Playing Catch up...yet again.

When you homeschool everyday and don't post about it there is a lot to catch up on. But don't worry...I won't share every little detail. :-) At least I don't think so. Anyway, last week we discussed the four seasons and instead of drawing examples on paper we decided to branch out into a different medium. What better canvas than our large glass front door? Perfect! We divided it into four sections for the seasons and Big T and Sweet E each drew a picture that they felt depicted that season. I think they did a wonderful job. Here is a picture of Sweet E drawing a pink (of course!) flower for spring.

It's not easy to take a picture of drawings on glass though, but hopefully here you can at least see the sun that Big T drew to show the hot days of summer. You can't see it but Sweet E drew a beach as well.

If you remember we talked about how the Bible used to be written on scrolls. Well, the children finally finished all of the copywork for the alphabet and we turned it into a scroll. They did a really great job and are so proud of their work. They love to show it to anyone that comes by the house. :-)

Here the children are doing copywork of their new Bible verse they are learning to memorize. I used the program I purchased from StartWrite. For now they are both tracing over the memory verse to practice the handwriting. Next week Big T won't have that and he will have to start copying on his own to get used to it, but since Sweet E is still working on her motor skills I will have her trace it a little while longer.

Oh...I almost forgot....we are using Math-U-See for our math curriculum this year. We were flying through the primer until we got to talking about place value. Which is fine...that is the beauty of homeschooling. You can go as fast or as slow as you need to for your child. Well, they have a neat way of teaching place value using "Decimal Street." They suggest making a poster, but that is too big for us and I remember seeing on a blog somewhere another mother made a lapbook. So that is what I decided to do. Here is the front of the lapbook.

When you open it up you see decimal street, the units house, the tens house, and.......

once unfolded the building for the hundreds. Each one only holds up to 9 (units, tens, or hundreds) I then made numbers (outlined in each color) to use as well. The only drawback is that I only have 4 hundred blocks. I need to get the completer set to help out with this, but it will be a while. Anyway...the children can now practice and it seems to be helping. I can put the numbers down and they have to build it with the blocks or I put the blocks down and they find the numbers to go with it. They then have to say the number. I think that is the trickiest part for them, but they are getting better.

Oh yeah, here is the back of the lapbook where we keep the numbers for the children to use. So, except for the blocks (which are kept in a plastic shoebox) it is self contained and doesn't take up hardly any space. :-)

Okay, so I think I am caught up until today. It was exploration day today and we are talking about how flowers and other plants grow. First up was to make flower petal "juice" to get the color. Sadly I don't have much in the way of flowers in my yard right now, but there were a few blossoms from the Rose of Sharon bush left.

We then placed them in a plastic bag with a little bit of water so the children could mush them up. :-)

Pay no attention to the little boy in his underwear. LOL We are in the middle of potty training right now. :-)

Then we took a coffee filter and soaked up some of the juice. It turned it a little bit purple, but it would have been better with flowers that had more intense colors. Oh well..... We then picked some flowers and are pressing/drying them between some books and we have some beans that we are watching. We placed them in between paper towels (wet paper towels) and we will be watching them over the next week or so to see how they sprout and such. :-) Okay...I better get my little guy to the potty before we have an accident, but I wanted to share a video of the last bible verse they memorized. I pray you are all having a blessed week in school!