Somewhere Over the Rainbow

Posted on April 24, 2013April 24, 2013 by Amy

We’ve spent the last week or so talking about R is for Rainbows.

I love rainbows. My girls love rainbows. It was a good week.

We painted rainbows.

We sang rainbow songs, and danced to rainbow songs, and did magnet games with pictures from rainbow songs.

Somewhere Over the Rainbow:

We did plenty of other “R” and Rainbow activities:

Punching holes in letter Rs with plastic needles

Some of my favorite resources for FREE preschool homeschool activities had great Rainbow Units.

Like this Rainbow Unit from 1+1+1=1. We used tons of the stuff from this download. The favorite of my girls was the printout of the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” with the pictures of the various things mentioned during the song (rainbow, star, clouds, chimney, etc.). I put magnet tape on the backs of each of these items and had them take turns putting them up on the dry erase board as we sang the song. They loved it, and we did it as part of circle time every day during this unit!

I also used lots of stuff out of the Letter R for Rainbow unit from Confessions of a Homeschooler. I love her stuff and I use it all the time. I got the “poke page” idea pictured above from her, for example.

Lass loved this magnet rainbow activity (we got this page and some coloring pages here, magnets here):

We got and read tons of rainbow books from the library.

We made rainbows on the walls and furniture and each other using our prism.

The girls really got into talking about Roy G. Biv!

For some more fun rainbow stuff, check out my Pinterest page on the topic (Have I ever mentioned how much I love Pinterest? It’s a homeschooling mom’s best friend). Enjoy!

Ready for Easter

Posted on March 30, 2013 by Amy

We have been talking about Easter all week in school.

We’ve read books about the Easter Bunny. About Easter Eggs. About where both of these traditions originated. And about Jesus and the Resurrection, of course.

It has been a good week. We’ve all learned a lot. I found lots of fun activities to do addition and counting using plastic Easter eggs and small candies (like M&Ms and Jelly Bellies), and I added in a bit of number and shape recognition to some of them.

We used up some left-over-from-St.-Patrick’s-Day poster board to make Easter bunnies.

I often get out textural elements for the girls to add to their crafts, like cotton balls to make the bunnies fluffy (or puffy paint made with shaving cream and glue). Miss often rejects these outright. She knows what she wants, and in this case the cotton balls were not part of her vision. Lass thought it was fun to add the cotton balls. Until it wasn’t. I love their different approaches to things.

Today we dyed eggs.

We talk about measuring and color mixing and all sorts of fun stuff when we do this one.

* Note: Last year I thought it was a great idea to use whisks to dunk the eggs in the dye. I even bought a second whisk this year since one of the ones I used last year didn’t work for this purpose very well. At the last minute I decided the whisks were sort of a pain (getting the eggs in and out of them was kind of messy, it was a little bit hard to get the eggs far enough into the dye, we could only do one egg at a time for each girl, etc.) and that the girls were old enough to do just fine getting the eggs out with spoons. I was right, and am glad I skipped the whisks this year.

I used more food coloring in the dye this year. We used brown eggs that I buy from a friend who has her own chickens, so I wanted to dye to be extra vibrant. I love how they turned out.

We got a bit messy. Some fingers got dyed. Especially Lass’s, since she kept sticking her fingers into the cups to get her eggs out.

She was so eager to get her eggs in and out of the cups. She dyed four eggs green (her favorite color) before Miss pulled one of hers out of the dye, I think.

They had a lot of fun. Miss said, “I think the Easter Bunny with love these eggs.”

Speaking of the Easter Bunny, he has been here tonight. He tied yarn to the older girls’ door knobs, which will lead them to their baskets in the morning.

We have their baskets and eggs hidden in separate rooms so they will each have a chance to find the same number of eggs. Miss is a little bit more focused in her searching and finding, so we didn’t want Lass to miss out on eggs (and their contents) if Miss found most of them. Daddy hid Miss’s in the office.

We are ready for tomorrow.

I was all flustered for a few days earlier this week trying to figure out the logistics of doing Easter Bunny stuff with the girls and making it to church on time at 9. I considered doing the Easter Bunny stuff all on Saturday, hiding the eggs/baskets during nap time, or somehow running in to get it done while my husband stayed out in the car with them after church. Ultimately, I decided to take advantage of the fact that the church holds Mass at several different times during the day. We’re going at 11, so we’ll have plenty of time to get everything done and be ready to go on time tomorrow. Easy.

