Week 2!

It's so hard to believe we just finished our second week of school already! Wow how time flies. Before I know it the year will be over. This week hasn't been that bad at all. We ended up taking Thursday off and using it as a field trip day :)  One of the many perks of being homeschooled! We found ourselves out at the Holden Arboreum. Basically a giant park! It was very pretty! The rest of the week we kept with our 3 hours a day, or at least close to 3 hours. Here are some of the things we did this week.

Monday we had a lot to do! On top of our normal one letter, and one number we had our story along with the lesson plan for that and we also did a my kindergarten portfolio, something he can look back over the years and see how he changed.

I took this picture just to show lilly laying down watching her big brother do school. She is normally right their, at the top of the stairs or under Georges table. Buddy could care less, we don't see him that often.

While George was cutting somethings out to go along with his story I finished his pencil can.

This week we read "Froggy Builds a Tree House." So with the theme of froggy we made a froggy mask for the activity. Of course George loved this!

As I said we did his little portfolio, and it was to cute not to share!

I weighed him and measured him right before I did this. He weighed in at 48lbs and 42inches tall!

We added his picture on the back, just because it was to big for the front.



I had to tell him when his birthday was, but he was able to tell me how old he will be

Then of course a family picture. This was actually taken May of 2011, at sea world. And I asked George if he had any brothers or sisters and he made sure we included Buddy and Lilly

Then we found pictures of his grandparents! He loved adding these!

I had to tell him our address

And the phone numbers.

He told me his favorite color was purple, although he always wants blue or green things. His favorite food is a sandwich. and his favorite song is the theme song from transformers! Kids say the craziest things!

Then his favorite book is "Where the Wild Things are" and according to George its about "Max goes to the wild things forever and ever and cant go home."

Like I said the book was to cute not to share!.


Just a picture of him writing the letter Ff on the board.

He filled in the blanks and then we wrote a few words.

Told you she likes to hang out near him!

This is just a picture to show what the top of my dryer looks like on any given day (this was Wednesday) and this was only the stuff for the afternoon lesson plan!

I took over another shelf in the laundry room!

My lesson plan book from last week. It's kinda hard to really see but its packed full!

I made George a really cool little puzzle with the letters of his name!  He loved it.





Practice writing his name

Learning about money, what each coin is and how much its worth. We will have to do this a few times before he really gets it. But he is starting to

Like I said we went out on Thursday and it was great! A picture of me, George and our friend Christy who took us out!

George LOVED looking in the water. He was telling us about frogs and lilly pads. So cute





I thought he was going to fall in at this point.

                                


Again looking over the edge

He was ready to walk off the path and down the stream.

 Nice one of me and George, just wish he would have smiled!

 Hanging from a tree!

Today we got back on track and did 2 letters and one number. Not to bad either. 





Here he wrote "mom" all by himself. We still have to work on making the "m" a little better but he did this from memory, didn't see the word mom anywhere so I was pretty happy.

This is a picture of the number cards we correctly put in order :) We do this with ABC's as well and usually do it everyday.

So in a nutshell that was our week 2. I am hoping for a great week next week, and Monday is a holiday so we are taking it off like the public schools do! Hope everyone enjoyed seeing how are week was!



First Week

So here we are, first week is done! I am a little late on the blog, I was hoping to do it over the weekend but time flew and I didn't find a time I could sit and focus. So here I am trying to get this done before its time for class today. The week went pretty good. We did take Thursday off just because it was my birthday. We ended up going out to the spillway and then fishing. Friday we did most of Thursdays work so we aren't really behind either. The whole week we averaged about 3 hours per day, except Friday. Friday was a little over 4 hours. George seems to be really enjoying class and looks forward to it. I can tell he is really learning too! Hopefully it wont be much longer until he finally knows all of his abc's. He has had zero interest in learning them, so fingers crossed it wont be much longer. We are basically doing one abc and one number per day. Here are some pics I got throughout the week. Enjoy!

One thing we did was practice cutting. On this project he had to color the space between the lines (which he was not happy about so he just did a little, he actually hates to color) and then he cut them out and we formed a flower.

He played cupcake patterns a few times and started to get the hang of patterns better. He was very proud. He is doing much better with ABAB, and AABB  he is still struggling with ABCABC, but with time he will get that as well

On Tuesday he had the number 1, and on the page he was suppose to trace the word one and then write it. I didn't think he would be able to do it and he shocked me and did a fine job!

