A Crafty Day...

And we continued our crafty day....our Mother Goose Time Extravaganza. After the shaking of the crabs (in my last post), we moved on. 

This month came with a coloring book for the theme. This is a fun treat because usually I need to print off the coloring book from the MGT site. It's still totally easy, but this one was super cute.

 

Tiny B colored this which truly makes my mouth drop. This little girl was not able to make things look "pretty" in the sense of what would be pretty to someone who is not the mother of the artist. But this truly is pretty and she's learning what is asthetically pleasing to herself and others! It's probably what many young artists go through.

 

We  did an Invitation to Create, making a strum drum. This was 100 percent independently done.

 

 

 

 

Remember how in my last post I said that I'm now feeling comfortable to use MGT curriculum in the way that fits us? This summer that means loooking for the projects that totally interest them and that are mostly independent. 

We then moved on to a lei. 

 

Stringing the straws and flowers is so good for their fine motor practice, hand-eye coordination, and keeps their fingers nimble for writing which most kids lose a lot of over the summer. (I keep telling them that I don't want them to lose too many skills this summer. Every fall my students would come back with so many lost skills. That's really not the worst thing in the world, I promise. A summer of fun is really great and just as important as keeping their skills, but it would be nice to not have to try so hard in the fall!)

 

The cumulative of our day of crafts: 

 

A crab shaker, strum drum...

 

...a telescope and a lei!

 

And this is a "before" pic of my homeschooling room. I've got some pretty special paint to paint it with, which will obviously have to wait until after I'm released from the hospital and am done with the difficult recovery following this surgery. Ugh. I can't wait to have a summer!!!

 

*I receive Mother Goose Time curriculum in  sharing of experiences, resulting from our personal use. All opinions/thoughts are my own and are in no way influenced by others.

 

It's Manipulative Mania

Anyone who doesn't teach or homeschool their kids will think this title is about something else. But those of us who do know that it's about the full-throttled mania that happens when kids get manipulatives in their hands.

We finally opened Mother Goose Time's Alphabet Island theme today. I have to be honest and tell you that I wasn't excited about this theme. I thought it was simply a review box with the only connection being the alphabet. Well, I was WRONG and it turns out that this theme is really about the alphabet and things on islands which is totally like my favorite thing ever. Ugh. I wish I had started on it sooner. Tomorrow we will hit the ground running with this one (and continue with our Bugs box because we are so not done with that!)

We are still in the depths of The Move. I'm starting to go a little cray-cray. I found an amazing dresser that shall henceforth be called "The Ultimate Homeschool Dresser" because it is. I'm going to chalk paint it white and it's going to look even more amazing. So I had to take out my old storage curio and move things around and let's just say that we are not there yet but we will be at some point this summer. Or I will go insane. 

I opened the box for them and the mania started. 

*see The Dresser?

 

This month included little foam letter mats and these cool peg things. 

 

The CD is filled with "Island-y" sounding songs and I loved it.

 

Tiny B asked for the bear manipulatives from a previous month so I got out the box in which I store these manipulatives. 

 

She "let" Strong B play with the letters. (She can be a bit of a bossy big sister). 

 

She began categorizing by color and she soon had a whole imaginative scenario going in her head. 

 

Strong B joined her in the scenario. 

 

So thankful for this box of manipulatives which I've collected over almost the last two years with MGT. It gave me two solid hours of unpacking/organizing and it gave the kids a whole different world in their heads. 

*I  receive Mother Goose Time curriculum in exchange for my honest sharing of experiences, resulting from our personal use. All opinions/thoughts are my own and are in no way influenced by others.

 

I Love Theme-Based Learning

 

This is a little girl who is completely engaged in the world of bugs. Because our theme for Mother Goose Time last month was "Bugs and Other Crawly Things," her and her brother have devoted so much of their energy to finding bugs, asking me to find them information on specific bugs, reading about bugs, and creating bug habitats. They are completely engrossed with bugs. And this is why I absolutely love theme-based learning. 