Happy Easter!

Presidents and Perfectionism

Posted on February 28, 2013February 28, 2013 by Amy

Since we were out of town last week, we’re talking about presidents and President’s Day in our homeschool this week. Miss is very fascinated by the stories of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. I think she especially likes President Lincoln, because we have read a few books that mentioned how much he loved to read. I suspect she views him as sort of a kindred spirit. Plus she thinks it’s really cool that he’s on the penny.

We made George Washingtons yesterday.

I love them.

I had planned to do the old standby “Lincoln’s log cabin”craft using popsicle sticks today. However, Miss specifically asked to make a President Lincoln instead of making his house. Kindred spirits, I say.

So I quickly pulled up this printable from DLTK and they started working on it. I left the room for a few mintues and came back to find that Miss had looked through one of our library books to find a picture of President Lincoln to refer to while she made her craft. “So I know what he looks like,” she said.

She was quite pleased with her finished presidents, though we had a bit of a rough time getting there with the Lincoln craft.

See, my eldest girl is something of a perfectionist. She is very particular when creating her masterpieces. The jacket she pasted onto the Lincoln picture was a bit tricky to get lined up right. I didn’t care if she had it placed perfectly, but she sure did. And she was very upset that, when placed correctly, it covered his hands a little bit. It was quite difficult for me to keep from helping her with this. She was having a complete meltdown, but I knew she could figure it out herself, and that she would feel much more satisfaction than if I fixed it for her. I ended up giving her some suggestions about how she could get the jacket the way she wanted but keep it from covering his hands, such as cutting the ends of the sleeves. She came up with her own solution though, as she usually does. She folded the sleeves back and pasted them in place, to make cuffs. Problem solved. And she did it herself. I love that “Aha!” moment.

I also love Lass’s accomplishments (she wouldn’t pose for a picture holding up her presidents).

I must admit, it takes a bit of effort on my part to sit back and let them do their craft projects on their own. I have a tendency to want to “help” them place the pieces in the right general area. I guess I’m a bit of a perfectionist myself. Lately I have been extra mindful of backing off. Of letting them shine in their own ways. I show them how the pieces are “supposed” to go together and then hand them the glue sticks and sit back. It’s actually much more fun this way. And naturally they got so much more out of the process and enjoy the end product more when they do it themselves.

They are teaching me every day.

Valentine’s Day Science

Posted on February 8, 2013 by Amy

Pinterest success was mine today.

Last night I pinned a link to this blog post about using Valentine’s Day candy conversation hearts for science experiments. I watched the video in the above link, and then checked out this post and this for more information.

Basically, the post was about using the conversation hearts to experiment with what would happen if putting them into different liquids/solutions.

I knew my girls would love this, even if only to have the opportunity to eat more of the hearts while doing the experiments (we ate some a few days ago when using them for counting, graphing, sorting, and they loved them).

So today, we had science class.

We started with placing the hearts in water of different temperatures. I did this slightly differently than the Mom at Inspiration Laboratory. I didn’t measure the water temperature. I just used cold, warm, and hot tap water. We dropped hearts in, stirred with spoons a bit, and watched to see what would happen. You can see the hot water on the left below. We talked about what “dissolve” means. They made the observation that the hot water was dissolving the heart fastest. They poked at the hearts, lifted them out of the water to see if the writing was still on them, and so forth. I liked using the clear glass containers and putting them against the white wall so the girls could see how the dissolving candy changed the color of the water.

Next we talked about the concept of “chemical reactions” and moved on to putting the heart in a glass of vinegar. They started by smelling the vinegar and exclaiming over its stinkiness. Lass dropped the heart in, and we observed that nothing happened. It dissolved even less than the heart in cold water. During all the time it was in the vinegar (about an hour) it never changed much at all. Bummer.

Then came the more exciting stuff. I brought out the baking soda to see what would happen if we put a heart in water that had baking soda dissolved in it. I didn’t watch the video for this particular experiment on Inspiration Laboratory, so I wasn’t sure what they found. When we put the heart in the baking soda water it almost immediately turned the water from very foggy to clear again. Interesting.

