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This is my quarterly Faithwalkers Journal editing deadline week, so I am making things I think will be pretty easy/low stress.  I’m so excited that the weather is finally fall-like, and the warm food will add a delightful warmth to the chill in the air. 

Monday: Crock Pot Beans and Rice (held over from last week since we grilled for one dinner over the weekend)

Tuesday: Beef roast and baked potatoes with veggie or salad

Wednesday: Lasagna (already made and in the freezer!)

Thursday: Chicken Tortilla Soup  (I usually use this recipe, but I might try this one this time instead)

Friday: Fish (I got some Sole on price reduction last week and froze it — not sure exactly how I will cook it yet), Pesto Pasta, veggies or salad

Saturday: eating at a friend’s birthday party

Sunday: homemade pizza

If you need more menu inspiration, check out Menu Plan Monday at orgjunkie.com!

We’ve now finished three weeks of Kindergarten.  We definitely had our ups and downs this week.  On Monday I lacked big-time in the patience department.  Wednesday we had co-op, had to run errands in the afternoon (due to running out of milk and having library movies due that we couldn’t renew), and then had soccer practice in the early evening, so no school beyond co-op got done.  On Thursday I apparently hurt Madeline’s feelings by asking her to do a phonics activity too many times.  On Friday we had friends from out of town join us in the morning, and although they encouraged us to keep going with our school routine, Madeline had a hard time focusing with company in the house!

However on the “up” side, Madeline made some real progress in math this week, and we had a lot of fun with some of our other subjects.  I guess most of the “downs” were more on my side — me seeing the character areas I need to grow in and me being forced to be flexible to the needs of the day and not stuck on the arbitrary schedule that I made anyway.

Here’s a bit more about the topics we covered this week.

Bible/Character: Our Fruit of the Spirit for the week was Joy, and we also read out of “Leading Little ones to God.”

Math: We reviewed 1-1 correspondence and basic shapes.  Madeline already has a good handle on these topics so we breezed through two units in two days.   She successfully counted from 0-20 several times on Tuesday, so we had a sweet celebration of fresh raspberries and ice cream for our afternoon snack.  This was a big milestone! Then we started on counting by 10s to 100 as well as counting by 1’s to 100. I was pleasantly surprised by how well this went.  We’ll be working on this next week too.

Reading/phonics: We added the Alphabet Island Matching Game  to our repertoire of phonics games. This involves matching a picture to the letter the word starts with.  Madeline did not do well with “ending sound” exercises in Alphabet Island, so I went on to the Freereading.net phonemic awareness activities.  This did not go as well as expected, and as I mentioned above, I greatly exasperated her by asking her to repeat the activities too many times.  Lesson learned.  I thought the activities from this site looked so wonderful, but I am not sure they connect with Madeline, or maybe I am just not very good at presenting them!

At the end of the week we went back to Alphabet Island to start learning about Clever C’s two sounds (He jumps like his pet Kangaroo K when he is near the boy vowels Active A, Optimistic O and Understanding U but he acts all silly when he is near the girl vowels Everloving E, Innocent I and Yours Truly Y).  We also played Sight Word Bingo and practiced the Alphabet Island songs, including learning the new song about Clever C.

Social Studies: We started reading Usborne’s Living Long Ago, and read through the section about clothes through the ages.  Reading all the text in that book is too much for Madeline, but she enjoyed it if I skipped some of the details!  We also finished her special Map Book, which shows where Madeline lives, from her room to her house to her street, neighborhood, city, state, country, continent and world.  It’s a neat project she can be proud of!

Science: Our topics this week were Air and Water. We read about them in our science book and some library books, and did a couple of experiments.  Here’s Madeline learning about how plants drink water by putting some food coloring in a jar of water with a piece of celery:

Handwriting: Madeline practiced more writing of short words on the dry erase board and practiced her name daily.

Arts and Crafts: Madeline had a renewed interest in doing crafty activities this week, so she chose a lot of crafts during her free time including a “mirror” craft from her Usborne Mermaid Things to Make and Do book, a homemade card, a beaded necklace, a craft from her Tinkerbell craft kit, and some collages made with old greeting cards.

Read Alouds: Continued reading “Trumpet of the Swan” by EB White.

Other Fun Stuff: Erik pulled a book about airplanes and pilots off the shelf on Sunday night, leading to a “mini unit study” of sorts for for both kids.  On Tuesday we made paper airplanes and both kids had airplane coloring sheets (Madeline’s also involved writing the word “airplane”). We read various short biographies of famous aviators all week long. Madeline also did a lot of mazes, dot-to-dots, and other “thinking puzzle” type worksheets in her fun boxes this week.

