P is for Picnic

I was P week over here at our house and picnics were on the menu for our school time. Little Man had fun practicing his upper and lower case Ps, and we had picnics all. the. time. for the week. Here are a few things that we did to celebrate all things p!

- Our science project was to see what foods would attract the most ants. We chose items to put out on our patio and then left it for a few hours before checking to see which items the ants liked the best. We put out a sucker with the wrapper on, a sucker with the wrapper off (that a certain 4 year old licked), cut grapes and uncut grapes, a cut carrot and uncut carrot, a piece of lettuce and a potato chip. Little man LOVED this experiment and it was really interesting to hear about his theories of what was going to happen ("Mama, I think that the ants will eat the sucker wrapper and then carry the sucker away to their ant hill.")

- We played the "hungry ant" game, which was a memory game that he ended being much better at than me. To play, we randomly grabbed a few food items that we were going to "take on a picnic" and put the items on the kitchen table. We started out with an apple kitchen timer, a bag of croutons, salt and pepper, ketchup and other things that he grabbed. When he wasn't looking, I took one thing away (the hungry ant ate it), and shuffled things around. Then, he had to guess what was missing. We added food items along the way to make it tougher and he definitely took a lot of pride in the fact that he was schooling Mama in memory games!

- We had picnics all the time, and he got to choose when and where, as well as bring along friends. We had a pancake picnic for breakfast in the front yard, a few lunch picnics at the park and at the local farm, snack picnics at the park after bike rides, and a pizza picnic in the living room.

Pancake picnic

- We switched scenery for school time twice this week, taking school time to the coffee shop once and outside on our picnic blanket once. I was hesitant to take him out of the school room because I wasn't sure if he would still be attentive, but the scenery switch was fun for both of us.

Working on letters outside

- We worked on the "at" word family and by the end of this week he was reading sentences and even a 3 sentence story about sitting on a cat with a hat. He is super proud of himself and I don't think that there is one person left in my circle of friends who doesn't know that he is a genius. :)

Little Man after he read a sentence

- We used the weekly mail circulars to work on our fine motor skills. Little Man cut out items from the circular to paste on his picnic place mat. He chose chocolate sauce, bread, eggs, and soda (which we never drink). Future foodie.

- We also send packages out to our new pen pals - one in New Orleans and one in South Carolina. He is really excited to get mail from them and to send letters to them too. I am looking forward to watching this pen pal thing grow.

Tossing rocks in a stream with a friend

- We continued work in our Wreck This Journal, as well as worksheets for writing numbers and phonics.

- Jackson loves to take pictures with my cell phone, but I hardly ever remember to let him do it. So, we had a full day where he found things that begin with the letter p and took pictures of them. From the potty to purse, to packing the car to pretty flowers, he took photos all day long. It was wonderful for his vocabulary (pebbles at the pond) and again, he was much better at this than me. Check out his pics and see if you can guess the p words.

All in all, it was such a great week! I wasn't sure that 'picnics' could sustain us all week, but was pleasantly surprised at how much educational fun we had. Next week, M is for Moon!

Back on the Merry Go Round

There's an interesting 'to-do' on my list next week.

I'm over at Parenting.com today with a letter to my Fertility Doctor. We are headed to a new RE office soon to start our first rounds of IVF. 

Want to hear more about our journey to baby?

We're More Than Our Diagnosis

Let's Hear It For the Boys

Parenting Through

Where Is God In All This?

Skipping Showers To Protect Myself

How Yoga Is Changing My Life

Year 8

A Mother's Heart

With Spring Comes Hope

or check out my old blog

I'll be posting a lot here about our journey as well, and your prayers are welcomed and appreciated as we start this process all over again.

I Is For Ice Cream

Little Man and I are dipping our toes into the homeschooling pool. While homeschooling isn't quite on the horizon (yet), I knew that it was important for us to get on a learning schedule during the week. We are still hitting the pool and parks and doing all sorts of summery things, but we are also doing one hour of school time a day M-TH.  I was totally nervous about the whole thing, and when I'm worried, I tend to eat. So, naturally, our first week was based on all things ice cream.

The good news: Little Man LOVED it. Seriously loved it. In fact, we were both so excited about our "school time" in the mornings that I forgot to feed him breakfast every day last week. Thank goodness for yogurt at 11am.

Here's what we did for our Ice Cream week.  Keep in mind that I did about 15 minutes of prep time on Sunday to plan out activities for our entire week. That was it. I'm into keeping it easy peasy around here, folks.

Here are our activities, in no particular order.  Drum roll, please.

- Daily: practice writing upper and lower case I's. We used Handwriting Without Tears style, since that is what our school district will teach him.  The first day, I dashed out the letters for him, and the rest of the days he did it freehand on his own.

- Daily: a page or two from Wreck This Journal. We are doing the orange one. I know that I could probably make my own pages, but I grabbed this from B&N the last time we were there, thinking it might be fun. You guys...it is SO MUCH FUN. Today we rubbed dirt all over a page and then licked a sucker and make "tongue art" on another page. He thinks it is hilarious and I love that it works on our imagination, fine motor and even large motor skills.

- We made our own ice cream in sandwich bags. Used this recipe.

- Cut out ice cream cones (triangles) out of construction paper, along with scoops of ice cream (circles out of construction paper). Little Man helped me trace/freehand the shapes and cut them out. We did addition and subtraction exercises with our scoops of ice cream. After that, we decorated a few cones - one to hang on the school room wall and one for Daddy to take to his office.

- This dot-to-dot ice cream cone sheet.

- We made up a story, and typed it on the computer as we wrote it, about Mr. Freeze stealing ice cream from a local ice cream shop. Thankfully, Super Jackson was there to save the day. After we wrote the story, we both drew and colored the characters and settings of the story and used them to put on a puppet show of our story for Daddy when he got home from work. This one was probably everyone's favorite from the week's activities.

Our story and drawings

Since it was the 4th of July weekend, we didn't get a chance to build our own ice cream shop out of blocks or have ice cream for breakfast like the library book we checked out, but I'm still counting this week as a huge success.

This week we are perfecting the picnic. I'll be sure to post the activities for the week soon!

A New Day

Life lately is full of transitions and change. D started a new job today, Little Man moved into his (very awesome) Super Hero big kid room this weekend, and we are trying out homeschool inspired activities daily in our new school room here at home.

I've always been interested in homeschooling, but I believe that preschool is just where Little Man needs to be for socialization - he is an only child after all. Plus, his 3 year old preschool really helped to teach him that learning is fun and school is awesome. This summer, I want to be sure that he gets some practice reading and writing, and if he still thinks that learning is fun, I will consider it a success. Let's call it Homeschool Light. Great flavor, less calories.

So, we are off and running today with one hour of school time four days a week (M-TH) and then a fun activity for the whole family on Friday when Daddy is home. I plan on using themes for each week and will touch on letter writing and sounds, science, creativity (like story writing and puppet shows), arts/crafts and math skills each week based on that theme.

This week is ice cream and we spent our time this morning cutting and counting ice cream scoops and writing I and i. He loved it and I did too. I will post our theme and activities weekly so you can keep up too.

It's a new day here in our home and life. A good day.

Tracing I this morning. He has never written an I before - he's been mostly focused on his name - so he was excited to learn something new.