I didn’t know that that wasn’t what was supposed to happen until I was looking at this post about the experiment they did to determine which ingredient in the candy hearts caused the bubbling reaction. Bubbling reaction? Oops. After reading through her post, I quickly realized that the reason our hearts didn’t bubble in the baking soda water is that they don’t have citric acid in them. So, if you do this and you want the bubbling reaction, get hearts with citric acid. Ours are the old school Brach’s Conversation Hearts in “Classic Flavors” (I chose this particular type to match the printouts I had for the math activities mentioned above).

Anyway. All this is building up to the best parts of our experimenting. Of course I mean the combination of baking soda water and vinegar.

I have never done this trick with the girls before, so we started out just combining the two to see the reaction, without adding any hearts.

I really didn’t know just how much it would bubble up. I thought it might go over the edge of the glass a little bit. I was cool with that, since I figured that would be part of the fun. I put down a paper towel folded in half just in case.

The girls thought this was hilarious.

For the next phase of our experimenting, I got a bigger container.

We started out by mixing the baking soda in the water again. One cup of water with half of a Tablespoon of baking soda. Then we added in a couple of hearts.

Then came the vinegar (I used a half cup).

After the initial reaction, the solution continued to fizz, causing the hearts to “dance” all around in the water. They spun, they moved up and down.

It was like magic and the girls just kept watching them move. They added lots more hearts, and they all continued to spin and bob. We talked a little bit about how the bubbles were lifting them up and then popping so the hearts sank back down.

*Note – In the video I watched here of the experiment, the Mom added the vinegar before the candy hearts and hardly anything happened, at least not for a while. In her post about it here where she also has a video, she says to mix the water and baking soda, then add the candy hearts, then the vinegar. So that’s how we did it and it worked perfectly. It seems to work both ways, but I think the effect is more dramatic and interesting to add the hearts before the vinegar.

The hearts danced for quite a while. Long enough for the girls to eventually get tired of watching.

Here’s a look at our finished solutions. Left to right, hot water, warm water, cold water, vinegar, baking soda water, and baking soda/vinegar water. This was a while after the experiments were completed, and the hearts had stopped moving.

I made the mistake of dumping these out once the girls lost interest in them.

Miss was very upset when she realized I had done so.

So we’re going to do it all again tomorrow. She wants to show her Daddy anyway.

There are a few things I’ll do differently:

1. I’ll use hot, room temp, and chilled water for the temperature experiment. I’ll also use the same color heart in each of the glasses and make sure it’s one of the more vibrantly colored hearts, like pink or purple. The yellow didn’t let them see the difference in saturation of the water very well. Maybe we’ll even use a thermometer and timer this time.

2. I noticed that the one white heart we used in the experiments (I think it was in the dancing experiment) had dissolved almost completely, while the others had hardly dissolved at all, so we’ll explore this a bit more to see how the white and colored hearts might react differently.

3. I also noticed, just when posting these photos, that the hearts were all floating at the top of the baking soda/vinegar solution, even after the bubbles had stopped forming, though sitting at the bottom of the other glasses, so we’ll check this out too.

4. I’ll probably find another container so each girl can do her own baking soda/vinegar/dancing heart experiment.

I love Pinterest. And I love my new find for fun activities, Inspiration Laboratory.

Groundhog Day Has Never Been So Fun

Posted on February 2, 2013February 1, 2015 by Amy

Groundhog Day has been my most favorite homeschooling unit so far. Apparently I dig groundhogs (pun intended, sorry).

So do my girls.

I have discovered the magic of Pinterest and my library for really bringing the fun to the topics we are covering in our school.

At the start of January, I decided that I was going to focus on units more than letters of the week, and just pick a letter that works with our unit. I’m not set on the length of time we stay on one unit. Most of January, other than the past week, was a Winter unit, with our letter being W.

This past week was a Groundhog Day unit focusing on the letter G.

My strategy for preparing for the units is to find good books on our topic and request them from our library. Then I comb Pinterest to find printables for all sorts of activities, some focused on our letter, some arts and crafts, some hopefully pulled from one or two of the books we’re reading. Then I wing it from there.

I found some really fun books for our groundhog unit.

These are the ones I used.

“Time to Sleep” was actually one I had for our Winter unit, but it talks about hibernating and has a woodchuck in it, so I included it this week too. It was fun for them to realize that the woodchuck in this story is the same as a groundhog.