~Erik is currently 30 months old~

Erik became very interested in airplanes this week after reading a book on famous aviators, so we turned that interest into a mini-unit study of sorts.  Here’s Erik having just thrown a paper airplane:

And since “A is for Airplane” I thought it would be fun to give Erik a “letter A” sticker activity.  He got a couple non-authorized stickers on there too. 

Erik also enjoyed giving the Lacing Animals a try:

Finally, I was so proud of him doing this shape/letter matching activity bag.  He sat with it for quite a while and matched nearly all the foam pieces before he got bored:

Check out the weekly Tot School round up at 1+1+1=1 to see what other families are doing for Tot School!

It’s “Menu Plan Monday” on a Monday.  What a novel concept!   Last week turned out to be my “improvisation week”.  Between forgetting things on two different trips to the store and having our car out of commission for much of the week, I just had to make do and find ways to use what I had.  No big deal for some people, but I found it to be a bit outside of my comfort zone.  I could have walked with the kids to one of the neighborhood stores to get things I was missing, but between our homeschooling taking up a good portion of the morning and the boys nap times often not lining up (and hence taking up much of the afternoon), even getting in a walk to the store would have been a scheduling challenge!

Here’s the menu for this week…hopefully I will need to make fewer improvisational changes!

Monday: Pork Chops and this Spaghetti Squash side dish.  My mom gave me a home grown spaghetti squash and I can’t wait to use it! Maybe some bread on the side ot round out the meal?

Tuesday: Chili Tacos (essentially, a can of chili mixed with Taco meat.  I remember a friend making this years ago and it was yummy, so I decided to try it again).  With taco toppings and guacamole and chips.

Wednesday: Stuffed peppers in the crock pot.  I am nearly certain I won’t like this, but everyone else in the family likes peppers, so I decided to give it a try.  And besides, I got a few free green peppers from my mom, plus they are on sale at Aldi this week to fill out the number I need for my crockpot.  At least maybe I’ll like the filling.

Thursday: Broccoli Cheese soup and homemade dinner rolls

Friday: Creamy Beef and Noodles (I have discovered this is really good made on the stove too, and it is easier to control the thickness of the sauce making it that way)

Saturday: Chicken and Stuffing casserole (look for this on the Kraft website…the site is running really slow for me right now so I cant get the search there to work).

Sunday: Crock Pot Beans and Rice

Be sure to check the “Menu Plan Monday” post at orgjunkie.com for more menu ideas!

This past week was Madeline’s second week of Kindergarten and it was our first “full” week.  I’m not sure if I will write up a “week in review” every week, but it was kind of fun to keep a log of our learning and it will be something nice to look back on if I can keep up with it!

We started every day (except Wednesday, since that is our co-op/fun day) with Bible devotions and calendar time.  We also tried to incorporate practicing Spanish vocabulary words into moments of time here and there.  I think our pattern will be to have Spanish in a workbox once a week or so to listen to the CD, and then just have spontaneous practice the rest of the week (doing it during lunch or snack time seems to work well).

I think we spent two to three hours doing school each day if you include everything school related, not just workbooks, textbooks and the like.  I’m trying to incorporate games into our school day whenever possible and of course reading books together.

Here’s a bit about what we did each day:

Monday: We read our of the Science textbook and did a gummy bear experiment to practice “prediction” — aka, what would happen when the gummy bear sat in water over night. For alphabet island Madeline practiced words with initial vowel sounds.  Madeline also did mazes, US states puzzle, kindermath worksheets and flashcards, reviewed letter s for handwriting, did a  “can you remember” activity bag,  and watched a short educational video about light (one of our science topics this week).

Tuesday: We read our history textbook and talke d about what history is and we also started Usborne’s  “Then and Now” book. Madeline did dot-to-dots and we played Number concentration with #’s 11-20. We checked on the gummy bear science experiment and then did  a couple of light/water science experiments.

Wednesday: This was our “Fun Day” — We had a  park playdate, and then Grandma Karen came to visit.  Madeline got to play and read with Grandma (including reading some of our history/social studies books from the library).  Then after grandma left we read some science books from library, review numbers 11-20 and practiced the Alphabet island songs. Then on Wednesday nights Madeline has soccer practice!

