From the Mouth of Spice...

"Is it almost lunchtime? I'm almost eating my hair."

What's In the Bag?

Several of the moms in my homeschool group got together a few weeks ago to exchange preschool activity bags. These are Zip-Loc bags that contain all the pieces a preschooler would need to entertain herself independently for a while. We had 12 moms participating. Two of us decided to make two activity bags so in all, each participant went home with 14 kits to keep their little ones occupied while Mom works with older siblings.
Here's what's in our bags:

ABC Caterpillar - This is one of the bags I made. I saw this on someone's blog not long ago, but could not for the life of me find it again. I wanted to go back and look at the caterpillar face she had drawn because it was much cuter than mine, but never could find it. If this was your blog, please let me know. There were a lot of cute ideas on the blog and I like to give credit where credit is due. Anyway, the main purpose of this activity is to help with letter recognition. Spice's job here was to lay out the plates in ABC order. It takes up a lot of space. Once she has them laid out, I call out letters for her to hop to or simple three letter CVC words for her to spell.


Sort and Pour - Obviously the point here is to sort the beads into cups by color. Spice spent a lot of time on this one the other day. Picking up all those little tiny beads is hard work! She also practiced pouring beads from cup to cup.


The rest of the bags were...
Push Pin Punch Art Activity - A washcloth to use as a mat, a push pin, construction paper, templates of simple shapes (heart, star, leaf...), and a clothespin to clip it all together. The purpose is to punch holes around the chosen shape with the push pin.
I Spy Bottle - This one is of course a big hit. My kids love the I Spy books. I have been planning to make one of these for ohhh about 8 months now so I was thrilled to get it and clean out the cabinet full of bottles I had saved. It came with a laminated print-out with pictures of all the objects in the bottle and a dry-erase marker so the child can mark off each item as it is found.
Writing - A mini chalkboard, sponge eraser, chalk, and a sheet of pre-writing songs.
Fishing Game - Much like the one I described here but with numbers instead of words.
Color Matching - This bag has strips with various shades of the same color along with matching clothespins. The object is to clip the clothespin to the correct color card.
Pizza Math - Three pizza puzzles divided into different fraction amounts. The child has to match the correct pieces together to make a whole pizza.
Fine Motor Skills Bag - This bag has several activities: Attaching clothespins to a cup, carrying pompoms on a spoon and dropping into the cup, lacing noodles on a string, and arranging wiki sticks on drawings.
ABC Sound Cards - One set of letter cards and three picture cards per letter to be matched up.
Number Matching - One set of index cards numbered 1-10 to be paired with a second set of cards with 1-10 stickers. (Not pictured.)
File Folder Game - This kit contains a folder with multiple pockets on it and blank laminated strips of paper. The strips and pockets can be programmed for a variety of activities like matching upper/lowercase letters, placing the appropriate number of strips in a pocket pre-programmed with a number... I wrote simple addition problems on each pocket for Spice the other day and included the necessary number of craft sticks. She had to solve each problem and place the correct # of sticks in the pocket. If she ended up with too many or not enough craft sticks, she knew one of her answers was incorrect.
What Comes Next? - Cards and counters for practicing patterns and sequencing. (Not pictured.)
Beads and Pipe Cleaners - Six colored pipe cleaners with matching beads that are to be placed on the correct pipe cleaner. There are also four pre-patterned pipe cleaners for practicing sequencing or color mixing.

I have been doling the activities out one or two at a time for Spice. I don't want her to use them all up in a day or two and have the novelty wear off. I keep them all together in a bin. Eventually I will let her pick and choose which bags to work with when she needs something to do. She has been having a great time with them and of course Sport always has to get in on the action even though he's waaaayyy past the preschool years.

Up To Her Old Antics Again

Spice is an accident waiting to happen. It sounds terrible for a mother to say that, but sadly, it's true. For those two or three readers of this blog who are not relatives and don't know her history, let's just say there was a point in time where she had more broken bones than years in her life...and yes, each broken bone was from a separate incident.
She's been riding her bike without training wheels for about a month now and has done a great job of staying up. This afternoon while showing Sport how fast she could ride, she crashed into the basketball goal and took quite a tumble. Fortunately, she escaped with no broken bones and mostly just cuts and scratches. Unfortunately, one of those cuts was to her frenulum, you know that piece of skin that connects your top lip to your gum line? She tore that baby clean off the gum line. After a couple of conversations with the on-call nurse at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, I was relieved to learn a torn frenulum isn't as serious as it sounds and should heal on its own. For the next few days though, Spice will have to be on a soft foods diet and parade around with a swollen upper lip any Hollywood starlet would pay an arm and a leg for. She's definitely got the Angelina Jolie look going on. In a show of solidarity, Sport and I have committed to live off of milkshakes and smoothies for the next few days as well.