The first book we read was “Groundhog Weather School,” in which the Weather Groundhog puts out a classified ad looking for more groundhogs to help him predict the weather around the country. He gives six criteria, with discussions of each of them, for candidates to consider before applying:

Various animals, such a a hippo, a monkey, and a skunk, check off the criteria they do meet, but then ultimately realize they don’t meet all of the qualifications. The girls really enjoyed going through each of the qualifications, repeatedly, for each of the animals, and disqualifying them at various points in the list. I left the list up all week and we discussed it many times while reading other books too.

I got lots of the stuff we used from DLTK Crafts for Kids, including the rhyme in the picture above, which is a song to the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot.” I made up some hand motions for it and we sang it a few times each day after doing our calendar. The girls loved it.

Another thing we did every day along with our calendar and weather discussion was to judge whether we thought the groundhog would see his shadow if he were to pop up that day. Miss really got into this and did a great job thinking it through and making a prediction each day.

The DLTK site has tons of free printables for activities, games, and crafts. Another one we used from them was the Five Little Groundhogs felt board activity.

And of course we had to make their toilet paper roll groundhogs.

The girls just made these today, and both of them are sleeping with their finished groundhogs tonight. Miss even insisted that we make burrows for the groundhogs, so we glued pieces of construction paper into cylinders that the groundhogs could fit into and “pop up” as desired.

We did lots of the printables from the DLTK Groundhog Day section, like some of these, and these.

2 Teaching Mommies has awesome units that you can download for free and I used several of their Groundhog Day activities, like these:

I laminated the pages and added velcro so the pieces would stay put for my girls (and not get lost). I especially love watching Lass do activities like these, because she really shows how much she knows when she can do it in a fun and different way (if I just ask her questions, she often pretends she doesn’t know).

I added a few other fun things to round out our groundhog fun. We went into my bedroom where we could pull the blackout shades and have a large expanse of blank wall to do some shadow playing. We built a burrow with pillows and the girls took turns “popping up” and seeing their shadows. We experimented with moving closer and farther from the light source to see what happened to the shadows. And of course we practiced making some good old shadow puppets.

This morning the girls made their hypotheses about whether the groundhog would have seen his shadow. Then we checked out the website of The Punxatawney Groundhog Club to see what Punxatawney Phil saw (or didn’t see). We watched the webcast, which I thought would be really exciting. I wish I would have watched it first so that I could have automatically fast forwarded the first two thirds of it which was nothing but a looong procession of all the “Groundhog Officials” and introductions of all of them. There must have been 15-20 of them. The girls did get a kick out of it once they finally pulled Phil from his “burrow,” but even that was sort of lame. I’ll just be thankful that I didn’t wake them up at 6:25 to watch it live… Not that I would have done that.

Their favorite thing this morning was when I played this recording of the whistling sound a groundhog makes when it senses danger. We have been talking about how some people call groundhogs “Whistle Pigs” because of this. They really got a kick out of hearing how it sounds.

We had lots of discussions about what makes an animal a mammal, what hibernating is, what herbivores eat, what animals are predators of groundhogs, and how groundhogs set up their burrows. It was all quite fascinating, really.

And finally, it wouldn’t have been Groundhog Day without a groundhoggy snack.

Chocolate pudding cups, graham cracker crumb “dirt” (the other versions I’ve seen of this snack used either chocolate graham cracker crumbs or oreo crumbs, but this is what was in my cupboard, so we had lighter dirt), Milano Cookies, slivered almonds broken in half for the ears, and fudge applied with a toothpick to stick on the ears and make the face. Not quite as elaborate as some, but enough to impress my kids.

So that’s it. I kind of can’t believe how much fun groundhogs can be. I think I enjoyed them as much as my girls did.

Next we’ll do two weeks of V is for Valentine. We’ll also throw some President’s Day stuff in there before we go out of town in a couple of weeks.

Happy Groundhog Day!

Accidental Anatomy Lesson

Posted on January 30, 2013 by Amy

I tend to pick the worst days to go grocery shopping.

Somehow I didn’t know we had a snow storm coming our way today.

I would have postponed our shopping trip, but we were out of many essentials and nearly out of many more, like bread, oatmeal, half and half, milk, etc. In fact, I mixed the last of the half and half with the last of the milk this morning for my girls to have something to drink with their breakfast.