When I first began teaching third grade in 2000, public school education was very much going away from the form of theme-based learning, where you teach your students everything there is to know about a certain subject. I understood why the leaders were against this. Teachers had been teaching about topics such as "butterflies" or "the desert"  but the real work that was necessary to learn the objectives wasn't being focused on. The students were walking away knowing a gigantic amount of information about butterflies but not how to correctly punctuate a sentence. They knew all of the different deserts of the world but not how to read four syllable words. 

I've always been so grateful to the themes that I've taught over the years, because these themes have always been a vehicle in which to learn the objectives. Most of the time our themes came from our social studies and science curriculum. In 4th grade I taught about the pioneers and had my students write pioneer journals. Through this they learned how to write creatively and how to use "voice" and good "word choice." (This was through a writing program called the 6 + 1 Traits of Good Writing). 

In public education (in the younger grades) the thought is still that the lamguage arts and math objectives are the most important thing and that the social studies and science objectives come in second. As a now homeschooling mom...I can now say that I think they are equally important. Without a theme that grabs a child's interest, they don't have anything exciting on which to build their writing. This is okay for students who don't struggle, but the struggling ones need themes that grab them! And even for the students who don't struggle, learning how to indent at the start of a paragraph is far more exciting through writing about a sarcophagus!!! 

I want my children to love learning and the actual content of "bugs" and "deserts" and "farms" is just as important. This is what fuels the love of learning. And this is why I love that MGT bases their program around themes. They teach important content through these theme about the actual subject matter and they use the subject matter to teach math and language arts objectives. I love it. 

 

 

I'm not kidding you when I tell you that they were searching all day for slugs. 

 

 

They found their slugs and created the ultimate home for them. 

Strong B pulled out our Storybook of the Month and tried to identify bugs he had found throughout the day. Reading, researching, exploring, searching...all beautiful things accomplished through a theme. 

 

*I  receive Mother Goose Time curriculum in exchange for my honest sharing of experiences, resulting from our personal use. All opinions/thoughts are my own and are in no way influenced by others.

Learning Sportsmanship Through Educational Games

 

This is the face of a 4 year-old boy who loves playing games and learning all things. It's also the face of a boy who is competitive and doesn't quite know how to have good sportsmanship while playing a game. This is typical for child though, and he really is almost there. Sweet B didn't have as fiery of a personality and therefore I didn't really have to work on this with her when she was four. But now that she's almost seven and her little almost five year-old brother has got a competitive streak...I'm realizing that I need to get to teaching these kids how to win and lose!

This Mother Goose Time game was called "Bug Family." It focused on the "ug" word family. Strong B is starting to read (eek!) which is so exciting and Tiny B is already a reader (double eek!) so this game was definitely playable for them and fun.

 

They took their respective turns and the game started out very sweet.

 

As Strong B started winking there was a lot of gloating on his part. 

 

Even Jack the Standard Poodle got in on the action and showed his competitive side. 

 

Oh boy...When the arm goes up to spin the spinner you know that some sibling rivalry is going down!

 

And here is where the pictures abruptly end. Strong B was winning. Tiny B was whining. Lots of whining.  There were tears from both. And because I've chosen to never put any pictures up that might embarrass them in the future, you'll have to take my word for it. Strong B decided that he was done playing the game, and that was where I put my coaches hat on (don't all mamas wear different hats?) and gave them a lesson on having good sportsmanship. We talked for a long time. We talked about how their daddy was a big sportsman and how much he respects players who play with integrity. We acted out different scenarios and defined "respect" and "kindness." 

I am confident that we will be having this conversation multiple times over the next thirteen years but I am also confident that they learned a lot from our conversation and it impacted their mind and future behaviors. They are both such kind and well-behaved children (oh boy, I lucked out on that one!) and I feel that this won't be a very hard skill for them to master.

*I  receive Mother Goose Time curriculum in exchange for my honest sharing of experiences, resulting from our personal use. All opinions/thoughts are my own and are in no way influenced by others.

