(And All My) Work Be Praise

Bible story: creation Scripture focus: Job 38-42  (about creation) Book: Gregory the Terrible Eater Craft: thumbprint grapes Snack: grape salad , Annie's bunny grahams Math  (for Owen) : gumball counting I printed this cute gumball machine paper from 3dinosaurs.com , which has tons of free printables -- go check it out for whatever subject (tots through kindergarten, mostly) you need! We pretended the pom-poms were gumballs, and counted them one by one by sliding them out of the machine. Owen loved this activity and asked to do it twice more throughout the week. Owen also colored this little Gg book, again from 3dinosaurs.com . I intended to ask him if he wanted to color the g oat g ray, but he attacked it with a g reen crayon before I noticed. :) At least he's finally interested in coloring! The thumbprint grape idea was entirely my own (for maybe the first time ever)! I drew the outline of a grape cluster and had them fill it up with thumbprint...

Last week was unusually busy -- out of the house three mornings in a row, followed by a visit from Grandma and Grandpa while my husband and I went to a wedding in North Dakota -- so we had a light week. The week's theme was inspired by the picture above: an idea from the ABCJesusLovesMe curriculum to review colors using ice cream scoops. Both boys are solid on identifying colors, but since we own the book Mouse Paint  (a favorite!), we often talk about which primary colors combine to make other colors.  Book: Mouse Paint (by Ellen Stoll Walsh) Science: mixing colored water, making homemade ice cream Craft: coloring ice cream scoops Letter review (for Owen) : matching upper and lower case Aa and Bb I had hoped/intended to have them scoop water into bowls themselves, add a little fine motor work in, but Silas was in the way and time was running out, so I just poured the different colors into different jars myself. It was all I could do to squeeze one last drop of ...

Bible story: David and Goliath Focus Scriptures: 1 Samuel 17 , Isaiah 41:10 Books: My Blue Boat  (by Chris Demarest), Boat Book  (by Gail Gibbons) Crafts: "b" sailboats, "B" bubble painting Blessing others: baking banana bread for two "B" families at church On Monday, Owen watched the letter B section on Starfall and then colored big B's brown and little b's black. (Say that three times fast.) It's one thing I think he's actually learning in all of this preschool nonsense: what the lower case letters look like, and how to compare them to capital letters. By Wednesday he'd become quite the stickler about calling them "capital" and "lower case," too. After Levi finished his math, we did this " b boat" craft inspired by some blog I can't find now. The camera battery was dead, so I only have pictures of the finished product, but it should be pretty self-explanatory: Levi insisted on coloring ...

A few nights ago, my four-year-old threw a temper tantrum the likes of which I've only seen once or twice from him, ever. He screamed until his voice was hoarse, until he was no longer making any sense at all, until all he had left was huge, hiccuping sobs. At first I thought he just needed space to calm down, so I took a few minutes to settle my two-year-old, a quick book he'd been clamoring for me to read and then an episode of Thomas the Train. I spent the better part of twenty minutes sitting behind Levi on his bed, arms wrapped tight around his little shaking body, whispering nothing of importance while he alternately screamed and cried and tried to explain why he was upset. His disobedience had been the original catalyst, but we were long past the point of any effective discipline, and the only thing to do was build the fences for him, to put up the boundaries around his emotions that his fledgling self-control couldn't yet construct. Though exhausting and a bit o...

Three disclaimers before I launch into this year's homeschooling blogs: 1. Our fall activities haven't started yet, so I had a lot more time on my hands than I normally will. 2. I do not in any way foresee this level of activity as being sustainable. We're starting with a bang that will most likely fizzle over time. 3. My toilets are filthy and we went out for dinner tonight. I can't always prioritize school like this. School for Levi and Owen this year has two main parts: a letter-of-the-week theme, and a character trait with the same letter. We did start with A, but I'll not be going in alphabetical order (because, really, M for Marshmallow needs to be in December). My letter ideas have primarily come from two blogs (though I grab ideas wherever I find them): Oopsey Daisy  and Walking by the Way . The alphabet character traits are a curriculum I purchased in a bundle of e-books, The ABCs of Godly Children . (Besides those two main school objectives, Levi al...

As I mentioned last week , this fall I'm trying out a very simple (and very generic) weekly schedule of tasks. I debated for a while whether to post this: sometimes I enjoy reading what other people do, gleaning ideas as I go, but sometimes I just feel overwhelmed by what other people are getting done. Right now this is still mostly in "idea" phase, as I haven't yet executed a full week of completed to-dos. For the most part, I anticipate doing these things during nap time (which, in the way naps currently overlap, is usually only about an hour, maybe an hour and fifteen minutes if Levi sleeps). My Tasks Monday: meal plan.  Because I feel overwhelmed by what I want to accomplish in the mornings, and because I can't leave the house in the afternoons, and because my husband works on Monday evenings, I'm going to try out grocery shopping on Monday evenings. Therefore, my Monday task is to finish up the week's meal plan and make a corresponding grocery lis...