Anyway. We were out of lots of stuff. I had to go to the grocery store. Because of the crazy weather, it took me much longer than it normally does. Okay, truth is it was the weather plus the fact that I didn’t make a list so I had to double back to the same aisle at least three times because of forgetting something.

My point? We had little time for school this morning.

We did our calendar, sang our groundhog song (Groundhog Day is February 2!), read our groundhog books. And that was all we had time for.

I was kind of bummed, but it happens and we roll with it. I have three days left to do the rest of our letter G and Groundhog Day activities.

When Miss came down from her “rest time” (she no longer takes naps), she saw one of my husband’s professional books lying on the chair next to me. The book is titled “Atlas of Vascular Anatomy.” She wanted to look at it, her sisters were still sleeping, and I saw a golden opportunity. So we dove in. She was naturally more interested in the color illustrations in the book than the more frequently occurring black and white angiogram photos. She stopped on each and every page that had one of these color pictures, pointed at the things she saw, and asked me what they were.

Now, obviously this book is totally over my head in its detail. However, I was able to tell her what each of the pictures were in basic terms (heart, spine, brain, lungs, arteries, veins, etc.). When I wasn’t sure about some of the specifics, I just looked at the captions. I pointed to the different parts of her body where the organs we were looking at are located. We got into some basic physiology too, like what the heart and lungs and brain do, the difference between arteries and veins, and so forth.

She was so interested, so I just kept talking. She asked tons of questions. I was able to answer almost all of them.

Incidentally, this was a lesson that lent itself to lots of tickling. We had so much fun!

When the girls get older, my husband will definitely be able to give them much better anatomy and physiology (any type of science for that matter) lessons than I can. But for now, I can handle anatomy on a preschool level.

Back to groundhogs tomorrow!

Homeschool Art Show

Posted on January 5, 2013 by Amy

Recently, I heard about an opportunity in our homeschooling group for the kids to have their artwork displayed at a local downtown store during our town’s Gallery Walk, which occurs the first Saturday of every month.

My girls love to paint, so I jumped at the chance for them to participate. I told the girls about it and bought them some special canvases on which to create their pieces. Neither of them really understood what the heck I was talking about when I said their art would be on display in a store downtown. They didn’t really care about anything other than having the chance to paint. And paint they did.

They each did a painting for the Gallery Walk and then did several more.

Miss did paintings of her sisters and then created this Self Portrait.

I thought about taking Miss’s self portrait for the Gallery Walk, but she didn’t want me to take that or the painting she did of her sisters anywhere.

So we sent these:

The one on the left is Lass’s, Miss’s on the right.

I didn’t ask either of them what they had painted or to give a name for their paintings. Both of them did so on their own though. In case you can’t see the cards on them, Lass’s is “Rapunzel’s Magical Hair” and Miss’s is “Picture of Wisconsin.”

Tonight was the Gallery Walk. I told the girls we were all going on a date to have dinner and ice cream and go see their paintings on display. I didn’t think they would really get the concept of having their artwork displayed for others to see unless we actually went and saw it and saw others seeing it. So we did.

We started out with dinner at a small cafe downtown.

I realized recently that we don’t take the girls out for dinner enough (um, ever). When we visited my parents we took them out to a local buffet and they thought it was the coolest thing ever. Neither of them had done that before. When it occurred to me that they don’t ever get to do that, I decided to remedy the situation and begin taking them out to eat more often.

So tonight we had a girl’s night out “date night” (Daddy wasn’t home). They had mac and cheese for dinner and chocolate ice cream for dessert.

After dinner we went over the the store where their art was displayed. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but it was really fun to see them see their art and accept compliments on it. There were several other homeschooling families there and they were very kind in their comments to my girls about their paintings.

It was also a great experience for them to see the artwork done by the other kids in the group. There were really great pieces, including photography, fused glass, paintings, textural drawings, cut paper art, colored pencil drawings, and even a castle sculpture made from marshmallows and toothpicks. The girls really got into looking at the different types of art.

When I first signed them up to participate in this I wondered if I was being kind of dumb since they are so young. I thought maybe I would seem silly since they aren’t technically of “homeschooling age.” I thought they might not even understand the idea of being in an “art show.”

They probably wouldn’t have if I hadn’t taken them to see it. And Lass probably still didn’t really quite get it.