 

Mother Goose Time Bug Blitz Part 2

In my last post, I described the boxes that I'm currently trying to make my way out of. Here is a picture for reference. I know just the sight of this will get very some of you the anxiety of thirty cups of coffee.

In spite of the boxes and the moving and the complete upheaval of our lives, I was able to find my Bugs and Crawly Things Mother Goose Time box and have a three-hour long Bug Blitz.

 

On hour two the kids started getting a bit fussy with each other. And by "fussy" I mean that they were ready to tackle each other in competition for these manipulatives that were included in this month's MGT box. The stress of moving does strange things to people... :)

Strong B has quite a love for building things. It turns out that Tiny B might be picking this up from him! Where there wasn't interest before, there is now.

They took the pieces and copied the pictures (an important visual/fine motor skill). This type of activity lends instead to future writing skills for Strong B and even the current writing skills that Tiny B has worked so hard apon.

 

 

 

 

 

In hour three, Tiny B still wanted to get her Mother Goose Time on, and therefore I brought out a Praying Mantis Invitation to Create. Strong B had vacated to the backyard in search of real praying mantises. 

For the second time today, she created a work of art that I would never have envisioned myself. And a million times better than what I wouid have made. 

Don't you just love it?

 

Stay tuned for more posts as I work my way through our moving boxes. 

*I  receive Mother Goose Time curriculum in exchange for my honest sharing of experiences, resulting from our personal use. All opinions/thoughts are my own and are in no way influenced by others.

 

Mother Goose Time Bug Blitz Part 1

 

These are the faces of two very excited little ones who had been deprived of academic activities for the last two weeks. We moved. It was the largest move of my life in that I have never had so much stuff to move. Months ago I had begun planning for this, getting rid of things that were useless or didn't bring me joy. I sold stuff and sold on online sites but I still had two truckloads plus the extra we brought over in car loads. I'm now up to my ears in boxes at my new home and have realized that I didn't get rid of enough, so I am purging my belongings as we speak.

Moving with little ones while I'm homeschooling is nothing other than impossible. And what I mean by that is that I could not both move and homeschool. One had to go. Guess which one went?

I had quite an internal war going on in my brain. 

Imagine my public school teacher self on one side repeating things such as, "They must continue to learn the objectives up until the last day of school! You cannot stop now! Instruction must take place until the last minute! If you stop now, you are doing these children a complete injustice!" 

Then on the other side of my brain is the homeschool mama that I want to be, clothed in yoga pants and my husband's shirts, saying, "You have all summer to read and write with them. You are setting up an entire dedicated homeschool room for them. You can see that Tiny B is progressing in her reading even without direct instruction! Her brain is growing and changing right before your eyes and you don't even have to give her direct instruction for the next month--only guidance--and she will still grow and learn! Strong B, through simply watching Tiny B read, is starting to read himself! So unpack those boxes. Get your home ready! This is where all of it takes place...The schooling and my work and our lives...Get your home in order and everything else will follow." 

For once I listened to my homeschooling mama brain. It's been trying and there's been a lot of yelling unfortunately (by me) and very bored children, but I have to continue my unpacking, and I will, until I am ready to begin our new life. 

I finally found my current Mother Goose Time box which I kept all of my materials in this time, because of the move. I decided to pull out the Day 16 bag on caterpillars, and it turned into a Mother Goose Time Bug Blitz...Basically a three-hour long marathon of MGT lessons and activities, purely because the kids were missing it. 

The I Can Read books are becoming quite a source of joy because Tiny B can really read now and Strong B can too (I can't wait to blog about this!) 

 

 

Jack the Standard Poodle approved of the Invitation to Create activity. 

 

They made caterpillars completely unlike I had imagined they would, which is really what makes the Invitations to Create so special. They are supppsed to do things how they want to. 

 

Stay tuned for Part 2 of the Bug Blitz. Breaking out of the boxes and creating and learning with the children was a gigantic break from the doldrums of unpacking. I cannot wait until our new life can officially begin.