Tot School

First, let me say that for me, there is a huge learning curve with this blogging stuff. I cannot seem to add pictures properly or get the layout the way I want it. So if this looks awful when I'm done, just know that I'm working on it!
So, Tot School. Tot School is one of my favorite blogs. It provides wonderful ideas for preschool activities and includes lots of Montessori-type projects. It is the blog which inspired me to start blogging to keep track of our school work. At the end of each post, there are links to other blogs doing Tot School, so you have access to a ton of project ideas. Be sure to spend some time at this site looking into her Tot School Tools, etc.


So after all that, here's what Crumpet did in Tot School this week:

We finished up the letter B by making capital and lower case B's with banana shapes.





















We started on the letter C. For our baking project, we made the Father's Day cupcakes I blogged about earlier.

The main C page for our alphabet book. 'Colorful Circle C's'.

A car puzzle made up of a variety of shapes. Good for shape recognition as well as letters!

Painting with cars. Without a doubt, Crumpet's favorite activity of the week!

For exercise, we tried out a kid's yoga DVD from Netflix. Crumpet has seen me do yoga and got a kick out of exercising like Mommy. This is "tree pose". Or something like it!

We go for a lot of nature hikes. The whole family enjoys it - note the dog and cat leading the way.

And we worked with a set of opposites puzzle cards I found at the consignment store. He doesn't understand the idea of opposites, but did start to realize that certain picture themes go together, even though they aren't exact matches.

Curriculum choices

I'm a lunatic, and I've already been working on our curriculum choices for next year when Crumpet turns 4. I'll be using some Sonlight materials and a few books suggested in The Well Trained Mind. In my wanderings, I also discovered Winter Promise. I found this site really exciting, and I'm pretty sure we'll be using them throughout our homeschooling years! They have great themes that tie several subjects together. I'm really excited about the Children Around the World theme, which we'll use when Crumpet gets a bit older. The science program for K-2 also looks great. And I think we'll start math using the Horizons program, but we may change in later years. Phew, good thing I got that out of the way, a year early! Anything to avoid cleaning my house!

Bear Hunt Mini Book

One of the books we read as part of our letter B project was We're Going on a Bear Hunt by Michael Rosen. The Totally Tots blog has a link to printable pages (http://www.makinglearningfun.com/themepages/WereGoingonaBearHuntPrintables.htm) which summarize the story, and each page has an activity to make the pages more like the story. For the part when the characters go tromping through tall grass, I cut out a strip of green construction paper, and Crumpet fringed the top. Then he glued it into the book. He painted the river with watercolors, fingerpainted the mud, made snow with a hole puncher, etc. It was a really neat activity which involved a lot of different skills and we both got a kick out of it.

Alphabet Book

We are working on an alphabet book. I found this idea on the Totally Tots blog (http://www.totallytots.homestead.com/). For each letter, we make a main page and decorate it. On the back, we paste pictures of things that begin with that letter. Then we laminate it. (I own a laminator, and who knew they were such useful things?? We use ours all the time!) During the week, we do projects involving the letter. We try to bake something beginning with our letter of the week. For A, we chopped up apples and poured cinnamon sugar on them. We shook them in a bag. Crumpet gobbled them up - it was the first time he'd been willing to eat apples in ages! For B, we made banana bread, another huge hit. The site also lists appropriate books to go with the letters, and we try to read them if I can find them at the library. This has been a lot of fun. I'll update the site with pictures of our weekly letter projects.

Gardening

Crumpet and I have been working on growing things from seeds. The first thing we grew was this marigold. We bought it at Lowe's around Easter time. I'm all about cute gimmicks. This came in an egg, and the directions were to tap off the top of the egg with a spoon and add water. Crumpet was religious about watering his dirt. Then he started carrying it around the house with him, and spilling more and more dirt, so I had to move it to a safe place! When the seed sprouted, we transplanted it and moved it outdoors. It has done really well, and we are very proud of ourselves!

Our other planting involved sunflower seeds. This is part of a larger project I'll write about soon. But for now, we are enjoying seeing how tall they will get, and we were excited to see the first flowers this week! We have a large patch of them, and it looks like more will bloom next week. It should be very pretty.

Father's Day Baking

Crumpet and I do a lot of baking together. He loves the stirring and tossing of the ingredients all over the kitchen. He loves the decorating. The tasting is his favorite. We made lawnmower cupcakes for Father's Day this year. It's an idea I got from Family Fun magazine. You frost the cupcakes and dunk them in green tinted coconut for grass. Then you make lawnmowers from Hershey's nuggets, M&Ms and licorice. Crumpet just kept shouting "cupcake, cupcake" and going berserk throughout the decorating process. I finally fed him one, and we had peace!

Beginnings

Hi. I'm all new to this blogging thing so bear with me! I'll be using this blog primarily as a way to document our homeschooling activities, in case anyone ever wants to follow in our footsteps, or just know what we're up to all day. And I'd like to look back and remember some of the cool stuff we do! I have a 3 year old son, Crumpet, and we are just beginning with homeschooling. I read a lot of other blogs, and I take neat activities from those. I pick and choose from a variety of curricula that I've read about. We'll mostly focus on Charlotte Mason and Classical. Maybe we'll do some 'unschooling'. I admit that I thought the idea was ridiculous when I first read about it, but so far, it seems to suit my son the best. When he doesn't know he's learning, he's happy and learns a lot! If he thinks he's being taught, he refuses to have anything to do with me! But he is only 3, maybe it will get better??