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Twenty Inches of Snow and No Power

Preschool CornerThis week started off smoothly and by early Wednesday the kids were all whooping and hollering – REAL snow was officially falling. Not the ‘if you get a magnifying glass out you might see it snow’ – LOTS of snow.

To the tune of TWENTY inches. While the snow was nice, the downed trees that caused a loss of power – not so much. At the moment we are still without power {and heat} and doing our best to stay warm!

Wednesday was officially deemed a snow day because the likelihood of us seeing that much snow anytime soon – slim. That and the fact it is supposed to be 60 degrees by the weekend means we need to enjoy it while it is here!

Thursday we all huddled together in the living room to read together and play games and then bundled up to work in the light of the dining room. The kids might think it’s an adventure, but I’m ready to be able to flush the toilet correctly and not worry about all the food in our fridge.

Here’s a peek into our week – the crazy and the normal!

Taking a Tour of France

Learning about France with Madeline and Little Passports (9)

Kaleb had his Little Passports suitcase out as a reminder to me to bring him a new country {he obviously likes the program!}. Up this week was the country of France. After we read the letter from Sam and Sofia and opened up the poster from them, we found France on our map and talked about ways that we could get there from where we live {boat, airplane, etc…}. We added our France boarding pass tag to our suitcase with the grand plan of completing the additional online activities another day – which didn’t end up being this week thanks to a lack of power and internet.

Learning about France with Madeline and Little Passports (1)

One of the books on our shelf to read together has been Madeline. Since we were talking about France, we pulled it off to read together. This was a great tie-in and gave us a chance to talk about rhyming, more about the Eiffel Tower, counting in pairs {the girls all line up two by two} – so a GREAT extension for a country study {and fun}.

Learning about France with Madeline and Little Passports (7)

Kaleb colored a small version of the flag of France {from our France geography printables} and then cut it out and taped it to a straw to play with. He also colored a picture of the Eiffel Tower {and was rather upset I made his use crayons – go figure}.

Leprechaun Math

St. Patrick's Day Math Printalbes 

I had printed out a copy of the St. Patrick’s Day Math games but didn’t have a chance to laminate them before we used them. Instead, I slid a few of the pieces into a page protector so that we could work on them with a dry erase marker. {See how we use page protectors to reuse workbooks}.

Preschool in the Snow-21

For the numbers 1-30, Kaleb put them in numerical order first and then sorted then by even and odd numbers.

Greater than and less than worksheet

The greater than and less than sheet was a huge hit. Kaleb kept making up crazy numbers and laughing at what he was doing. We finally got around to numbers UNDER fifty which was great practice or him to write {and for me to sneak in some handwriting for him}. He is still reversing some of his numbers every now and then.

St. Patrick's Day Math activities (5)

Tally marks FINALLY clicked this week too – yay!! We set the timer for five minutes and he rolled away making tally marks as he went – definitely something that we will pull out to work on again!! Counting by 5’s is still something that we are working on because he can’t seem to grasp it yet. 10’s we have down pat though!

For the rest of the week – it was just enjoying the snow!! Below was early Wednesday morning. Snow continued to fall the rest of the day but the kids were outside at 7am ready to play!

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That was our week! Did you all get any snow this week? {if you are in Florida, I don’t know that I’m ready to talk to you at the moment – as I shiver in our cold, cold house without power – wink}. What fun things did you do together this week?

 

Other Helpful Links

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The Week the Laptop Broke

Preschool CornerThis was going to be the splendid, wonderful week where we uploaded all the fun new Lego software to the computer and also had some more fun with Little Passports, but unfortunately the kids computer went kaputz and I was too scared to let them TOUCH mine for fear it would all go downhill quickly.

So instead we just had a normal week. No crazy bells and whistles. Just snuggle time and reading together – and school as normal. There may have been a few tears because we couldn’t do what we thought we were going to do, but it was still all good.

Learning about Observation and Sorting

science sorting

During science time {with Nancy Larson Science K} we’re learning about sorting objects {this week we talked about sand and rocks as well}. We pulled out the magnifying glass to observe the tiny grains of sand and also talked about different ways that we can sort objects. Can you guess what the easiest way was to sort sand and pebbles?

Building Gears with Legos

working with lego gears

We worked on a different gear sequence this week with our Simple Machine Legos set. I love that even I’m learning a few terms through this as well. While I understand how it all works, talking through it with Kaleb is very fun and he really enjoys being able to build with Legos.

legogears

Looking at the picture above, can you tell which of the three gears is the drive gear and which one is the idler gear?