Thursday: This was our first fairly hard day due to a cranky toddler and a teething baby.  I made too much of a big deal about a little thing during calendar time, and so after that Madeline wasn’t in a great mood either.  We worked on medial vowel sounds for alphabet island — this went better than expected.  Madeline practiced writing numbers on the dry erase board– she thinks this is much more fun than doing it on paper.  We finished “Then and Now.”  We tried to read some books about Minnesota for our history/geography time.   “M is for Minnesota” is the only good one I managed to find a the library.  Unfortunately there were errors in others or they were too boring or too old for her.

Friday: This was an awesome day…after doing our calendar, devotions and one chapter of our new read-aloud book (The Trumpet of the Swan by EB White)…we then headed to porch for handwriting practice on the dry erase board.

Then after that we went outside for phonics games and work on her map book.  It was so great to do school outside!

After our “finger food Friday” lunch (also outside), we walked to a nearby hosue demolition site to watch the action.  Then during Erik’s nap time we did some quick math and alphabet island workbook pages, then read more of our chapter book.  Madeline really also enjoyed her fun boxes that she did during various breaks in the day — A Princess activity book and a Tinkerbell art book.

~Erik is currently 29 months old~

Erik is almost two and a half and doesn’t want to miss out on all the fun he sees his sister having as she does Kindergarten work.  He’s really not at the point of needing a formal preschool curriculum yet, but I did want to give him some fun things of his very own to do during school time and maybe help him learn a few basics like numbers, colors and shapes.

I’ve seen the concept of “Tot School” on various blogs that participate in the weekly Tot School roundup, and I really like the idea of purposeful play for the “pre-preschool” set.  Here’s a bit of what Erik did for his first week of Tot School:

A lot of Erik’s Tot School comes in the form of daily Tot School Baskets.  These are his equivalent of the workboxes that contain Madeline’s school work each day, right down to the velcro number cards.  Of course, he has little interest in doing anything but playing with the number cards, but at least he is playing with his number cards and not hers! I have no expectation that he will do his baskets in order — he can choose them as he pleases.

I’m filling his Tot School Baskets with educational toys and activities…and some things that are just plain distractions to keep him busy while we do school.  Favorite activities so far have included foam and wood puzzles, stacking pegs, the Busy Bugs activity set, various decks of flashcards (he loves to spread them around and look at the pictures), and our Farm and Builder Create-a-Scene magnet activities.  Here’s Erik enjoying Create-a-Scene magnets this past week:

I’ve also given him a couple activities from the Preschool Activity Bag exchange that we did last year.  Many of those activities are too young for Madeline now, and Erik is just coming into the age of being able to enjoy them.  He needs more help with these, but he seems to enjoy trying to do things like match up letters.  I tried giving him a special art activity or coloring page or “worksheet” to scribble on during our first week, but he seemed to gravitate away from those.  As much as he likes to color and do art, I think because he knows right where to find those things, it didn’t seem “special” to have them in the baskets.

Right now Erik is doing most of his “Tot School” while do Kindergarten with Madeline.  I am trying to be intentional though about giving some attention and instruction to him in the process.  He also enjoys when his “Tot School” mirrors what Madeline is doing with her school work.   Here Madeline works on a USA puzzle while Erik works on a farm puzzle:

I’m also hoping to have some one-on-one playtime with Erik once or twice a week.  This also may or may not include Kai, but he’s not a big distraction yet! It’s a real treat for Erik to get to play with me without Madeline around, so I am hoping we can remember to occasionally give her time alone doing something she enjoys (like drawing or playing a computer game) while I play with the boys.  During our first week of Tot School, Erik really enjoyed some time to play blocks with me.  And since Kai can’t crawl yet, we were safe to not have the towers tipped over!

Eventually I would expect “Tot School” to morph more into a preschool time for Erik, and that as time goes we’ll have even more intentional focus on letters, numbers and the like.  Right now, Erik is asking me to write him things on chalk board:

But it won’t be long before he’ll be writing things up there too!

You can can visit 1+1+1=1 to see what other families are doing during Tot School time!

Madeline would like you to know how to make Covia!  Here’s the recipe. She says that Erik told her what was in it.

You’ll need:

2 apples

1 lb of strawberries (or less is fine)

2 drops of food coloring (or 4 drops if you want two different colors)

Optional: 3 spoonfuls of brown sugar and a few dashes of cinnamon.  Those were mommy’s additions

Chop up the apples and strawberries.  Put them in a pan.  Drop in two drops of food coloring. Use two different colors if you want to.  Mommy thinks you might like it with some sugar and cinnamon too.  Bake it in the oven for 15 minutes.  Mommy thinks 350 degrees is hot enough.

