"Canoe" Days

Our week in homeschool has been FULL of wonderful experiences and field trips and I am so happy to be recording our memories here in this blog. I am so thankful to Mother Goose Time Preschool Curriculum for providing such wonderful topics for my children and I to explore! We are on our last week of the transportation unit and we are so sad about it! We have enjoyed this unit SO much! I cannot wait to see what is in store next.

Last week, the kids and I studied water transportation, specifically the tugboat and canoe. Over the weekend, I decided to take the kids to Lake Kaweah so they could see first hand some of the water transportation.  Jon was able to go on this field trip with us, so he brought his stand-up paddle board and the kids got to ride around the lake on the board pretending it was a canoe. 😊 They had a BLAST! We fed ducks and saw canoes, houseboats and motor boats. We got to spend quality time with Jon, learn and have fun all at the same time!

 Poor Jonathan fell in the water! We were thankful that he was safe with his little life jacket, though it got a bit cold! He was a complete trooper and still had a wonderful time.

Feeding the ducks was definitely a highlight!

When we returned home and everyone got dry, I took some time to teach the kids how to compare/contrast. We compared a canoe to a stand-up paddle board. Jonathan had so much fun doing this! MGT also provided some great crafts and games to play along the canoe theme.

 This game was really neat! The children were to roll the dice and select that many people to go in the matching canoe. So if Hope rolled a 5, she would select 5 people to go into canoe number 5. After all the little people were in the boats, I had Jonathan solve some easy addition problems by asking how many people were in boats 3 and 4, etc. It was so creative and very easy to adapt to a higher level.

Thank you, MGT, for another wonderful week and for many new opportunities to learn and experience new things.

The Shaders Learn About Airplanes!

Hello All! I am currently sitting in the sun shining through our window and feel so blessed to be sharing our homeschooling process with all of you! This week has already been full of fun and learning within our transportation unit by Mother Goose Time. We are learning about air transportation this week, and I will share with you our most fun day... The airplane day!

One of our FAVORITE activities this week was making and decorating our own paper airplanes. During this time we talked about the airplanes we have been on as a family. Jon and I LOVE to travel, so our children have been on several airplanes already. We also spent much of last year traveling because of Jon's education in medical school, so they are very familiar with riding in an airplane. The kids and I will actually be getting on an airplane next week to visit family, so this lesson was perfectly timed! I'll post a few photos at the end of this blog of all of us on our various trips.

The best of part of making paper airplanes is making them fly! These airplanes had the children blowing into straws to make them fly. Such a great idea! Hope had a little trouble in the beginning, but soon got the hang of it. They had a blast!

What do you see when you're in the sky on an airplane? Clouds! We took this opportunity to learn and write our letters and shapes. Such a fun activity that I remember doing when I was a kid.

Here are some old photos of us on airplanes. I plan to print some of these old photos and have the kids write journal entries about their different rides on airplanes. What is your favorite part about flying? What do you see at an airport? Where have you flown to? ect.

Jonathan flying at 4 weeks!

Many of our flights have been just
the kids and I,
Always an adventure!

And this is just a small number of them! I didn't realize how much we have traveled, until I was looking for the photos. We are very blessed!

Learning Our Letters in Creative Ways

Hello Family and Friends!  This week we had the pleasure of learning more about transportation on land. The kids learned about how we travel with cars, trucks, bikes, feet and animals.

On bike day, we included dad and went for a bike ride to the park! When Jon is available, I love to include him as much as possible.

It has been an excellent week of learning, even if sometimes our homeschool time looked like this:

The reality of teaching/learning with a toddler, is that sometimes it does not go well! This particular day, Hope wanted to spend most of the time in my arms... So thats what we did! She learned (a little), Jonathan learned (hopefully), and my arms and back got stronger! Ha! 

Mother Goose Time had some excellent activities for learning letters this week! We took full advantage of the games to learn the letters "D," "J," and "U".  We will be working on these three letters (though I usually have Jonathan learn more) for the entire unit.

Jonathan loves the color green... Can you tell?

One of the activities we do every week with Mother Goose Time is fill out and color a letter book. The kids color them and then practice reading the words that begin with that letter. 

MGT also has the children forming the letters out of letter pieces every week. The kids love this activity because it is just like a puzzle! I usually bring out all the letters we have learned this year in order to review. Also, I have them go over the sound of the letter they are working on and name a few words that begin with that sound. 

One of our favorite activities this week was the "Letter Roll." I improvised on the supplies as I thought the kids might enjoy using their car tracks to play this time. The kids had so much fun doing this activity, I left it set up for the rest of the day and they played with a while longer. Here are some more photos of the fun:

 There was always a celebration when the ball made it all the way to the correct letter. Such a neat idea!

Another favorite activity this week was called "Walk on a Path."  I adjusted this activity for my early reader (Jonathan). Instead of calling out the letters, I gave him a simple word to read and he walked the path to the first letter in the word. He is working so hard to learn to read! I am so proud of him. Here are some awesome videos and pictures of him learning his words and letters. 

I love this video of Jonathan participating because it shows the reality of learning with a toddler in the room. Hope played for a while, but then got distracted as 2 year olds do! Instead of reading words, Hope got a picture and walked to the corresponding letter.

I always feel like these blog posts aren't given enough thought and time in my life, but I am so glad to be doing this! This blog has been an excellent way to me to reflect on the quality of our learning... It gives me a new perspective on ways that I can improve and on the ways the children are learning so well. I am so excited to see what this year will bring for the children, and also for myself as I develop into a homeschool mama.