Wednesday I pulled out shaving cream and put it on a cookie tray and let him decide what color to add to it. He picked green, and later on yellow. He loved mixing the color in.

In order to practice cutting circles, he made a caterpillar. (I cut out the head) I can already see a big improvement on his cutting in just a few days. He was happy on this cut and paste I let him use regular glue not just a glue stick.

This is a picture of him using one of the write and reuse books, tracing fun  He really enjoyed this. I am sure these books will be a great asset.

I was told about this great blog to follow called 1+1+1=1  I have found tons and tons of ideas on here. One of the ones we used this week was called clothespin abc I printed the pages off, laminated them and decided this time I would let George use a dry erase marker and just circle the correct answer. He loved them!

We also pulled out Alphabet Hearts  He did pretty well. Better than I expected. He would go over to the board with the lowercase letter and find the uppercase then go back to the table and find it on the folder. Over the weekend I made him a small chart he will have on his desk for when we do games like these so he doesn't have to run to the board.

Fridays craft was to make our own pencil canes out of regular cans. I don't use canned goods in the house very often so I was very happy when I realized I had a small one and a large one. So me and George sat down with paper, scissors, glue and glitter glue. George loved the glitter glue! A little to much, his can was not able to be put together. Today we will do that so on the next blog you will get to see his end result.

Mine was pretty simple

That was basically our first week. We are slowly starting to find our groove which is great! I'm hoping this week is as good as last! Feel free to comment!

Georges First Day!

Today was George's first day! Monday's are always a little rushed in the mornings due to speech therapy. Once we got home and had a little down time, and gave me a few minutes to be sure I was prepared, we started the day. At 11:10am, I announced to George it was time to start school, of course I did this 5 minutes early just so I could grab a few pictures of my baby starting his first day!

Very Excited to start finally!

I am so glad I did this one! It's perfect, and I plan to do this every year whether is home schooled or attending public school, he will always know what year it was.

First we got his box that has glue, crayons, scissors, and a ruler. He sat down so mesmerized looking at it. Directly following this we sat down together on the floor and I read "Amelia Bedelia's First Day of School" Following the story we did a 5 question and answer sheet together.

Then I gave him a sheet with 6 pages (mixed up) and he had to cut them out and correctly put them in order. With some help from looking back in the book he successfully did it.

In the story Amelia Bedelia makes Daisy's out of paper, so of course that was a great simple craft to go along with the story.

Then we made one that had colorful petals

After this is was almost lunch time and I needed to tend to some laundry so I brought out the file folder game I told you about here "dress the bear" George had a blast and made all sorts of outfits, and mismatched them.

This gave me a few minutes to fold a load of laundry and throw the next in the dryer. At this time is was 12:30pm, time for lunch. So we cleaned up and went downstairs. We came back up at 1:45, and it was time to start in on the assessment.

I decided the best way to watch Georges progress was through a simple assessment we will do three times, at the beginning of the year, middle of the year and again at the end. Sadly the first time around most of it (80%) he found very frustrating because he just didn't get it very well, but he tried and I am proud of him for that. I am sure it's not easy to try to do a task when you have no clue what is being asked. He stuck with it though. One thing he really loved was BINGO

We used this for the color/shapes part of the assessment and he just blew right threw it. So proud of my little man! After this we started the actual lesson for the day which was the letter Aa, and number 0. He knows the Aa, so that was pretty quick. he struggled a little with the lowercase today but I think that was more of him just needed a break because we had been going for over an hour and a half at that point. But again he stuck it out and finished every task I threw at him.

After we finished that I decided today is done. It was 3:45 I moved the last part of the lesson plan (a color review) to another day. We cleaned everything up and called it a day. Our first day was great. I really believe this year is going to be a good one. I just pray god gives me the patience I need to do this. One thing I learned today is don't expect the pace to be anything. The Amelia Bedelia lesson plan took us an hour, I thought it would take 30minutes tops, and the assessment I thought would take 2 hours and it only took around one. I also am going to need to stop more than just once for lunch. It's a lot to ask a kindergartner to sit still for 2 hours like that. Included lunch our day lasted 4.5hours, actual classroom time was 3hours 15minutes. If he where in a public kindergarten it would have been 3 hours, so we spent more time in class.  So that was our first day. I just wanted to share with everyone! Now to be sure I am ready for the rest of the week!