Helping Kids Clean

I'm beginning to think this blog exists only for the purpose of linking up with WFMW. I'll try to post something riveting before next Wednesday!

Wouldn't it be great if you could tell your kids to go clean their rooms and they would actually do it? It took me a while to figure it out, but a kid's idea of clean is very different from a parent's idea. Sport will wade through Legos to get to his bed that's buried under a library shelf full of books and still insist that his room is clean. For awhile I would sit in his room and direct him step by step on what to pick up next. Let's just say this was not fun (especially when you consider half the reason I send him to his room to clean up is in the hopes he will actually decide to play with some of his toys while he's up there and give me a few minutes of solitude.

Enter the cleaning chart from MeckMom.com. When I first came across this post it gave me just the excuse I needed to go by the laminator I had always dreamed of. I made charts the next day for Sport and Spice. Since pictures are used, the charts work really well for kids who can't read yet. Spice still uses her chart, but Sport and I have gotten a bit lazy - mostly because it's hard to find all of the pictures when they're buried under books and Legos. Now I just make a list for him on his dry erase board. Here's a look at today's list:

1) Make bed.
2) Put away clothes.
3) All shoes in closet.
4) Clean up books.
5) Legos
6) Legos
7) Legos...

Twenty minutes later his room was much more in line with what I call clean! This idea works for me. To read more cleaning tips, head over to We Are That Family for the WFMW cleaning edition.

Quiz Bowling

One of the great things about homeschooling is kids don't always have to put pencil to paper when test time comes around. I typically make up an "official" science test for Sport at the end of each unit, but with other subjects, I tend to be a little more relaxed.

It probably goes without saying that Sport likes sports! Last year, early on in our homeschooling career he came up with a bowling game that allowed me to quiz him on pretty much any topic. We actually ended up using this as a form of assessment quite often. Here's how it goes:

I would take about 10 index cards and write questions on each one (math problems, social studies questions related to the continent we were studying, spelling words...). Then I would lay them out face down like bowling pins (1 on the first row, 2 on the second row, 3 cards on the third row, and 4 on the final row). He would stand about 5 feet away and roll a tennis ball toward the cards. We had a mat designed to go under a sleeping bag on camping trips that we would use for our ally, but it's not necessary. If the tennis ball rolled over any cards I would pick those up and call out the questions. If he answered correctly, the card was set aside. If incorrect, the card went back into the line-up for a second chance. I found this game was not only fun, but it gave me a great opportunity to find out how much he really knew. He was much more forthcoming with information when he could talk about it rather than being forced to write it down. It was also easy to dig a little deeper by keeping the conversation going and turning the question from one card into two or three.

Today we're going to break out the tennis ball and bowling alley mat again for the first time this year. I know he and Spice will be thrilled. We're wrapping up a short science unit on sound and musical instruments so I felt it would be easier to do a bowling quiz rather than make up a written exam. Spice hates to be left out of the fun so I always make her a hodge podge of questions.

Here's a look at their tests for today...

Sport (3rd grade):
-How does the shape of our ears help us hear?
-Why does a guitar have a hollow body?
-Give an example of a percussion instrument and a wind instrument.
-How does sound travel?
-What word tells the measurement of the number of waves that go by each second?
-What is pitch?
-How does the length of a wind instrument affect its pitch?
-What is a vibration?
-How does an echo work?
-Why is it louder when you clap your palms together rather than the backs of your hands?

Spice (age 4):
-What month is it?
-What is another word for autumn?
-What is 9-1?
-Spell the word how.
-What saint is known as the "Little Flower"?
-What is 5-2?
-Who were the first man and woman?
-Who is George Washington?
-Read this word...they.
-Would you like to have lived in colonial times? Why?

Hairbows and Legos

This week's Works For Me Wednesday theme is about organization. Two things that were beginning to take over our house were Spice's hairbows and Sport's Legos. So here's how we got them under control.

For the hairbows (and other hair accessories), I found this idea on MeckMom.com.

 

MeckMom has lots of great tips. She originally called for using a shoe organizer for this purpose, but I found this all-purpose organizer at Dollar Tree and used it instead 'cuz I'm cheap. It's a little smaller than a shoe organizer would be, but it works for us. I added ribbons at the top to make it hang lower on the door so Spice would be able to reach almost everything, then we sorted all of the accessories by color. This is much easier than scrounging through a drawer stuffed full of bows, and Spice likes being able to find the right color pocket and reach right in and grab what she wants. Can't get much better organizing help than this for a buck.

