Category Archives: teaching & learning

clay ornaments

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It’s a cruddy day in these parts so we decided to do a little craft project I had stashed away. We used sculpey clay and made these super cute owl ornaments.

 

 

I pinned this a month or so ago and I was waiting for a vacation day to work on these with the kids. They were super easy for all of us to do…from the 6 year old all the way up to the 30-something year old! If you can’t tell in the photo, the owl eyes and the feathers are created with the lid of a thin crayola marker. We used a toothpick for the eye balls and the little beak. For the back, I used some jewelry wire I had in my stash to make some loops for a ribbon or a rook to hang after they are baked.

 

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And as this will be my last post for a while. I wish all of you a Merry Christmas!!

owlfamily

summer ART school {picasso}

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summer2012button

This summer we are working our way through different artists and recreating some of their art work or art traditions they inspired. Picasso was the first artist my rooster picked. To begin with we looked at some of Picasso’s art online and the first project was making portraits inspired by Picasso. I found the idea here and honestly it stressed my children out (as it did hers).

My son is a perfectionist and at first he thought this activity was fun. When it wasn’t coming together (aka matching up perfectly) he became really frustrated. We talked about how Picasso’s art isn’t “perfect” but very mismatched. He didn’t even finish it and honestly I didn’t push him. It’s summer.

2012 summer art school: picasso portraits

My daughter is all about lovely and pretty things. Picasso’s portraits aren’t lovely and beautiful. She ended up going with it (with an agreement that she could add a penguin and some flowers to decorate it!)

picasso projectpicasso project

Next up we talked about Picasso’s blue period. This activity came from the art book, Discovering Great Artists. The idea is that you take one color and mix different shades of that color and then paint a picture using those shades. This was really hard! We had a lot of fun mixing the colors and finding different shades, but when it came to painting with them it was difficult!

Here is a glimpse at our results
our picasso projects

Picasso was ok, but honestly he is totally not my favorite.

Next up Degas…he makes the ballerina in my little chick very happy!

summer 2012 {the plan}

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My son has one more day of school left and I’ve got one more week of working the shop before summer vacation begins around here. I’ve got great plans, but the top plan is to be flexible yet organized! We are changing up a few things in the running of our household and also planning on doing a little bit of light summer schooling around here too. This is the planning week and hopefully over the coarse of the next 7 weeks of our summer I will be able to share with you some of the fun things we did!

First up in the area of summer schooling:

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My hope is to lightly do an artist of the week, using this book as our guide. In our weekly library trips I hope to grab a handful of books on that artist to have in our house while we are studying.
Both my kids have completely outgrown those lovely 2 hours naps, but we are instigating a mandatory 30 minute reading time and a 30 minute play in your room quiet time. The rooster is working towards a backpack and a backpacking trip with his father at the end of the summer (more on his reading challenge in another post) so he has a stack of 12 books he has to work through.
The chick is entering Kindergarten, so we will continue working through all the Kindergarten sight words and also continue working through Explode the Code (my most favorite phonics books of all times!). I’m still not 100% sure what the Rooster is going to focus on. More than likely we will do some hard work on memorizing multiplication facts and some other grammar/writing maintenance things. We will also take at least weekly library trips (spending one of our one hour quiet times at the library) and also enjoying all the special summer stuff the library will be hosting.

Second up in the area of home maintenance:

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We are changing up our chore & responsibility chart. I’ll go more into this in another post when it’s all complete. I pretty much used much of the ideas from this example and created one to fit with our family. The essential idea is that there are things we do as a family that are responsibilities and there are things we can do that are extra (aka contributions) that we can earn money for (we are using the word “commission” versus allowance). We will have a weekly payday on Sunday and the kid’s will be responsible for keeping a daily time sheet.

The other big change are the technology cards. My kids get about an hour of “free” tv time during the day. Typically Wild Kratts & the Electric Company in the afternoon while I’m cooking dinner. These cards are for those times when they are “bored” and are looking for something to do. They will each get a card every Sunday and each punch is worth 45 minutes. They won’t get a new card until the following Sunday, so if they use it up before then, they are basically unplugged until they get another one. These cards cover using the iPad, using the computer, watching a show on tv/netflix or playing the Wii.

