Aquarium

A few weeks ago we went with our new homeschooling group to the Aquairum in Sandy. It was so much fun! The boys learned lots and they were so well behaved so it was fun for me also! Here are a few pictures of our adventure! You can click on the collage to make it bigger.

Sick and reading

So, this week we haven't done much with school. Jonah has been running a fever of 103 and throwing up. It is kind of ironic because the morning that he got sick, before he was sick, I was telling my visiting teachers that my kids don't really get sick that much. Anyway, Travis and I have been sick as well, but not as bad as Jonah. I mainly just wanted to let everyone know that Jonah is officially reading now. He is doing so well and he is very interested in what words say. It is so fun to see him excited and wanting to learn. He still cannot read to many books at once. He gets fidgety and anxious, but he is doing well! We are very proud of him!

Halloween

So, here are some of the fun things that we have done for Halloween this week. The boys made pumpkins out of paper plates. We traced their hands and they cut them out for the leaves. The boys had a lot of fun!

Today we made foot print ghosts. They turned out cute and I will always remember their feet at this age!

YEA!!!

So, Jonah sat down and sounded out some words yesterday! I am so proud of him. He really just needs some confidence I think. When he realized that he could read the words in his "I can read it box" I think that he realized that he could read other words also. He sounded out about five words and then he was done, but he did great! Now I just need to keep reminding him that he can read.

Jonah's words story

So, Jonah has an "I can read it box". Every day he reads the words in this box, and then we add one or two more. He has been doing so well! Well, I decided that it would be fun for him to have his own book of words that he can read, so I wrote a story for him. He is going to illustrate it himself. I just thought I would post the story. It is not fabulous by any means, but it includes all the words that he can read. I have bolded all of the words that he can read.

Once upon a time, there were some Super Hero’s. They were Spiderman, Superman, Underdog, Batman, Optomis Prime and the Ottobots, and the Ninja Turtles. They all were preparing to work together because a great war was coming.

The evil Thomas, Doctor Octopus a mummy and one hundred bears were starting an army and were going to take over the worlds population of chipmunks and Doggies.

One day, the chipmunks and Doggies were playing at the park. They were having so much fun on the playground when suddenly a cloud of dust overtook them.

Back at the Super Hero headquarters the Super Hero’s were all eating pizza and pop when the Transformers got a warning. Optomis Prime told the other Super Hero’s “I feel there is trouble at the park” All the Super Hero’s jumped into their Hot wheels and fire trucks and flew to the park.

They arrived just in the neck of time. They saw the cloud of dust overcoming the chipmunks and Doggies. The war had begun.

But the evil army was no match for the Super Hero’s. The Super Hero’s quickly overtook the evil army and saved the chipmunks and Doggies from the cloud.

The End

New curriculum

So a few weeks ago I ordered some books that I read about that are called "Games for Learning" and "Games for Writing" by Peggy Kay. I have been using them for the last couple of weeks and we are having so much fun. All we do is play games all day and the boys are learning a ton!




One of the games is called I can Read it Box. You take a index card box and put cards into it. Then you ask the child what word they want to read. I asked Jonah and his first was was Superman. Shocking Huh? So, I wrote Superman down. Then I asked him what it said and he said Superman. I then praised him profusely because he read the word. You are supposed to add a word a day and have them read every word each day. It has worked SO good. He now has 24 words in his box and can read them all. I started adding two words a day, because he was doing so well. Now I add a word a day that he chooses and a word that I choose. I want him to start learning sight words like "the" and "and" and "I" but of course he will not choose those words so I decided that I needed to add them myself. Anyway, they are fabulous books!

Columbus Day

Yesterday we learned about Christopher Columbus. We read a book about him and then we made hats and telescopes and pretended we were him. We got on our boat the Santa Maria (ie the coffee table) and sailed away into the deep blue sea. The boys acted out things that we had just read in the book. When we got to land, the boys knelt down and kissed the sand and talked to the Indians. It was a lot of fun!

Animals

This week we have been studying about animals. Here are some of the fun things that we have done. We made masks of lions and pretended we were lions.





(Sorry, I forgot to flip them before I downloaded them)

We set up a zoo in our living room and took pictures of the animals. Here are a few of the pictures that Jonah took.

Today was Fun!

Today was such a fun day at school. We started our day like usual with Prayer, flag, reciting our family motto. We did our memory verse which right now is learning our phone number. We read our scripture and did our exercises. Then it was time for our value of the week. This week it is family unity and identity. So far this week we have read some stories from family histories. We read great grandpa Garners stories. Yesterday we made a paper chain with all of our names on it and a chain of love in the center and talked about how we all need to be in the family and have love to be united. Today, I pulled out Travis and my scrapbooks from when we were young. I read the boys some stories that I wrote when I was young and showed them some pictures that I drew. They got to see Travis' soccer and basketball pictures. The boys really loved hearing about us and loved to know more about us.
We moved on to our theme for the week which is Animals. We listened to the Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saens. The boys listened to it and guessed what animal the music was portraying. Then they would dance around like that animal. Jonah especially got really excited about this. He loves to listen to music and move so this was perfect.
After this we moved to math. Today we talked about patterns and sorting and we got out some colored shape manipulatives and the boys made boats and animals out of them. They really got excited about this as well. It was just all together a good day at school!

Week of September 1st

Well, I haven't had time to post for a while so I thought I would get caught up. Last week was a fun but busy week. We didn't have school on Monday due to Labor Day and Tuesday we had school in the afternoon because Travis was home and we had some important things to get done. That kind of threw us out of our routine and it was kind of hard to get back into the groove for the rest of the week. We still had fun however. We worked on shapes. The boys made some fun shapes out of flour and water. i wish I had cookie cutters that were shapes but I did not. Because of that most of them just ended up looking like big blobs, but that is ok. We let them dry and the boys painted them the next day. They were so impatient while waiting for the to dry. They were really excited to paint them.





