Sick Kids and Cacti

This year has been absolutely wonderful! We have loved homeschooling and learning together as a family. And while homeschooling is everything I have hoped it would be, it can be very difficult. Sometimes real life just gets in the way! We have been VERY sick this week. The kids and I had fevers all week this week... Making school very difficult to complete. We definitely took a couple days off, but after that we were BORED! Thankfully, our curriculum is a wonderful distraction!  The main key to teaching sick kids is to make it fun, fun, FUN! Also, we made sure to keep it SHORT and take a lot of breaks.  The most fun day we had while we were ill was the day we spent learning about the cactus! The kids loved all the hands-on learning there was this day.

Poor Jonathan! He burst a blood vessel in his eye
from coughing so hard!

Our first project was AWESOME! Mother Goose Time provided the Styrofoam pieces and the dixie cups so we could make our own cacti. We were able to make the connection that we use water to connect the styrofoam and a real cactus has water inside too.

A finished product!

 The next project we did (after taking a break) was to make cacti out of play dough and toothpicks. We picked cards to find out how many spines we should put into our cacti. We were calling the spines "pokey things" until we did a little research and found out they are called "spines." This was an excellent lesson for Jonathan to practice recognizing his numbers into the teens.

Our final project was to make our own cacti letters. This activity was so cute! And great practice for the kids to recognize their letters and sounds. Mother Goose Time provided that letter cards and pipe cleaners for this project.

Our school days were definitely shorter this week, but still there! I am very pleased that we can learn even when we aren't feeling so good. Thank you Mother Goose Time!

Learning about the Mojave Desert

Last week, we learned about the Sahara Desert, and this week we had the wonderful opportunity to learn about the Mojave Desert through Mother Goose Time! This unit was perfectly timed because we just returned from a short vacation to Palm Springs visiting my grandparents. We didn't get many photos as we were enjoying our time together as a family swimming in the pool and soaking up the warm sun. But we were still able to use the knowledge that we have learned from that trip during this desert unit. Such fun!

When we started our first lesson this week, we talked about the location of the Mojave Desert and Jonathan piped up with, "Palm Springs is in the Mojave Desert!" We talked about the hot sun, lots of sand, and the wind that blows.  The lesson we did had the children painting rocks to be nuggets of gold, searching through sand for puzzle pieces and reading short sight words.

We began our lesson with learning how to cool ourselves when it gets hot out.  We are very familiar with this concept in Visalia, as it was 80 degrees today on the 18th of March! Jonathan had wonderful ideas: swimming, eating popsicles, drinking water, and fanning yourself. Hope said: drinking milk! So sweet! We learned how to make paper fans and fanned ourselves throughout the rest of the lesson.

Our art project had us panning for gold! We painted some of our rocks yellow and later in the day, panned for gold. The kids loved this! 

The next activity was my favorite! I love when Jonathan can be stretched in his reading and writing skills through Mother Goose Time. The kids were to read the words, "I am a..." and fill in the blank with a photo they found in a tub of sand. I used the picture photos provided by Mother Goose Time for this one. I then had the kids write the words, "I am a..." and fill in the blank with their favorite picture. I used the name tags provided for the month for this part. I laminate all those name tags, so they act more like a sentence strip the kids can use over and over. This was an awesome activity! I can see us doing it again sometime soon.

We read a really sweet book called, "Way Out in the Desert." Unfortunately, I couldn't get the book from the library, but YouTube had a wonderful reading of it!

We also looked for puzzle pieces in our bucket of sand. I put two different puzzles in the bucket and got the cutest video of Hope putting together the desert puzzle. SO sweet! The kids really loved this activity too.

Another great lesson planned by Mother Goose Time. We are absolutely loving this year of homeschooling!

Camels, Pyramids and the Letter W!

Another great week in the Shader homeschool preschool! The kids have been absolutely loving this Desert Discovery unit. This week we studied the Sahara Desert and all it includes. We studied the pyramids, the oasis, camels and small creatures. The activities were so fun! I can't wait for you all to see what we've been up to. I am going to share mainly about the activities based around the camels and pyramids.

Some of our letter activities included brainstorming "W" words, our "My 'W" Book," and writing with wwwwwater and wwwwwwiping it up. We also wrote in our journals this week.  The kids had fun playing with the /w/ sound all week long!

Our "camel activities" included a very cute poem about Sally the camel. The kids really liked this one! And I liked that it included larger numbers for them to begin recognizing and practicing.

They also got to make their own camel humps out of playdough. This was a great game to play "one more" or "one less." Jonathan would add a hump to him camel and I would ask, "How many would you have if you added one more?" It got pretty silly after we had too many humps! Lots of giggles around the table this day.

Our pyramid activities were awesome! We got to build our own pyramids with connector cubes. We also got to draw hieroglyphics on the wall! This was their favorite activity, I think.

They were pretty proud of the end product. So cute!

We had a wonderful week! Thank you, Mother Goose Time, for the amazing curriculum and activities! 

All About Cowboys and Cowgirls!

It has been a long week in the Shader household... full of sickness, dental procedures, pink eye and sleepless nights. I haven't been able to give as much attention to other things in my life, so I will give you all a quick picture of school this week. We are moving on to a new unit for the month of March... Desert Discovery! We actually started out this unit by studying cowboys and cowgirls this week. A very favorite subject of mine! My dad used to take us to rodeos and I used to own and ride horses all through high school. I absolutely loved this time in my life, and it was fun to share it with my kiddos.

First, we got some wonderful new tools from Mother Goose Time this month, including new math manipulatives. The kids had so much fun playing with these this week!

Our favorite day was "Cowboy Hat" day when we got to make our own cowboy hats and pretend to be cowboys.

We got to make our own self portraits and glue a cowboy hat on them. Such a fun activity! And a good reminder for the kids to remember what they need to draw to make a face... Next time, we will encourage different colors. :)

One of my favorite things included in the Mother Goose Time box, is the silly shape. I always make sure to laminate this one, as we use it all month long. They include a very sweet song on the back of the poster all about that specific shape. This month is the star! The star is black because that is the color we are studying this month as well. We sang this song all week... I found myself singing it in my head at 3am... "A star has 5 points, a star has 5 points." Haha!

Another great activity this day was "Cowboy hat colors" in which the kids sorted the colors of the hats to the colors of the cowboy or cowgirl boots. I turned this into a "matching" game to add a little bit more difficulty and fun!

Another great week in homeschool preschool! Thanks Mother Goose Time!