Moving Along with Reading

kindergarten reading

Again, a little confidence boost for Kaleb this week when he really kicked into reading more fluently with our reading program. I truly love this part of homeschooling and seeing everything ‘click’ with our kids!!

Just so you don’t think it’s all ‘roses and sunshine’, Tuesday of this past week Kaleb had a monumental meltdown over reading – to the point that we left the schoolroom and had to sit somewhere else for some time. We didn’t go back to reading that day, but when we sat down on Thursday, it was smooth sailing.

Note to self: I really need to remember too that he does SO much better when we start off with some subjects rather than waiting til the end of his school time to do them. We were starting with reading before Christmas and somehow after Christmas forgot about that – next week will change!

Photo Booth Fun

Rainbow Background Test (10 of 46)

Rainbow Background Test (18 of 46)

Did I mention we’ve been having a little Photo Booth fun in our home? Laurianna has been working on a project for co-op and needed some guinea pigs, so the kids were more than happy to help her out and be goofy, especially Kaleb. {I’ll be sharing more about the photo booth soon!!}

Rainbow Background Test (27 of 46)

Helpful Preschool Links

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Grab a button for your post below and be sure to take a minute to visit the person who linked up before you. You can read more in the updated guidelines for Preschool Corner. By linking up, you are granting permission for me to share your wonderful ideas and pictures with others in periodic show-and-tell posts.

Be specific in your ‘link title’. Leave either your blog name or theme and provide an age range for your activities. Something a little like this:

Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

Preschool Corner

 

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Our Angry Bird Unit ~ The Week of Angry Birds

Preschool CornerNo surprise that the mere mention of Angry Birds made Kaleb jump up and down in excitement. He’d only been eyeing the growing pile of games and fun for weeks, hoping that each day would be the day we started.

Well, this week was the it! We had so much more planned to do, but a certain mom forgot that we had a field trip to the planetarium in her enthusiasm to collect every fun idea on the internet related to Angry Birds {cough}.

There may be a few more Angry Bird activities that will now spill over into next week. :)

Fun with Angry Birds Printables

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For the most part we kept up with our regular subjects each day {above is our weekly grid}, unless there was something in the printable pack that could take the place of a subject {i.e. for math we worked on several of the math pages in the pack, etc…}. Something about the colorful birds made things extra fun!

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One of the math highlights of the week was the prediction page to go along with the roll and graph page in the Angry Bird Printable pack. Before rolling the Angry Bird die, Kaleb predicted which of the six animals would ‘win’. He rolled the die and filled in a square with a Do-A-Dot marker each time he rolled. When he was done, we answered a few additional questions and read the graph together {he was cheering for the black bird to win, so he was VERY excited at the end!}.

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The Do-A-Dot markers are still one of Kaleb’s favorite things, so we pulled out a few more to use in the ‘find the word’ story. He loved finding multiple copies of the word ‘the’. Can you tell he was a little dot happy? He had a pattern system worked out at the beginning, but that quickly went to the side and he just dotted away.

Other parts of the Angry Bird Printable pack we worked on: beginning sounds sheet {upper and lowercase}, 1:1 counting, word tracers, letter tracers, mazes, addition, directional words, patterns, find the A’s, word matching, find the difference, more/less/equal, letter P sound, least/greatest number, and following directions. Phew!! That was a lot more than I thought!!

More Angry Bird Fun

There was quite a bit of hands-on fun this week too. Believe it or not, we didn’t pull out the iPad or iPod ONCE to play the game!! Instead we pulled out a few fun things and played it in real life!

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Using small plastic cups and Angry Bird pencil toppers, we built fortresses, hid pigs, and tried to knock it all down. We had plans to set up some elaborate block structures, but that didn’t happen – I have a feeling that fun will continue into the weekend for us!

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Kaleb painted a bunch of paper plates and made some fun Angry Bird faces {idea found here}.

Angry Birds card game

One of our favorite games this week was a simple Angry Bird cards game. Kaleb was able to pick up the rules quickly and teach it to everyone. It became a fun game for him to play with the others when they were waiting for something {especially since the games last between 5 and 10 minutes overall}.

We also had picked up a set of the Angry Birds knex, and although they were cute, the pieces didn’t stay together well, which ended up frustrating Kaleb. A few of the parts we are using for other things though {the sling shot is great!}. Instead we are getting the Knock on Wood game {which is what I thought I had ordered – oops}. That one has easier pieces to manage.

