Tissue Heart

We have been very busy with a lot of Valentines art project. This one is an oldy but goody for us! Each time Holly does a project with crumpled tissue she has more patience and is more thorough with her art. This time she wanted the little holes all filled in just perfect.

This is an easy project. Cut a medium to large sized heart, depending on the child's attention span. Pre-cut a lot of little squares of colored tissue. Have a little dipping bowl filled with white glue. Then I crumple one little tissue square to show how it is done, a light crumple not a tight one or it will take forever to complete, dip in glue and start to fill the heart up.

It turned out so pretty!

Time Will Tell

Holly has had a bit of an introduction when it comes to clocks, nothing solid though. Today we are officially starting to work on learning to tell time. I chose to use a Kumon book geared towards basic skills a long with some books, practice clocks, a Judy clock, flash cards and various little skill projects too. However, the key here will be repetition I am sure.

To start off Holly is focusing on the placement of numbers on the clock by hours. Today she did some work with that, we read a book and she practiced moving her clock to hour positions from flash cards. Then she cut out a circle and placed her own hours on the clock and compared them to an actual clock to see how well she did on spacing. She really enjoyed all of her work with clocks and is very excited to start understanding how to tell time.

Breaking Down 100

Holly has pretty much mastered her 100 board, counting by tens and is working on counting by fives more comfortably. She has the 'numbers' memorized however we are focusing on the physical quantity of one hundred by 10's and 5's. So, she has been taking groups of 100 items and counting them out by groups and then transferring them to her 100 board. Some of this is repetition, however she is feeling a lot more comfortable now with her number patterns and is starting to move up into the hundreds a lot more comfortably without just the memorization, but skill.

Library Days

We visit the library at least once a week, if not more! We have a pretty good routine down of our plan when we visit - Holly does all the 'work' part. She sorts our books, movies, music and cd's and puts them in the book drop. We then discuss what items we will look for first (we have already made a list of interests), check out our 'on hold' shelf and then she scans all of our materials for check out and loads the bag to head home. We adore library time and could probably go daily if it were possible.

The Joy of Homeschooling

The joy of homeschooling... so many joys are to be had, however flexibility is one of them I treasure most!!! The flexibility to change your day to be in tune with your child or accommodate a new adventure. Today was a good day for flexibility.

The work box was filled, the plan was created and there was work to be done. Holly also had a science class to attend. The theme was Fossils & Rocks - a favorite of Holly's by far.

The day at home started with wanting to look at her one of many dinosaur books and then it soon evolved into watching Walking With Dinosaurs (which is amazing by the way). We headed out for her class where they talked a lot about fossils, inspected many, Holly brought some to share, they colored some pictures and then created their own 'modern day' fossil craft project.

After returning home she pulled out yet more books, did a dinosaur puzzle, played with her Playmobile dinosaurs, colored in her coloring book and asked to go to the library to get more books on dinosaurs. So, we loaded up and went out to get more books.

Flexibility. She had a serious desire today to do all things dinos and fossils so we went with it and scrapped our other school plans. The joy of homeschooling! Sure we'll make up the work throughout the week, nothing to major as it is Kindergarten - however, for now Holly sits engrossed in a new book. Can't beat that!

Chalk Art

Today Holly learned about chalk pastels in art. This can be a messy little activity, but a fun one and her first time really trying art chalk out. She created a design on black paper with a white crayon and then used bright colored chalk to color it in. Her goal here was to learn how to hold and use the chalk, only one piece broke -- not too bad!

For the second project we discussed blending chalk, she saw some examples and then tried her fingers at it. Holly then created a free 'scribble' to blend several chalk colors.

When you are done coloring with chalk you want to lightly spray your art project with an aerosol hair spray to set the chalk - it will limit the dust and smearing.

The Day to Day Stuff

Often times on this little blog I'll post a fun art project, outing or experiment that Holly has enjoyed -- but, please know there is that day to day stuff we do all the time. The reading, math, writing, listening, science, history and so much more! Typically we cover at least eight to ten different subjects/activities a day if not more, depending on how in depth we are on them.

Today for instance we started with reading, I read Holly a great book on weather that does a nice job breaking down how weather works and what a meteorologist does. Then she read three books to me. After reading we moved over to spelling words for the week - reviewed reading all of her sight words (sounding out some, knowing others and stumped on the tough ones) there are about 75 of them right now, she wrote out her weekly words several times and then spelled them out with magnets on our board. Holly worked on math and subtraction, diamonds on the geo board, a word search of winter related words, did some copy work with a four line poem on snowflakes, did her 100 sheet and we did a lot of talking about the weather for the day as she filled in her weather graph.