Those are the two biggest areas of structure in our summer. Honestly, the reason I’m putting the shop on vacation is so that I can have fun with them this summer. We have a pool and a park across the street, a fabulous library within 5 minutes and the mountains within 30. I want to be with them this summer in a way I just haven’t let myself before. Enter the Pinterest summer board.

I’ve created a board on Pinterest with links to all sorts of things that have peaked my interest for this summer and another board for all those things we actually do.

If you haven’t subscribed to daisyeyes yet, this might just be the best time! I hope to show as many pictures and ideas as possible of our summer. Sort of a journal of summer 2012.

I hope you follow along!

playing with scraps

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You know the whole parenting frustration where you spend all this money on great toys and the kids just play with the box? I think there was a post a while back floating around the net that gave the top 10 toys for kids and it was like a cardboard box, pieces of wood, a rope etc. Simple things.

Our house is in a constant state of remodeling. My husband has stuff lying all around the house for all sorts of projects. I admit that most of the time it drives me nuts and I want to chuck it all, yesterday was one of those days I was glad for it.

Introducing the world’s most famous toys: the tube and the stair tread remnant

a board & a tube

We have a million of these cardboard tubes lying around 1. because my husband works for an engineering firm and he brings all of them home from work and 2. he is planning on entering a cardboard boat race and is in it to win it this year. The stair tread remnant is from the finally accomplished stairs into our basement (We are like 2 steps from being done with remodeling our basement…yippee!!).

The kids and I were outside yesterday and I realized these would make amazing balance boards. I wondered if the tubes were strong enough to withstand the weight of the kids and even me and they were! We had a blast playing around with our balance and found out that it works much better on the grass versus the driveway (I nearly had a major bust when the tube started rolling under me…can anyone say “lumberjack racing”?)

a board & a tube

Then my son, being the boy he is, decided to make it into a catapult and starting launching things off of it.

a board & a tube

So, when you start to get board this summer (no pun intended) just take a look at all the junk lying around your garage or carport and you never know what you might find!

a schoolish post

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It’s been a while since I’ve shared any learning/schoolish posts. We aren’t “homeschooling” anymore, but I’ve become a very firm believer that even though my children are primarily educated at school, we are still partners in their education and our house is going to be a house of learning too. We are getting ready to embark upon this science book starting in February. The Rooster is all about fish…he’s like a walking encyclopedia of fishing lures, fish types etc and is about to DIE that we are going to take a Netflix fast and he won’t be able to watch all his Discover Channel, Animal Planet and whatever else fish shows! Hopefully we will be using all the time on our science studies. The goal is to finish it by the time school starts up in mid-July (our system goes year round) and culminate our study with some sort of dissection of a fish. We have also adopted a couple of spots on a stream through Tremont and hopefully that will play nicely in with our swimming creatures study. I’m so excited about this spring!

In the meantime, I’ve started to do some kindergarten work with the Chick. She is in a preschool program, but it’s a blended program with students who are considered at-risk, learning English as a second language and typical preschoolers. That said, she is ready to start doing some Kindergarten work and while she gets some at school, I wanted more. So when the Rooster works on his homework after school, we do her “homework” together.

I’ve been struggling with how and what to teach her with and finally decided to use these three things:

Explode the Code: book 1. I love, love, love this series and it was one of our favorite things to do when we were homeschooling. She passed the pretest with flying colors, so we are starting with book 1. We’ll go slow and not push it, but I’m super excited. For someone who doesn’t have a clue about teaching phonics, this is a lifesaver for me.

I’m pulling alphabet review stuff from Confessions of a Homeschooler. Her stuff is amazing! For now, we are working on the A-Z Beginning Sounds Game.

I actually printed these at half size (I’m a stickler on making my colored ink last). Looking at the little letter dots I realized they would fit perfectly under these clear glass gems I had in my craft stash.  A little modge podge later and voila! Fun little letter gems.

 

We are also starting very slowly on learning our kindergarten sight words. I found this awesome group of printables from 1+1+1 (which is also a phenomenal blog) and made a special reading notebook for the chick. She has about a 5-10 minute tolerance for this, but I really didn’t expect more than that. Each list of 4 words has a great variety of activities and is easy for a momma to get together.

 

As we get into our science work, I’ll be sure to post some updates of the fun things we do.

an activity sort of advent wreath

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Saw this:

 

 

Read a bunch of ideas online about how to foster giving during this season of advent.

