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The two weeks prior to this one we did do some school, so for the sake of posterity I thought I would do a quick overview of what did…or at least attempted to do.  My plan from the outset was for December to be a light school month, but the past two weeks were very light.   I think we had a total of about five school days during the two weeks.

First up, Tot School with Erik:

We attempted to do Tot School at the beginning of our school day, and the days we did it, it was great.   Madeline was happy to help Erik with his activities (or do something similar along side) and Erik was more content to play or do activities on his own after having had Tot School time with me.

I did find it a little bit difficult to chose to put Tot School time at the beginning of our day.  A couple of days we just got started with Madeline’s school, hoping to do Tot School later…and it didn’t happen.  After our Christmas break, I am going to continue the experiment of having focused Tot School time with Erik first and really make an effort to get started with our day early enough to make that a reality most of the time.

The days we did do Tot School, we mostly did Preschool Activity Bags, and old favorites from our game cabinet, and activities like stacking pegs and lacing beads.

Kindergarten with Madeline:

Bible/Character: We continued with our focus on Christmas, some days reading the verses from our Advent paper chain (other days we read them at dinner) or reading Christmas related books

Math: We worked on money — specifically counting coins.  We covered this topic last year, but I don’t think Madeline retained a whole lot.  Pennies and nickles are easy to remember, but she still has a hard time remembering about the dime and quarter and how much they are worth\

Reading/Phonics/Handwriting: We continued to practice the  short “i” word families and did just a bit on the short “u” families in Alphabet Island. Most if Madeline’s handwriting practice was doing her Alphabet Island workbook pages.

History: We read about the Revolutionary War time period, reading biographies about George Washington and Benjamin Franklin by the D’Aulaires and starting a “Magic Treehouse” book that takes place in that time period.

Science: Hmmm…not much! This is one subject that definitely got shortchanged with  our light school schedule.

We’ll be on Christmas break for at least the next two weeks…and we may take the week of January 4th off as well.  I have my quarterly editing deadline that week, and after a week of traveling and other excitement, I have a feeling that we may need another unstructured/fun week before we return to the routine.  (And I may need another week to get ready as I retool a few of our subjects).

~Erik is 32 Months old~

It wasn’t a big picture taking week for me, but I do have a lot to say.  This week our Tot School started shifting away from activities Erik would do mostly independently (after I got him started initially) while Madeline did her Kindergarten work, and toward a time where Madeline, Erik and I would all sit down together to do at least some of Erik’s activities:

I started noticing during weeks 10 and 11 that Erik was less interested than he initially was in completing activities on his own.  I think he had gotten bored of a lot of the things he could do completely by himself (or with minimal introduction from me) but I didn’t have our schedule set up in such a way that it was easy for me to spend more than a few minutes at a time helping him.

The first part of this week Erik did not choose to work on his Tot School baskets at all, so I knew that I change in our schedule was in order.  We had our co-op on Wednesday, and then on Thursday I tried having all three of us (Me, Erik and Madeline — Kai at 10 months old is still busy utilizing his new found ability to crawl to explore the playroom and all it offers) do Tot School together after lunch.  We had a lot of fun, but it wasn’t the best time of day to do it.

I wasn’t sure how excited Madeline would be to start our school day doing Erik’s stuff and not hers, but it turned out that (at least on the one day we tried it) she was very receptive to doing Tot School activities along side Erik and “helping” him do Tot School.  My main concern with doing things this way is that the time spent on Tot school would take away from the total time that Madeline would be able to focus on school and it would be harder for us to get her school work done.  The day we tried it, and this month in general, won’t be a good test for that, since we are doing a lightened school load during the month of December anyway.  We’ll try this new schedule now and into the new year and see how it affects Madeline’s school work.

My new challenge will also be keeping Erik from creating too much chaos after Tot School and while Madeline and I are doing Kindergarten.  So far Erik is more than happy to play by himself or with Kai, or be at the table with us coloring or scribbling so we’ll see what the coming weeks hold for that aspect of things as well.

To read more about what other families are doing for Tot School, visit the weekly Tot School round up at 1+1+1=1!

After taking a week off for Thanksgiving, we were back to our regular school routine this week, for the most part.  We still had a bit of a light week compared to our workload in previous weeks, and I would anticipate that continuing until we begin our Christmas break.

My current plan is for us to do two more weeks of a lightened load of regular subjects, then do mostly Christmas-related school activities (books, crafts, printables, etc) during the few days leading up to Christmas eve.   We’ll take a break from Christmas eve through January 3rd, then start up again on January 4th — though I would anticipate we’ll have a light week again as we begin the new year since I will have my quarterly Faithwalkers Journal editing to complete that week.

Here’s what we did this week:

Bible/Character: We read from “Leading Little Ones to God” on Monday, then began our advent paper chain devotional, reading and discussing a Bible passage each day:

Reading/Phonics/Handwriting: We began the “short i sound” word families and covered several of them this week.  Madeline was eager to make progress and learn new words! I think we are going to breeze through these word families in Alphabet Island, then spend a few days playing games and doing supplemental or review materials to make sure she’s really “got it.”  Since we did several pages in her Alphabet Island workbook, we didn’t do any additional handwriting practice this week.

Math: We continued to practice the skill of adding one to any number, as well as reviewing greater than/less than and counting by fives.

Science: Our topic was the rest of the land animals we had not already covered — reptiles, insects, arachnids, amphibians and other creepy crawly things.  As a part of keeping things simple, we just read and discussed our textbook and didn’t supplement with any other materials.  I’m sure we’ll cover these topics again soon, so this was just a first exposure for Madeline.

History: We read about Native Americans this week, with a biography of Pocahontas by the D’Aulaires and “Meet Kaya”, an American Girl book about a Nez Perce girl from the mid-18th century.

Fun stuff and preparing for Christmas: Part of the reason we are doing a light school schedule the next few weeks is to allow more time for fun Christmas preparations (well, and a few “not so fun” ones like cleaning the house for hosting friends and family!).  Here the kids are helping me make desserts for a family gathering we had this past weekend:

This coming week we’ll be baking lots of Christmas cookies, and hopefully stuffing our Christmas cards and maybe doing some Christmas shopping together too!