We also played a twister sort of game with different colored shapes and I told the boys to put their hands and feet on the shapes that I told them to. I got them really twisted up until they fell over. That was a lot of fun! Yes Simon is in his underware. He usually is dressed for school, but I think he had just gone to the bathroom.

We also talked about adoption and read letters from their birthmoms. We talked about when they were born and how much we love them and are glad to have them in our family. Our value of the week was relationships and we talked about how important relationships are and that we need to take care of them. We acted out proper ways to treat people. We have also been working on our ABC books. They will probably take us the next few weeks to finish up. We are just cutting and pasting pictures out of magizines that start with the different letters of the alphebet.

Starting to get the hang of it!

Well, it has been two weeks of homeschooling now and I finally feel like we are starting to get somewhere. Don't get me wrong, we have had a blast the last few weeks and I know that the boys are learning, but we have had some fights along the way. The last two days have been virtually fight free and the boys have been really excited about doing school.

This week we have worked on colors a little more. We focused on black, brown and white. Jonah often get black and white confused so we thought this would be good. We ate black olives, cauliflower, and chocolate for our snack and talked about the colors. We went for a walk and found things that were these colors.
We have also been focusing on safety along with the public schools green ribbon week. My sister is the PTA person over green ribbon week at her school and provided me with a lot of fun things to do.
For phonics work we have been playing a lot of games. One game that we played was one with a egg carton that I wrote the letters of the alphabet on the inside of the egg holder ( lol-I don't know what to call them) and the boys took turns tossing a marble into the carton to see what letter it landed in. They identified the letter and then had to say a word that began with that letter. They both did very well. I was very enlightened by there knowledge, and it was quite encouraging!
One of our favorite things that we do is our value of the week. This week we have been talking about communication. We have played games and discussed how we can talk and communicate our needs. It has been great. It is funny how kids always know the correct answers, but when it come down to it, they don't do it. I guess adults are the same way really.
They boys have also learned our family motto. They now know it by heart and we love to say it every day. Sometimes we say it like monsters and sometime like babies. It is really fun.
Today we started reviewing shapes. We did some painting with sponges that were cut into shapes. They boys had a lot of fun with that. So did I. I made a Christmas tree with presents and everything under it! Jonah also sat and wrote the number 1 for his writing practice.
All in all I think things are going really well!

Thanksgiving Point

Yesterday we also went to the Thanksgiving Point Gardens. It wasn't really for school, mainly just because we thought it would be fun and it was only two dollars per person. The boys had alot of fun. Travis asked Jonah what he like best and he just said"I liked everything! It was sooo fun!" I am glad that we went it was a good break for us! Here are some pictures from our adventure!

Colors

Well yesterday we talked about colors. We talked about the primary colors that are blue red and yellow. (Not that you didn't know that). Anyway, we learned the names of them in Spanish. We painted pictures with thoughs colors and made other colors by blending them together. The boys had a lot of fun! We also made ice cream with yellow bananas, blue berries and red apples. It really was just kind of a review for both of them, but it was fun and relaxing and a good starting point in our math skills. Jonah still has a few problems with some of his colors, so I thought it would be a good review.Here is a picture of the painting that we made yesterday.

First day of school

Well the first day of school has officially come and gone. Things went relatively well. There were a few bumps in the road. Mainly dealing with Jonah getting used to being more structured at home then we normally are. At one point he said he was done doing school at home and so we talked about why. He said he wanted Mrs. Weber to be his teacher again this year. I explained to him that she couldn't be because he was in 1st grade now and so mommy was going to be his teacher. That actually went over quite well. We were really flexible in the schedule. Jonah kept talking about how he wanted to do show and tell, which was not on the schedule, but he wanted to do it, so we did. He talked about a few of his toys and then he was ready to do more "school". Another time we were going to read the scriptures and they wanted to read other books, so they (Jonah and Simon) each picked out one book and we read those first and then we read the scriptures. Their behavior was really pretty good!
Some of the things that we will do every day are the pledge, reciting our family motto, doing the weather and calendar charts in both English and Spanish, and prayer. We will also do Brain Gyms every day. This will help the boys to be able to move about more and at the same time work their "brain muscles" to enable them to think better. We will also read the scriptures every day and work phonics into that.
Every week we will have a value of the week that we will work on. This week it is Honesty and Candor. We played a game were we pantomimed feelings and then we pulled papers out of an egg carton with different scenarios on them and talked about how they would make us feel. The boys really liked that!
Every other day we will work on either language arts or math. Today we worked on language arts. We did a few letter games and then Jonah did some work in a workbook on the letter "F". We are also going to study Spanish this year because Jonah is really interested in it right now, so in addition to doing the weather and calendar in Spanish we are going to work on other words. This week we are focusing on Colors. Today we learned rojo which is red. The boys loved this. We sang a little song that said red is rojo and then we went around looking for things that were red and said rojo as we pointed to them. We worked in piano practicing as music study also. All in all, I think it was a great day!

School is about to start!

I can hardly wait! I still have some preparing that I have to do. Mainly just gathering things together and getting stuff for crafts ready and that sort of thing. It won't take much. I really think that this is going to be so great for my family. We have been working on little things over the summer and to my delight Jonah seems to know more then what the tests show and what he normally displays. We have been trying to get him to display things in different ways and when we find a way that clicks with him, he gives us all sorts of information that we have never heard come out of his mouth before.
Anyway, we are doing to keep track of school things on this blog. Things we are learning, how we are progressing etc. We thought it would be a good idea to keep a record of stuff. Any thoughts or suggestions about things are welcome comments.