Monkey Bars!

Here is a short (12 second) video of Nehemiah crossing the monkey bars!

Stephanie

St. Patrick's Day homeschool highlights!

We had another fun week in home school and in life in general!  Who wouldn't have fun with a sweet boy like this?!?!?!

This week we checked out a handful of library books and this cool game pictured below.  The library just got these recently and there are all types of subjects! We did the Body Parts book/game this week.

 We also worked on a free kindergarten St. Patrick's Day unit this week.  It was fun and Nehemiah did GREAT on it!  He was being a ham and posing for tons of pictures!

 Today I hid gold coins/treasure all over the house for Nehemiah and one of our other boys to "hunt." They had a BLAST!  We also did "painting" with droppers of colored vinegar on baking soda (even the 10 and 13 year olds enjoyed that!). We still have a skittle activity to do later on, which should be yummy FUN!

 His artwork above is improving so much!  It's so neat to see him starting to draw and make things that look like what he says they are!  LOL I helped with the drawing on the left (the truffula tree and flower). 

Good week, despite being really tired and looking forward to our trip to New Orleans next week! Tomorrow is my 30th birthday and Monday is our 7th wedding anniversary!  How time flies!

So Blessed,

Stephanie

The past week or so...

Well, I've been slacking on posting on here.  It's hard to find time to concentrate and sit at the "real" computer so I can include pictures.  Sidebar: Anyone know why I cannot post pictures from my iPad to a blog post?  I'm still figuring this thing out!  Also, I need help in making my pictures fit better next to each other in a post...I need a tutorial or something! Open to advice!

"I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees!"

Here are some pictures from the last week or so and what we've done in homeschool.  We celebrated Dr. Seuss' birthday by going to the movies and seeing The Lorax.  It was a great movie and I'd recommend it! (I think they said one word in it that we consider an ugly word with Nehemiah like stupid or idiot, I cannot even remember which word it was now). 

Some Seuss books we read and enjoyed!  

Dr. Seuss Books- Purchase through this link and a portion goes towards our adoption fund!

Story sequencing

Truffula Trees! 

Seuss apps (FREE!)...I am We are particularly addicted to Lorax Garden and Seuss Band!

We practiced our address and my cell phone number a lot this week, as well as phone skills!  If you call, he may very well be the one that answers!  LOL! It was super fun letting him dial and call me from the house phone in the other room!

Playing Seuss Band on my iPad

We had fun and had lots of giggles at the silly rhymes in the Dr. Seuss books!  Since he uses lots of made up words, it was good practice in using context clues to figure out what a word means!

Blessed!

Stephanie

School: decisions decisions!

We've decided what we will be doing next year for Nehemiah's schooling. Our choices were: pay to send him to WEE school at our church again next year which is three half days a week or to go ahead and officially start homeschool kindergarten. He would not be able to start public school yet because of the birthday cut-off date...he has a late October birthday.

This year he has been in a three year old class, of which he's been the oldest in there. It is a great program and he has an awesome teacher, but he has been bored, to the point of begging to stay home and do homeschool! He loves it once he's there, most of the time but even the teacher and the director have noticed his boredom and started giving him class work from the older class. They often send "homework" for him just to challenge him a little and he gladly does it after dinner when the big boys have homework time. I am so glad I have a happy little learner. I just pray he continues like this!

So we obviously don't want to push him too much, too quickly but we also don't want to pay for something pointless either. I know he'd still get benefits from preschool but are they worth the cost and time if he can get those same benefits elsewhere? We have decided no, not for us. We are going to look for social activities and sports to involve him in, such as soccer, as well as AWANAS and homeschool co-op.

We live in Louisiana and fortunately (and unfortunately) there are not very strict guidelines for homeschooling. From what I have researched and found by asking other homeschoolers is that you must only send in a letter of intent to homeschool at the start of the school year. I will not have to send any lesson plans, records, test grades or attendance in. We also do not have to participate in standardized testing if we don't want to (not sure how I feel about this yet; they do offer it to homeschoolers every year though so that's good!). This is good in the aspect of being more flexible but also there is less accountability in the state for ensuring that people are homeschooling well and really educating their kids. For me, this means we can continue to take Nehemiah's schooling at the pace we are already on, being more easy going and flexible, allowing for him to learn and do things at his pace and explore his interests.

This is a little daunting to me in the respect that up until now we have been unofficially homeschooling and now it will be "official" in the Fall. My type "A" personality wants to get all worked up over it but I am trying to not freak out keep the big picture in mind. Pray for us in this exciting adventure, that I would have great patience, creativity and energy!

Blessed in more ways that I can count!

Stephanie

Learning Fun!

Roll the dice, add up the dots and mark the sum on the paper! He LOVED this!

Here are our home school highlights from this week! We continued to use some of the worksheets from the Jake and The Neverland Pirates Kindergarten pack from last week. We did several activities with coin money and a couple Valentine's activities, as well as educational iPad apps, reading books galore, working on some speech activities, pronunciation, playing Legos and pretend!

As you can tell from the variety of clothing choices on Nehemiah in the pictures, we have found that we do not sit down for an extended home school time all at once (for now). I used to beat myself up about this. I seriously thought I wasn't "doing" home school because we weren't at the table starting by 8 am or doing it all at once. Nehemiah cannot sit still that long and finds worksheets boring if I give him too many at one time (Who doesn't?!?!?). I can tell already that my traditional educational mindset (having grown-up in public schools) is going to be greatly challenged in the schooling of Nehemiah. He is a very active learner to say the least! It actually works to our benefit to spread it out throughout the day and right now we have the flexibility to do so. It also helps that our BIG boys have homework/tutoring time after dinner each school night from 6:30-8 pm and Nehemiah usually asks for some homework then too! Mostly I try to have worksheets, activities and concepts prepared in advance for the next week or two so that when I have spare time, when he is in a cooperative mood and when he is asking for home school/homework that I am ready! We mostly try to keep learning fun but also stimulate that BIG brain of his!

Links to the cool books above are here and here.

 Money Bingo with Coins

 Character name matching from Jake Pack.

 An iPad app called Sight Words by Little Speller

 Crayola Color Wonders Sound Studio

 Matching and gluing the rhyming words in the correct category.

 He asked me to draw an oval and triangle so he could cut them out. Then I spelled the words and he wrote them all by himself!

Practicing his name!

Hope you all had a great week too!  Anyone know how to make the pics smaller and to have more of them together? like in a 3X3 grid?  I've seen it on some blogs and couldn't figure out how to condense this anymore!

Blessed,

Stephanie