Unfortunately, the Lego problem could not be solved for a buck, but after searching stores and the web for ideas for quite awhile, we found something that Sport and I are both happy with. This tool box came from Lowe's and was about $20. It's made by Stanley and has about 50 storage compartments intended for sorting nails, screws.... We spent hours, no DAYS, sorting Legos by type. Before this, we had all of the bricks sorted by color in cigar boxes we found at the local recycling center. This worked well for awhile, but the amount of Legos eventually outgrew the boxes. I found several "Lego Masters" online who store their pieces by type rather than color. The theory is it's much easier to find a red 1x1 brick in a pile of multicolored 1x1 bricks than it is in a pile of red bricks of all different sizes. Anyway, this box is cool because it can be completely unfolded giving easy access to every storage compartment at once and, it can be folded up when not in use (not like that ever happens around here) or to move from room to room. Sport and I like to call it his "briefcase" since he would love to one day head off to work at the Lego factory.

 
 

To find out what works for others, head over to We Are That Family for Works For Me Wednesday.

Make Life Easier

When we moved from our one level ranch house to our current home, the downfalls of living in a two story house with kids quickly became apparent. Can't tell you how many times we were on our way out the door only to realize the kids didn't have shoes on, hadn't brushed their teeth, hadn't done a thing to their hair or even worse, all of the above. Sending them back upstairs to take care of one or all of these issues was a huge time waster. Couple that with the fact that my kids refuse to go upstairs alone because aliens or some other strange creatures might be waiting for them, and we were doomed to be late for everything. It was obvious we needed help. First up, I placed extra toothbrushes for Sport and Spice in our downstairs half-bath, along with toothpaste, a cup for rinsing, and a comb for last minute dos. This saved a lot of time. We still had the shoe problem. This one was solved inadvertently after I got tired of finding shoes in every room of the house. I bought a basket to corral all the wayward shoes and placed it near the garage door. Shoes found downstairs get tossed in the basket. It didn't take long to realize this solved the problem of always having to run upstairs for shoes. Now the kids just grab a pair out of the basket and we can be on our way.

Job Security

Everyone's worried about their job in these tough economic times and I'm no different. Can't tell you how many times a day I worry, What if they don't like the meal I cooked? or What if the laundry's not up to spec? Will they fire me? Cut my pay?
Well, yesterday the top brass let me know I was doing a fair job and needn't worry. Spice brought me this note while I was getting ready to face the day:



For those of you whose job description does not involve reading 4-year-old, here's a translation:

mom i no You LOVE mE

Ahhh, job security!

Overheard

A conversation that just took place between Sport and Spice. Sport put something on his head pretending it was a hat.

Spice: You look like somebody from the Civil War.

Sport: How do you know about the Civil War?

Spice: Uhhh...wasn't Dad in it or something?

Sport (laughing): The Civil War was like a hundred years ago!

Spice: Oh, must've been PaPa then.

Summer Reading

We love to read! Now that 180 days of homeschool are officially behind us, we plan on spending a good chunk of our lazy days of summer reading and taking part in a couple of summer reading programs. As part of The Old Schoolhouse magazine's Summer Reading Splash, here's a look at some of the books we hope to get our hands on:

Sport, age 8, reader extraordinaire:
Swiss Family Robinson by Johann Wyss
Ramona the Pest and other Beverly Cleary books
Boxcar Children books by Gertrude Chandler Warner
Great Inventions: Computers by Brian Williams
Frindle by Andrew Clements
Secrets, Lies, Gizmos, and Spies by Janet Coleman and other spy books
Books about cars

Spice, age 4, learning to read & lovin' it:
My Pal Al by Marcia Leonard
I Do Not Want To by Kathy Schulz
Frontline Phonics books
A Beka beginner phonics readers
Clifford phonics readers

GroovieMom, head of family reading:
Charlotte's Web by E.B. White (family read-aloud)
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave - been working on this one for awhile, just need to finish it
100 Top Picks For Homeschool Curriculum by Cathy Duffy
Realityland: True-Life Adventures at Walt Disney World by David Koenig
Big Russ and Me by Tim Russert
Sue Patrick's Workbox System
You Being Beautiful by Dr. Oz - Don't know if I'll make it through all of this one. It gets pretty scientific...much more than I need to know.

If your kids plan on doing some summer reading, head on over to the Barnes and Noble website. If they read 8 books, they can earn a free one. We love books - especially when they're free!

Word of the Day

Weeha: (interjection) A term used to show joy, pleasure, or excitment; often heard on the Little People Farm. Word Origin: Spice, 2009. Related Terms: Whee, yeeha. Usage: "Weeha, Farmer Jed is riding his horse! Weeha!"

Quotables

Snippets from two of our conversations today...

In the car, Spice takes her shoes off and comments "Whew these are stinky socks!"

Groovie Mom: Why are your socks stinky?

Spice: Actually I think it's the feet that's under them.


Later in the evening, stepping out of church after a late night Cub Scout meeting...

Spice: Hey it's dark out here. Who turned off all the lights?

Sport: GOD!