A
We printed a coloring page of a large letter A and Ryder colored it.

I found some nifty free printable flashcards and we cut them and added the letter to his learning board. We talked about various things that begin with the letter A, like Apples, and Alligators.

We had fun making the Letter of the Week craft project- An Alligator! Then, we completed a review of everything on our learning board, added the Letter we just learned, and read another book from the reading list to do with the theme.

Thursday, I introduced the Number of the week, which was ONE (1). Again, we printed a coloring page with the number 1 on it, and Ryder had fun coloring it. Again, nifty flash cards were printed and cut. We added the number to his learning board.

We are going to be making some index cards that have the number and the spelling, and then another card that has the number that matches it in stickers. This way, several weeks in, when he has more numbers, we can play a matching game. I will post that project when we get started on it.

With the Number of the week, we go around the house "counting"- or getting items like cheerios or goldfish, etc. and I have Ryder count them out. Another thing we do is take the Shape of the week and draw the corresponding number. I also point the numbers, shapes, letters of the week out to him as we are going about our day in town, or running errands, wherever I see them.

Thursday's for schoolwork are kind of slow due to it being number day and we don't have projects for that (other than the matching game, which is ongoing)- so I decided to add a couple of things to this preschool curriculum.

The two items I have added are the American Sign Language SIGN of the week and a Bible Verse of the week. I already had some flashcards for most common signs for babies/toddlers, and just went through it to find one that went along with the curriculum's theme. This week, we learned the ASL sign for COW.

For the Bible Verses, I found a great site that offered printable flash-cards for Bible Verses that go with the Alphabet. So, I just printed them out, and we are using them in correlation to the already existing Letter of the week. For week one, the "A" Bible Verse was Matthew 7:7 - "Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and you shall find." Another website I found that had different Bible Verses to memorize with your children is here. Maybe I will do those next year, and then rotate the verses out each year.

Both cards get added to the learning board for the week.

On Friday, I introduced the Rhyme of the week. This curriculum introduces it on Friday, and you continue to repeat it/review it until the next Friday when the new Rhyme is introduced for the new theme. The Rhyme for the COW theme is HEY DIDDLE DIDDLE. We wrote it on an index card and put it on the learning board to review throughout the week.

Friday's are also Fine Motor Skills Day. We were supposed to build a cow out of squares, but we didn't get to this activity.

The rest of Friday's are used as a review day- going over everything on the board that we have learned that week. Here is a picture of our board at the end of the week, along with Ryder's Letter of the week Craft we did. It hangs on his wall in his room. I am pretty proud of the way it turned out and am excited to share with you week two! Stay tuned for the next post!

Why homeschool a preschooler? Why NOT?

Ever since I found out I was pregnant with my son in 2009, I thought how fun it would be to homeschool, but I didn't know much about it. I knew that my county had a big Homeschooling presence, so I joined their Yahoo Group page, and started following some of the posts there.

I know, you are probably thinking... why was I worried about school at all, when he hadn't even been born yet? I don't really know either. I just know that I continued to hear horrible things about the public schools in our area through my sister and several others, that I wanted to do more research and get to know the home schoolers in our area. At this point, I was still active duty for the National Guard, and I had no intention of quitting work, so it really was just kind of an "idea" that I wasn't sure would go anywhere.

Fast forward two and a half years, a re-occuring back injury that took me out of work, and becoming a stay at home mom, and observing as my sister pulled her kids out of public school and began homeschooling. At the beginning of 2012, my son, Ryder, who is now two, almost three- began a speech therapy program through Early Childhood Intervention (ECI) because he was having a hard time speaking and it was causing a lot of turmoil for him not being able to make himself heard.

As Ryder continued his speech therapy for the next six months, I was amazed at how fast he learned and wanted desperately to learn more every day... not just HOW to say the words, but to put them into action through play and learning. It's true what they say. Kids at this age are such sponges! They just soak up everything! At this time, I was seven months pregnant with my second child, Rhett, and decided then and there, I didn't want to wait until Kindergarten to start him on learning.

I began doing some web searches, and found a plethora of ideas and programs and things I could do right here at the house with him. The problem was there was SO MUCH out there! I didn't know where to start! It's very overwhelming to say the least.

That's when I stumbled upon another preschooler homeschool blog that had taken the FREE Brightly Beaming Letter of The Week Preschool Curriculum a step further by outlining everything one had to do to begin homeschooling their preschooler with minimal purchasing of anything! I had hit the jackpot! Everything was done FOR me, all I had to do was incorporate it. So I got started!

This blog is being set up as a digital record of the schooling that Ryder (and Rhett- later on) are receiving, in case I choose to continue homeschooling through their older years, as well as something they can look back on (kind of like a digital scrapbook) of learning. I encourage the family members, near and far, to check in often to watch my two wonderful SONS SHINE as they learn (and I learn through them).

What a wonderful blessing my back injury and becoming a stay at home mom has turned out to be. I am excited to begin this journey!