But I don’t feel silly about having them participate in the experience anymore. They had fun. They got to paint, which they always love. They got to have a special night out with Mom. They got to see their artwork on display with other pieces by older kids. They got to explore and enjoy the other art and receive compliments on theirs. They thanked the mother who organized the show.

And now we have our next craft project already planned out. I happen to have mini marshmallows and toothpicks in my cupboards. Sculptural art lesson, here we come!

Egg Shell Artwork

Posted on December 1, 2012December 1, 2012 by Amy

This past week we talked about the letter E.

E for Elf.

I slacked off a bit on some of our school time so we could have a much needed play date with out BFsF. My girls had been missing their friends after not seeing them for a while because of school and holiday stuff and we were all so happy to spend some QT with them.

Another morning we went to open gym at their gymnastics place.

And we did some other, um, stuff.

We did do some school stuff this week, but E ended up getting neglected a little bit.

That’s the great thing about homeschooling. You can do it on Saturday if you want to “play hooky” to do something else during the other days of the week. We don’t do formal school stuff every day at this point anyway, other than our calendar. Mostly we play and we read and I try to mention our letter of the week as much as I can. But I wanted to do a few more E-focused activities.

So today we did. Dot to dot elf and elephant (Miss is really into dot to dot pictures now). Brainstorming for E words on our category worksheet. And my favorite, playing with egg shells I’ve washed out and saved this week.

The girls love cracking the egg shells when they cook with me, so I figured they would have fun with them and have an interesting sensory experience. I put the shells (about 10 eggs’ worth) on the table along with some markers and they went to town.

They examined the eggs and asked questions about the thin membrane inside them.

They colored on the shells.

And as expected they quickly moved into crushing the shells and playing with the pieces.

Miss commented that she thought the pieces felt and sounded like glass when they clinked against each other.

She really got into it and pulverized her shells.

Lass liked breaking her shells up and then watching them drop from her hands over and over.

Egg shells were a big hit. I will be washing them and saving them from now on.

T is for Thankful

Posted on November 16, 2012November 16, 2012 by Amy

This week we started our home preschool.

I’ve decided to skip getting a formal preschool curriculum and just wing it for now. I’m picking a letter each week and using free stuff I am finding online, along with a few things I’m making up as I go along.

Instead of doing the letters in order, I’ve chosen to pick the letters based on what is going on in our house or in the world (i.e. Thanksgiving) and just squeeze as much from one little letter each week as I can.

So, we started out the week with T is for Turkey.

We colored turkeys. We talked about turkeys. We made turkeys, using this printable from The Craft Nest.

We did T is for Tree and made our own “Trees of Thanks.”

I found great free printables from Twisty Noodle. They have tons of printables for each letter, and so much more (holidays, months, food, colors, etc.). You can print not just the picture with the letter and word but also a picture that has an area at the bottom for practicing writing the letter and word. Lass got the pictures to color. Miss got the pages with the writing practice.

Of course I realize that just coloring pictures of things that start with T doesn’t constitute preschool, so we did plenty of other stuff. The girls practiced scissor skills. We read lots of T and Thanksgiving relevant books, like The Thankful Book and Thanks for Thanksgiving and The Giving Tree (one of my favorite books ever, it makes me so happy that my girls ask for this one over and over and over). We sang an alphabet song that I got from her school that is set to the “Jeopardy” tune. Because who doesn’t love having that little ditty stuck in her head? Of course we did our calendar stuff every day. We made tacos for dinner. We did a science experiment with apple cider vinegar, dish soap, and water in a glass. It’s supposed to be a way to catch fruit flies (they get stuck in the bubbles on top). It had nothing to do with the letter T, but we I can’t stand fruit flies (it didn’t work, by the way). We did some counting. And lots of playing.

They love to play Rapunzel in our Learning Tower (don’t worry, the scarf, “her magical hair,” is tucked in her pony tail and isn’t wrapped around her neck).

I made up my own little Letter of the Week game, using categories for which the girls had to think of T words. This was a lot of fun for Miss. She got several of these on her own and most of the rest with just a little hint from me. All week she has been randomly pointing out, “Mama, do you know what else starts with T?” and then telling me something like, “Tick tock!” or “Tickle!” Lass does it too, though she has yet to actually name a T word. She does make the right sound for T though!

My favorite Letter T related activity this week by far was our tea party, with real tea and cream and sugar and t-t-treats!