The Rest of the Week

Angry Bird anger management

Something that ALL of the kids enjoyed {mom included} were some great tie-in anger management lessons from The Home Teacher. I really can’t do it justice in explaining it all – just know that you are going to want to download her posters and use them with your kiddos. FABULOUS!!! And something kids will remember because it ties in with a game they love!

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Our trip to the planetarium was a lot of fun!! We went with a group of friends and the ‘show’ we watched was entertaining for even the younger ones and then the peek at the night sky was very neat {even I learned a few things!}.

All About Reading program

Kaleb is about halfway through his reading program right now – just one more lesson and he gets to try the moon ice cream that came with our kit!! That has been a fun incentive for him to keep reading. There are days when he acts so frustrated and then just minutes later is reading along great – so puzzling. He ‘thinks’ he can’t read and needs a LOT of encouragement to remind him that he CAN do it.

That about sums up our week – I’d love to hear about your week!! What was the most exciting thing that happened with your kids this week? Leave a comment below and share the excitement!

Angry Bird Links


 Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Grab a button for your post below and be sure to take a minute to visit the person who linked up before you. You can read more in the updated guidelines for Preschool Corner. By linking up, you are granting permission for me to share your wonderful ideas and pictures with others in periodic show-and-tell posts.

Be specific in your ‘link title’. Leave either your blog name or theme and provide an age range for your activities. Something a little like this:

Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

Preschool Corner

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Mention Legos and Things Get Done

Preschool CornerEveryone was back in the full swing of school this week although occasionally there were groans of “I don’t really want to do that.” Not because a certain someone couldn’t do what was being asked, but rather was just being a stinker.

A few weeks ago I met a few ladies from Lego Education, had fun playing with some of their homeschool kits and knew that they would be something wonderful for the boys to use. The kits focus on gears, levers, pulleys, and eventually robotics. So…we bought two homeschool kits to use.

Lego Education kit

On Wednesday, a box arrived on our doorstep that quickly changed the behavior of two boys in the house. A big box full of Lego learning.

Being a mom who knew when to get as much out of a certain little six-year-old as possible, the two of us managed to get a LOT accomplished with the golden carrot of Lego time dangling. {grins – you know you would do it too!}.

All About Reading Level 1

Kaleb is making great progress with All About Reading and realizing that he CAN read {not that is he being made to read}. This week we worked on final blends in words and there were cheers from all the kids when he was reading words that had five letters in them with NO problem at all – because those blends finally kicked in!! Woot!

Now, Legos and reading weren’t all that we did this week {we also worked on math, language, science, Bible, art, and history}, but they were probably the most memorable.

Learning with Legos

After finding numerous vehicles, planes, people, and what-not had invaded our space and were occupying the time of some kiddos, we now have a ‘no Lego law’ in place. The Simple Machine Legos are officially the only ones allowed in the school room {cough}.

photo(1) Lego Education Gears

While Kaleb was ready to pull all the manuals out and build everything in site, we are going s.l.o.w.l.y through them and focusing on the different concepts being covered. This week we started with gears and levers.

You can see in the picture above that Kaleb was turning the handle to move the gears and we talked about what types of things we see gears in and what happens when there are gears of different sizes.

The yellow bricks and pieces were key in this lesson because they showed areas that you would put force, etc.. on in order for it to work. There was an area of yellow under his one hand as well, since he had to hold it there.

We also used two gears of the same size and compared the distance that the gear had to move to cover an equal amount of distance. Overall, this has been GREAT fun and there are some really fun activities coming up that I’m sure I’ll be sharing with you!

That’s the sum of our week – next week we’re having some Angry Birds fun and cannot WAIT for that either. How was YOUR week?

p.s. you might recognize some of the pictures from my Instagram stream. During the week I share different snippets of our day. Feel free to follow along here: http://instagram.com/jolanthed/

 

A Few Preschool Links 

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Grab a button for your post below and be sure to take a minute to visit the person who linked up before you. You can read more in the updated guidelines for Preschool Corner. By linking up, you are granting permission for me to share your wonderful ideas and pictures with others in periodic show-and-tell posts.

Be specific in your ‘link title’. Leave either your blog name or theme and provide an age range for your activities. Something a little like this:

Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

 

Preschool Corner

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Taking Just a Minute to Make a Moment

Preschool CornerThe first part of this week was travel time for my hubby and me. Lots of time spent at the airport and/or driving to and from. In that time, I had the chance to sit down and actually read {fairly uninterrupted}.

