P is for Pig - Three Little Pigs - 11/2/11

Freddie was sure that now that Halloween was over we should be doing a new letter, and to be fair, I had told him that we would do Letter P until the end of Halloween. BUT, I figured we would at least finish out the week! I realized P was for Pig and it would be a great time to do the Three Little Pigs. I asked them if they knew the story and neither of them seemed to have a clue about it, so we had to go find the book, and FAST! After reading the story, we decided to make some model houses and some stick puppets so they could act out the story. The pics below are from this day and also the following Monday because the houses had to dry before they could act out the story. I'm including them here for continuity as well as the video of them retelling the story.

The rest of the day was just a busy school day along with all of our running around as usual. Here are a few pics from our day:

Feeding their brains!

Freddie doing small, medium, and large cards.

Scout doing online geography quizzes. She got 100% on he states!

Scout led an art project making turkeys.

Happy Halloween - 10-31-11

We had 4 days of Halloween this year!

Day 1:  Halloween-themed family night. Everyone was supposed to dress up. Even Grammy and Papa got in on the action!

 

Day 2:  Thanks to Starlight Foundation we went Trick-or-Treating with the Phoenix Coyotes!

 

 Day 3:

Jem's best D friend was in town for his birthday so we went out to party with him, and then rushed home to get ready for our homeschool group's Halloween party at the park. 

Day 4:  Halloween!  It was a school day so we did some Halloween school. Unfortunately, I didn't get many pics of it :(  I had a lot of worksheets printed from the Pumpkin Preschool Pack from 1+1+1, and I just let them choose what they wanted with the exception of one worksheet which was a color by number type thing. It had blank pumpkins on top and then an answer key on bottom. You can find it at the link above. It was adaptable for all 4 kids, so I made separate worksheets for them all, and they thought it was cool that could all do them at the same time. They were all challenged. Freddy did simple addition and subtraction problem using counting bears to help him. Jem did harder addition and subtraction. Scout did converting decimals to fractions, and Flossie did matching shapes. Freddie was convinced his was too hard even though it is exactly what he has been doing in his math book, but once I showed him how to do a few with his counters, he was off and running.  He gets frustrated and is willing to give up too easily. Can't let him get away with that because helping him see if he sticks with something he can do it will be important for later when he comes up against hard things in school. Here's a few of the pics I did manage to take:

We decided to organize our pencils and markers.

Freddie made a "P"

Jem's Pumpkin worksheet

So, after Day 4, I am tired and done with Halloween, except now I have to take all the decorations down :( 

P is for Pumpkins! 10-25-11

Well, it's been over a month since my last post. Obviously MY LIFE IS BUSY people!!  Mainly I'm going to blame my computer and phone sitch. I've had my computer crash twice in the past couple of years causing me to lose ALL of my pictures that were stored on there. I am so worried about that now that I am not erasing any of the pics on my phone! That causes a big headache when I go to upload my new pics to the computer. Well, I have spent the past few days putting everything on cds. That's not my fav solution. I want to get Carbonite. I WILL be getting Carbonite. And soon. But, in the meantime, I bit the bullet and erased all the pics on my phone.  :(   Hope all is well for awhile.  Meanwhile I have been trying to organize the tons of pics on my computer and it's just a huge cluttered mess, which by the way I realize comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone who knows me. SOOO .  .  .

Meanwhile, life has gone on, and so has school and preschool. I have taken lots of pics of everything, and I'll just post what I have at the end of this post so they aren't lost.

As for today! We decided to make Pumpkin lapbooks thanks to some inspiration from 1+1+1=1 Tot School.   We used lots of the printables from her Pumpkin Preschool Pack and then some of the materials from the links she provided from Enchanted Learning. You can see pics of our Pumpkin Lapbook here.
We were so busy actually DOING the lapbooks that I realized when we were done that I hadn't taken any pics of them doing the work!!

Some of the only pics I got today were of a project Jem did with the kids making Haunted Houses out of cracker boxes.  We do this every year and they never seem to tire of it. We have a pretty cute little village by now.

We also finished up our pumpkin vine paintings. Yesterday we painted the vines and this morning we did the pumpkins.

This was after we read It's Pumpkin Time! by Zoe Hall. Freddie and Flossie loved the book and were very interested in how the pumpkins grew. It will be great to follow up on this when we go to the pumpkin patch this weekend!

We also used this as a guide for the  Pumpkin Lifecycle minibook in our lapbooks today. Good little book :)

This also followed a weeked of FALL up at our cabin! We went up to cut firewood before the winter snows. The kids carved pumpkins up there. We also got to see real leaves changing color on the trees, which was nice after our fall leaves art project last week.

It has definitely been a P is for Pumpkins week!

Here are some photos from the past couple of weeks:

Freddie's Trick-or Treating map :)