The girls got all dressed up for our party.

She really wanted to do the “pinkies out” hold on her little tea cup like her sister. She spilled half of her tea in her saucer, and I convinced her to use two hands.

This week I was happy to not have to wake the girls up on Tuesday and Wednesday, get them ready, and drive them 25 minutes to take Miss to school. I don’t think Miss missed it. When I initially explained to her that she wasn’t going to go to school anymore but would be doing some school at home with me and her sister, she was a little bit confused. I told her that I would be her teacher, and she got sort of upset, saying, “I don’t want you to be my teacher, I want you to be my Mommy!”

Now she understands. Mostly we just did what we always do, with a little extra. On Tuesday she even called me “Teacher” once. It was priceless.

Next week we’ll be baking, and I need to do some more math related activities.

I learned a lot this week. And I had a lot of fun. I think I’m gonna love this homeschooling thing.

Preschool Dropout

Posted on November 1, 2012November 1, 2012 by Amy

Yesterday was Miss’s last day of preschool.

Recently, my husband and I decided that we would take her out of preschool and just start our homeschooling journey with her now. It was a little hard to make the decision to take her out, but only because I really love her school. It’s such a wonderful little place and her teachers are fantastic. When my husband and I decided in May that we will be homeschooling our girls, I thought that I would want to keep Miss in Preschool until the time for her to start Kindergarten (and send Lass and Sis when they got old enough). My reasoning for this was that she enjoys school and could have some good experiences in a fun learning environment that is more under my control than regular school would be beyond the preschool years. I could choose to send her only two mornings a week. I could choose the days she goes (LOVE this about her school). I could take her out of school to travel whenever necessary.

Additionally, her school is small, with mixed age groups and a really wonderful environment. It’s a mix of Montessori and traditional preschool styles that I think is really great. And I know of at least one instance when the owner of the school, after trying really hard to help a disruptive child, decided that the child could no longer attend because of the disruptions to the other kids. It’s not that I loved the idea that a child was asked to leave her school, but I was super glad that it was an option for her teachers to remove a child who was causing problems, when attempts at correcting the issues were unsuccessful. That would never happen in many other school settings.

I have always felt comfortable with and confident about Miss’s preschool, and at the time it seemed like the right thing to send her back at the start of this school year.

Problem is, her school is about 25 minutes from our house, and this fall juggling the younger two girls while getting her to school just seemed like more than I wanted to do. Sis’s schedule tends to get screwed up on school days. I never had as much time to run errands and get things done while Miss was at school as I thought I would.

Plus, I just want her home with me.

So I decided she would be done with school at the end of October. I talked with her about this, and she was fine with it. Her last day was the school’s Halloween party. It was a fun way to close out her preschool experience. All of us girls were in attendance.

Miss was super excited to show Lass her school.

I love seeing how much their relationship has grown just since last school year. The last time I had Lass at Miss’s school she seemed so much younger than the kids there. This time she fit right in.

They are the best of friends. I can’t wait to see how they grow together now that we’ll be starting “preschool” at our house.

And speaking of growing, our littlest ballerina is getting ready to move.

I’m so not ready for mobility.

Her first Halloween was lots of fun. She snuggled right in to go Trick or Treating with her big sisters. Or as Lass says, “Trick or Tricking”

It was pretty chilly last night, so we kept asking them if they wanted their hoods up. Miss said, “Nope. I like to feel the breeze in my hair.”

They were a little bit shy at the first house we visited.

But after that they were such funny, outgoing little trick or treaters. They actually stepped right into the second house on our route!

We did a quick sweep of our little neighborhood and rushed home to get into jammies and hit the road.

We’re at the Farm for the next week and a half for deer hunting.

It will be our first week of home preschool, and we’re going freestyle.

Tonight we watched five deer out the window. We talked all about does vs. bucks and had a cool experience when Miss banged on the window and the buck on the lawn looked right up at her. She was excited when I explained that he had heard her and was trying to figure out what the noise was. We watched him run off a few minutes later.

I haven’t yet decided if I’m going to actually get a preschool curriculum or just go with some of the things that are easily available online, some of the stuff that Miss did at her school, and lots of playing. I’m leaning towards the latter. I’m a little bit nervous about “doing it right,” but I think we’ll be okay.

I’m excited about having my oldest girl home with me full time again.