Then came up with this:

The ideas is that each day is a different activity…sometimes something special for the kids, our family and sometimes something for others. Here are a few from our list:

call a grandparent just to say “i love you”
tape quarters to a vending machine
bring the office ladies at school some coffee
make a card for a friend and mail it
have hot chocolate for an after school snack
get an extra 30 minutes of plugged in time
decorate our gingerbread house
deliver treats to the trash men, postman and neighbors
a host of movie nights: Elf, A Christmas Story and the Nativity Story
Lunch with cousins
making gingerbread cookies
making a Christmas craft
bring coffee and donuts to our teachers on Monday morning

Planning Summer Fun

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Summer started today in our house and it was hot and by 2:15 we were all whiny and done for the day. I had great intentions of planning the heck out of this summer and making all sorts of schedules; we were going to finish up some homeschooling stuff from last fall that we had enjoyed and stopped. But I read a couple of posts last night that really prompted me to let go and rethink my strategy for the summer. While I can’t be all willy-nilly with structure, I also feel the need to be a bit more adventuresome with my children. So, I axed the big structure and decided to try my hand at something totally new.

Summer Fun Jars

In comes the Jars of Fun. There are all sorts of ideas such as these roaming around the internet this week and this is my take on the whole thing. Part of this is to add some variety to our lives and part of it is to shake me up a little (ok a lot) and force me to engage with my children in all sorts of ways.

After looking at a bunch of different ideas found here, here and here, I went through their lists and circled all the things that would stretch me, sounded fun and nixed those that might push me over the edge. I divided the activities into three jars: Rainy Days, Sunny Days (which might also end up being darn it’s hot outside days) and I’m Bored Times. I wasn’t going to add going to specific places, but in the end I did end up adding those to certain days (museums that are indoors for rainy days, zoo for sunny days etc). I tried to keep the “I’m Bored” activities to those that they could pretty much do independently.

We will have some structure this summer though. Rest/Quiet time will still be from 1:30-2:30. Tuesday mornings will still be library mornings and I’m thinking of trying a new book reading thing on Thursdays at our local University Gardens. We will definitely be hitting up the no-longer-free (cost you a $1 now) movies that Regal offers on Tuesdays or Wednesdays and will also be working through getting into the rhythm of chores (and us actually paying out the allowance).

Here is a link to the pdf of all our activities in the jars: Summer Fun Jars

learning the abcs

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I’ve been way to lax on working with the chick on her letters. She knows them all and can write most all of them, but she needs to work on learning the sounds. I’ve seen tons of activities like this all over the web, but most recently saw it in Small Magazine and it finally got me motivated. I knew the little chick would get into it because she loves to have her picture taken.

Here’s the process we took:

1) I had her write down 5 letters. I was going to go through some dictated order, but decided that giving her more “control” might be spur her along a little more…it did.

2) After writing the letters, she picked one and we talked about it’s sound and words that start with that letter. Then she had to go find an object that made that sound.

3) We took pictures of her holding or doing that letter.

4) I made little cards for our first group of letters and put them in a special book for her.

After we get through all 26, I’m thinking that we’ll go back through and add the short or long vowel sounds that we were missing and maybe we’ll add sight words or something like that too.

grow a rainbow

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Last week at story time the librarian read this book and reminded me what a treasure it is for preschoolers. I checked it out and we read it a few times and this week we did a little mommy and chick project with the book.

How to Grow a Rainbow

1. Read a book and make a list (I will brag and say that yes, she wrote most of those letters after me calling them out!)

2. Head to your local garden center (in our case Walmart) and pick out the colors you need.

3. Bring them all home and plant them up (and make sure you have enough dirt…sadly we didn’t)

March Sensory Box

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March/St. Patrick's Day Sensory Box

Our March Sensory Box in honor of St. Patrick’s Day. The box is blue, which makes everything inside it look blue, but I promise it’s all green! I’m hoping to get a little activity sheet together for the chick to do in conjunction with this box…we’ll see!

What’s inside:
split peas (which actually don’t smell great…fyi)
green puff balls
a small set of St. Patrick’s Day trinkets/buttons
a few gold coins
some gold pipe cleaners
some green shot glasses I found at Target in the Dollar Spot
a green garlic roll thing-a-ma-bob