Here’s our Covia! before it went in to the oven.  There are two pans because one pan had cinnamon and sugar and one pan didn’t:

Madeline also says. “It was really delicious when we ate it.  Also really yummy and messy. It is very blue because I added a lot of blue food coloring.  More than two drops.  When it cooks, it makes it into blue Covia!  The one with sugar and cinnamon is very liquidy after cooking but the other one was pretty dry”

[We started hearing Erik say "Covia!" a few weeks ago, having absolutely no idea what he was talking about.  One day Madeline came up to us and told us that she found out was Covia! was and Erik told her.   They have been begging me to actually make it for days, so this was our fun family activity last night.]

It’s time for another Menu Plan Monday! Here’s what we have on the dinner menu this week:

Monday: Black Bean Burgers, French fries and salad

Tuesday: Turkey Tetrazzini and a veggie (link to recipe is below)

Wednesday: Creamy Corn and Spinach Enchiladas (with pork if I find the portion of it that’s burried in the freezer…otherwise made with the rest of the leftover turkey, even though I hate planning the same protein two days in a row. Yes, I am weird like that!)

Thursday: Salsa-Beef Skillet (though I might make a more “homemade” version with my own mac and cheese instead of a velveeta box.  Though I could still imagine using a hunk of velveeta in it.  Hmmm….) and a veggie or salad

Friday: Egg, Shrimp and Rice Casserole (see below for link to recipe) and a veggie or salad

Saturday: Most likely out to dinner for our anniversary!!!

Sunday: Chicken (probably in the crock pot), Mashed potatoes and veggies or salad

The recipes for both the Turkey Tetrazzini and the Egg, Shrimp and Rice bake were in a previous post.  It’s funny that there was another week on a past menu that had those same two dishes!

As always, you can find lots of other menu ideas in the Menu Plan Monday post at orgjunkie.com.

We began our first week of school on Tuesday.  Madeline was excited for her first day of Kindergarten, Erik was excited because Madeline was excited (even though he had no idea what this “Tot school” thing was all about)…and Kai was just happy to play:

Madeline got a special present for her first day (a pretty binder and dividers to store some of her school work in), and we had a special lunch of raspberry pancakes.  It was supposed to be our special breakfast…but the kids jumped the gun and ate cereal for breakfast before I had a chance to make the pancakes, so we had them at lunch instead.

We really only had three full days of school this week.  We didn’t start until Tuesday, since Monday was labor day.  Then on Wednesday we had our first day of co-op, plus soccer practice in the early evening.  After seeing how tired we were after co-op this week, Wednesdays may need to be the light days on our schedule — I may use them to do some of the “extras” like art and music in the afternoon after co-op.

Madeline worked hard to learn which letters are vowels (and what their short sounds are), she reviewed numbers 0-6, we played the Alphabet Island Vowel Game and Sight Word Concentration, we read about maps and started making Madeline a “special map book” (this was actually her idea, not mine!), we read some out of our science text book as well as some science non-fiction books the kids chose, and Madeline practiced copying a few words for handwriting practice — one of her first times copying whole words instead of just individual letters.  We also started out each day with Bible study and calendar time.  Here she is hard at work on her math assignment:

Meanwhile, Erik got to work on his Tot School baskets.  I filled his four baskets each day with coloring pages, games, puzzles, and other fun activities.  It generally kept him pretty well occupied while Madeline and I worked on other things.  Not to say he didn’t ever interrupt us! A part of our daily calendar time is an “estimation jar” where Madeline guesses the number of items in the jar and then we count them.  I quickly figured out I had to have a jar for him too, otherwise he threw off our counting by throwing the items in the jar randomly while we tried to count in an orderly fashion!

Some of my tot school activities were a bit “too fun”.  On Friday, Madeline couldn’t help but play “busy bugs” with Erik:

We ended the week with a fun “Finger Food Friday” lunch outside on the picnic table.  They were really more excited about it than they look in this picture:

Overall, I am very pleased with how our first week went.  We didn’t get as much done as we I had planned for, but I am not discouraged by that.  I didn’t really consider the shortness of the first week when making our plans.  Nor did I consider how normal interruptions from a toddler and a baby who need things like potty breaks, diaper changes, and so forth, can make a 10 minute activity take 30 minutes and a 30 minute activity take an hour and a half.   I’ll adjust my expectations accordingly for next week and continue to find ways to meet the boys’ needs while slowing down school progress as little as possible.

