musings of me

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Silly Songs

We survived our first week (post coming soon)! The letter we focused on was “S”. We definitely had highs and lows but all in all we had a great week.

By far the biggest hit with my two was this:

We had 3 silly s songs that were sung at least 50 times throughout the week….they were such a hit that I decided to bundle them up and sell them in my TPT store so you guys can join in on the fun too. There are 1-3 songs for each letter (song tune and instructions are included in the packet). Trust me, the song is SIMPLE and teaches letter sounds and letter names…….BEWARE – they get stuck in your head!!!!

I’ll give 5 away to the first 5 people that leave me a comment and their email address :-)

If you don’t make it, you can get to my store and check them out by clicking on the picture above.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

Calendar Time

Here is our “wall”. Sorry about the shadows and the bad picture – to get it all in, I had to stand in another room! This room also doubles as our guest room so it’s not a huge space…..big enough for us though. Please also excuse my “sight word” sign which I’ve actually re-done but don’t have a picture of. Anyway, you get the general idea.

Here’s the month part of our wall. For August we have a little apple that we move each day.

This is where we practice our days of the week.

The weather, feelings and season.

Shapes…..I can take the actual shape part off to put a new one up each week.

Days of school, Dominoes, What’s the time and 10 frames.

Last but not least, tally marks. I also have a space for sight words (as you can see in the top photo) but we take them off the wall rather frequently :-)

We go over all of these things each day but I don’t have Channing write anything down…..there’s enough other things to keep us busy.

The clip art I used to make these is copyright Dianne J. Hook (djinkers.com). I also used papers and labels from mygraphico.com

Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Putting It All Together

Since I’m using so many sources, I decided to make my own plan book! There are so many out there but I decided to make one specific to my needs.

On the inside, it’s divided up into weeks/themes.

After each theme page I have a page of note – this is where I put reminders to myself (like this week I have to get ice cream and soda for our “spiders”).

I like to have each day mapped out for me…….if I didn’t , I KNOW I would forget something. Parenting 14 kids can make you more than a LITTLE scatterbrained at times :-)

At the end of each week, I also have space for Book Day activities. Part of our job requires that we are “on duty” for 12 days and “off” every other weekend. Those “on” weekends can be SUPER long for my 2 little guys as they have to share us with 12 other boys. There are times during out “on” weekend when my husband takes the bigger guys to do something so I’ve decided that I’ll use this time as “memory making” time with my own little ones!

In the end of the book is room for assessment pages. I have pages in there like letter/sound, sight words, number concepts and certain benchmarks. I’m hoping that this will give the teacher Channing has in Australia an idea about what he’s done and where he “is” in terms of learning.

I printed out one set of the weekly pages and then photocopied it, put it all together and took it to Staples. They put them whole thing together for me for only $4. I thought that was a bargain price to keep myself organized!

Stay tuned tomorrow for some pictures of our “Calendar Wall”.

Monday, August 20, 2012

Curriculum Choices 2012-2013

Hope you guys all had a wonderful weekend! I definitely enjoyed some cooler weather and some GREAT family time.

As I mentioned, I am starting Kindergarten with Channing this year (we actually started today). He misses the cut off here in the USA for Kindergarten this year but would start in Australia in January 2013. Since our baby is due at the beginning of December and will be a c-section, there is no way we will make it in time for him to start school. I’m guessing that he’ll miss the whole first term!

I did ask at his preschool if he could be moved to the pre K class rather than the 4 year old class just so he’s more prepared but the answer was no. We LOVE our preschool and will keep sending Channing (it’s only 3 mornings a week for 2 and a bit hours) for the social factors but I plan on “catching him up” on all the Kinder “knows” so he won’t be behind before he even starts in Australia.

We’ll have to see how it all goes……the baby will be born on December 3rd and I think it’ll take me a few weeks to feel well enough after the c-section and THEN, we found out last week that our school will be moving us out of our student home over Christmas (and into some kind of apartment until the end of January when we’ll lose our job). That means when we move out, ALL of our things (apart from 3 suitcases) will be shipped to Australia. We’ll basically be living out of those little suitcases for possibly 3 months. I’m not sure HOW we’re going to continue with school during all this but I will do whatever I have to so that Channing just needs to worry about making friends and getting used to a new country.

I spent MANY hours looking at what was out there and while I could have come up with my own, I decided to save myself lots of extra hours (that I don’t have) and the MAIN curriculum we’ll be using is……….

My Father’s World By Marie Hazell. I love it for a few reasons:

A. I LOVE that each week the focus is not only on a letter but on a Biblical truth…..unlike some of the other curriculums out there, that truth is taught throughout almost every lesson and not just in the devotion.

B. I love that it incorporates many different subject areas and is flexible.

C. It lends itself to me being able to create things for Channing to do that go along with it :-)

While MFW claims that it is a complete curriculum, I do believe that it is geared more for preschool or a younger Kinder child. For a child going to regular school (possibly in the middle of the program) it would not cover everything. Soooooo, MFW will be our main curriculum but we’ll also be adding:

All About Reading (Level 1) by Marie Rippel

Rising Readers Leveled Books by Newmark Learning

Explode the Code (Books A-C and probably beyond)

Horizon Math (Kindergarten)

Extra things made my me such as:

Little Letter Books

I Know Numbers (1-10 to start)

Let’s Learn Letters

Portraits Of Me

My Sentence Book (available soon)

My Little Word Book (available soon)

My Journal (available soon)