I’m fairly sure that you all know how much I love the ministry of Compassion International {and if you don’t you can feel free to read more about my trip to Africa with them – I’ll wait for you!}. I was handed the book Just a Minute by Wes Stafford, the CEO of Compassion, and managed to read the entire book on Monday.

Just a Minute by Wes Stafford

And wouldn’t you know it changed my week.

The premise of the book is how we never know how just one minute can make the difference in the life of a child. Maybe it’s a simple word of praise, a little something special that we go out of our way to do and it forever impacts the life of another person {big or little}.

It just made me think more intentionally. And give me a different perspective on my children.

Do you remember something specific that happened in your childhood – either good or bad that shaped who you are today? I vividly remember a fifth grade teacher of mine and some horrible, nasty Valentine’s Day card that she gave me {no really, it was THAT bad}. To this day the phrase still runs through my mind, begging me to BELIEVE that what it said was truth.

So, this week, amidst all the subjects and learning that we did together I had a few things in mind to make it a successful week with each of our kids – think before speaking and intentionally choose the words that come out of my mouth.

Words that will encourage. Uplift. Build up. Cause giggles. Make little faces smile.

In short – take ‘just a minute’ to bless my children’s lives in the midst of all the busyness and make my words count and be encouragement. Words that will nestle in their hearts and stay with them for years to come.

Will you take just a minute with me today too?

 

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Grab a button for your post below and be sure to take a minute to visit the person who linked up before you. You can read more in the updated guidelines for Preschool Corner. By linking up, you are granting permission for me to share your wonderful ideas and pictures with others in periodic show-and-tell posts.

Be specific in your ‘link title’. Leave either your blog name or theme and provide an age range for your activities. Something a little like this:

Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

 

Preschool Corner

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Fun Valentine’s Day Ideas for Kids

Preschool CornerValentine’s Day is just a few weeks away, so I’ve been pulling together some fun ideas as I find them and wanted to share a few of them with you today.

At the end of the post are a few additional links to my Pinterest boards, so be sure to check those out as well – there are some other fabulous ideas to do with your kids!

 

Cheerio Bird Feeders from By Stephanie Lynn – these would be such a fabulous idea to make with your kiddos and then share with the birds. We have so many birds on our deck right now and this would be a fun treat!

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Heart Memo Board Tutorial from Spell Outloud – Maureen has a great tutorial sharing a handmade memo board that also includes an idea for making valentine’s to hang on it to encourage other family members. Cute!!

Valentine’s Day Heart Lei from Make and Takes – with an abundance of straws in our house, this lei would be much fun to make, or even extend it to make some cute garland to hang around the house.

 

Long Distance Hugs from The Party Event – if you have family members that live far away {or even if they don’t}, these long distance hugs to mail would be super-cute. I happen to know a grandparent or two that would love them!

Heart Shaped Button Snake from the Iowa Farmer’s Wife – this would be a super easy lacing activity for younger children {simple to make with felt, a ribbon, and a button}. Easy is great!

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Valentine Candy estimating from Homeschool Creations – if you have a few different kinds of valentine candy in your house, make a fun game out of the variety!

 

Valentine’s Day Sensory Bin from The Iowa Farmer’s Wife – there are so many things that you can do with the Valentine’s Day theme and a fun sensory box!

 

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Rose Scented Playdough from Blog Me Mom – how yummy and fun would this be to make together?

 

Paper Bag Counting Book from Sixty Second Parent – turn a simple paper bag into a fun counting activity for little ones.

Valentine's Day Collage

Valentine’s Day Printable Pack {free!} from Homeschool Creations – pull out your favorite Valentine’s Day books to read with your kids and print off the pages your child will enjoy from this FREE printable pack.

Do you have any special crafts or plans for this Valentine’s Day? Leave a comment with your ideas or links to things you’ve found and share the fun with us!

 

Ready to Link Up?

Share what you are doing with your kids! Please link your exact blog post to the Mr. Linky below and link back here too! Grab a button for your post below and be sure to take a minute to visit the person who linked up before you. You can read more in the updated guidelines for Preschool Corner. By linking up, you are granting permission for me to share your wonderful ideas and pictures with others in periodic show-and-tell posts.

Be specific in your ‘link title’. Leave either your blog name or theme and provide an age range for your activities. Something a little like this:

Police Officer Theme {ages 4-5}

Preschool Corner

 



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