To keep us organized and on track this year, I decided to try out a fairly new and “trendy” system of organization called “workboxes.”   This system was originally created by Sue Patrick and she has a great website with an e-book you can buy that describes the whole system.  I will admit I didn’t buy the book.  I read a lot of blog entries and joined a yahoo group mailing list, learned as much as I could about the system, and then created a version of the system that I think will work for us.

To put it in a nutshell, the original workbox system involves setting up about a dozen clear plastic shoeboxes on a cart, with number cards on each box.  The student’s work is placed inside each box (breaking it down into bite size pieces if necessary).  The student can then independently work through the boxes, and take the boxes off their cart as they finish, and also keep track of their progress by taking the number off the box and putting it on a “schedule strip” that may also have cards designating other activities like breaks and lunch.

The big advantages of the system include a means of visually tracking progress and expectations for the student, having everything set-up and ready to go for each subject right in the box (right down to pencils and erasers) and in general greater independence in completing school work.

Since Madeline is a kindergartener, there is not much independent work happening during her school day.  But, I did notice during the past couple years of doing preschool with her that transitioning from one activity to the next could be chaotic.  I would prep for one subject or activity, and then have to run around the house to find what I needed for the next one.  Or we would quickly complete say, a math activity, and she would ask for more math because that’s what we were doing and it was in front of us…and I would oblige.  But then she would get tired or run out of patience before we got to other subjects I wanted to cover.  I was also worried about her constantly asking me what we were going to do next or if we were done yet. I also liked the fact that many users of the system report that it was easier for them to include in their day little extras, fun activities, or those educational items that they had bought but could never find time to use.

So, I thought I would give the workbox system a try…almost more for me than for her.  The investment was small.  I bought 10 plastic boxes at Target for about $8, and I had a couple extras around the house I knew I could use if I wanted to get all the way to 12.  I did also buy 4 plastic baskets for Erik at an expense of about $10 so he could feel included too (more on that later).  I used a wooden shelf I got for free from one of our former neighbors to put the boxes on.  It’s not perfect, but it fit in the space and it was free.  Here’s what Madeline’s set-up looks like:

She only has 10 boxes in use right now but there would be space for the other two of the recommended allotment of 12 boxes on the floor under the shelves. Since part of the idea of the system is to break things down into small pieces, we really could use all 12 if we wanted to without adding extra work. The pink thing on the left is the “schedule strip” where the number cards for the finished boxes go as we complete each one.

And here’s Erik’s set-up.  We’re calling them “Tot School” Baskets (more on “Tot School” in another post):

The verdict so far is that this system is a winner for us! I’ll be writing about our first week of school (hopefully, if I find time!), in another post…but doing workboxes exceeded my expectations for how organized our school days felt.  One of my biggest concerns in starting this system is that it would be difficult to stick with, but I don’t think it will be.  I was able to fill the next days boxes/baskets in 15 minutes or so in the evening (not counting time doing other prep work like cutting out a new game).  And for the short amount of time it took to do that, I think it was more than gained in time spent more efficiently during the day and less stress for everyone.

I’m still working out the finer details of the system.  The official workbox system recommends taking the boxes off the rack as they are completed and putting finished work in a designated box or bin (in addition to putting the number on the schedule strip).  We left the bins on all week and pretty much just kept stuff in the boxes all day (or if I knew we would not be using an item the next day, I would put it up on the bookshelf).  I think this led to some confusion for Madeline because even though the number was gone from the completed boxes, she could still see “stuff” in the boxes and weren’t sure if  they were done or not at a quick glance.  So we may start a “done” basket or bin next week.

I also allowed Madeline to select the order of our work to some degree (sometimes I picked, sometimes she picked) and I also re-arranged the order we worked through the boxes to accommodate whether or not the particular school activity would work well while I fed Kai or would fit with what the boys were up to in general.  I think this is a good thing for us and it will continue, though I will need to monitor if there are certain subjects we are procrastinating on and not spending enough time with.

Finally, I am still figuring out the amount of work to set in front of us for the day.  Since Madeline is so young, I don’t want to push her too much.  Some of our boxes have “fun stuff” and some only take a few minutes to do, while others are the more “serious business”  of kindergarten like phonics and handwriting.  I’m not sure what the balance is between allowing her the satisfaction of being done with all the boxes, and having plenty to do so that if she wants to do more, it is readily accessible.