MIA

Sorry, that I have been MIA lately.  I have been severely ill and it has taken me this long to finally recover. Not sure that I am completely recovered but I am moving around more. J has been chomping at the bit about school, we missed a whole week so now we are playing catch up.

I bought a package of letter beads at Michael's when I was in the states. We separated them into letter piles and then used them to create names of people in our family. I was a little disappointed, though, because the package did not contain all 26 of the letters. I should have known to buy more than one package to ensure that we would have all the letters. Next time, I will.

K is for koala. We made a koala puppet and added it to our Zoo train that we are creating for our zoo unit.

J is painting our paper plate kangaroo for our zoo train, complete with pocket for the baby!

We are playing animal memory game. This was the first time I used all of the animal cards and she surprised me by doing really well. I thought it was going to be too hard but she ended up beating me in the number of matches she made.

We painted some paper different shades of green which we then cut out into shamrocks. We added them to our front door for St. Patrick's Day.

L is for lion. J made a tissue paper lion for our zoo train. It turned out really cute. She cut up different colors of tissue paper and glued them onto the mane and tail.

This is a tissue paper punch art kit that I found last summer at Jo Ann's. While I am in the states, I try to find inexpensive art kits and projects to do for J. I wasn't sure she could do this but she thought it was fun.

We had some unexpected snow this week. Here J is making a snow angel on our balcony. It snowed non stop for about 3 days but it just did not want to stick, so we only had alittle snow to play in. Keke and Scott were disappointed that they didn't even get a snow day!

While J was playing in the snow on our balcony, Kaleb and I stayed warm watching her by the door. We were just having some fun. Kaleb is getting so big. He loves to eat his veggies, fruits, yogurt, and cereal. This has been our week, slow at best because I am still not up to par but we did get alittle school in. Next week, we will be working on M and hopefully, adding some monkeys to our zoo train.

Our Week ....so far

Today, Keke had face painting practice and last night, she wanted to practice on J. That's exactly what she did but during the process, something funny happened....

She fell asleep...you probably can't tell but she is sleeping here. After Keke was done, rather than wake her up, we put a towel on her pillow and put her to bed. Not a second after her head hit the pillow, she asked to get the paint cleaned off her face. She didn't want to sleep with the paint on her face.

We practiced wavy lines.

We practiced writing the letter of the week - K.

We worked with our attribute blocks and made the letter K. This was found here.

J is painting a masterpiece...we are still working...We just started our zoo unit and K is for koala, kangaroo, and komodo dragon. We will be learning alot about animals the next few weeks. She has picked up quite a bit watching Jeff Corwin. It is funny the things she remembers, she now knows the difference between venomous and non-venomous snakes!

Life Skills

My DH started teaching a new class to his eighth graders this quarter. It is Life Skills and it teaches just that. So many times we take for granted that our children are learning the skills they need but there could be some gaps. The Life Skills class is offered to teach those kids about making a budget, writing a resume, doing laundry, cooking a meal, sewing a button, changing a tire etc... Well, today, we were part of his Life Skills class - how to take care of a baby and baby Kaleb was the prop. We discussed feeding a baby, changing a baby, the correct way to hold a baby...and we answered the questions they had about babies. Most importantly, we discussed safety issues and how to help a baby if he/she is choking. I thought I would share some of the photos of the day for us. I think it went well up to the point that Kaleb was being passed around. I don't think he liked it much...

Needless to say, Kaleb had enough and when we arrived  home, he proceeded to take a long nap. Where was J during all of this...well, she was in the middle of it.

Heart Day

This week started with Valentine's Day. I had an eventful day, we basically spent a good portion of it in the doctor's office. But, when we got home, Keke and J had a late dinner planned on our balcony. They decorated the balcony with lights, a table, and some chairs. They made dinner for us, served us and gave us wonderful cards for Valentine's Day. I fail to mention that it was freezing outside and we ate dinner in our winter coats, hats, and long johns. But it was nice for them to think about us. We ended our dinner with a cup of coffee and a sit by the heater (to defrost). I have a few pics of what we have been doing this week.

We played a silly sentence game. I found it here.. I printed and laminated the cards and put them into piles. We chose a card from each pile and made up silly sentences. This one was "A green booger monster met a skunk in a hot air balloon while riding a magic carpet." They were silly and we had fun making them up. We laughed at them and sometimes added things.

We are still working on recognition of the alphabet and hand/eye coordination. She is connecting the letters in order.

We are comparing numbers here. This is the last week of our pond unit and I found these fish erasers. She chose 2 numbers to compare, put the fish under the number and then decided which one was greater. This aids in one to one correspondence and visual discrimination.

We finished our pond mural!!! yay! We added our two adult turtles and a baby turtle. I think it turned out pretty cute and we had fun learning about the animals that live in the pond. Now, we are off to visit the zoo! We will begin our zoo unit next week. As an added bonus, we bought a video here and inside, there was a coupon for a free visit to the zoo. So, I am hoping we will make a zoo visit sometime soon.

We have been watching old episodes of Jeff Corwin lately. We have season one and two of his show. I had bought them awhile ago and we had never watched them all. So, now at lunch, we watch an episode while we eat. J has been learning alot about animals. We were playing like we were naturalists trying to capture snakes and here baby Kaleb has captured two! He is wrestling them to the ground....

But, he has decided to eat him instead. Yum, he tastes pretty good, good thing he wasn't venomous.

One last photo,,,sorry about the red eye. I didn't have time to fix the photo. Again, this cute, smiling baby photo was taken by my talented daughter, Keke. She can always get him to smile. You can just see his two dimples that show when he is truly smiling (and alittle drool).

No Internet....again

It has been awhile since I have posted due to a lack of Internet....again. But I think that we finally got it fixed and I am ready to roll again. It has been about two weeks without the connection but it felt like a month. The last week of January, I taught English at a T elementary school. That was an experience in itself. The kids had a two week winter break and there was a winter English camp that needed teachers. I figured it was only temporary but I tell you, it was a long week. We are back to school this week and I am happy to be home with the kids again. This is what we have been doing so far...

I is for inch worm...I found this game on the Internet. It is reinforcing number recognition. She counts the holes in the leaves and matches the inch worm with the correct number to the leaf. I printed this off and laminated it so we can use it again.

We classified animals. She separated animals into categories - what lives in the ocean, on the farm, and in the zoo. We are finishing up our pond unit and will be moving on to the zoo.

Here it is finished. Not sure where I found it but I definitely found it on the Internet.

We read Inch by Inch written by Leo Lionni. We then measured items with an "inch" ruler. This book was cute and it introduced measurement to J. She had fun measuring things...

Here she is measuring Kaleb. He doesn't seem to mind though.

He loves her. She can do just about anything and he smiles or laughs at her.

Measuring the chair...

 Measuring our Chicka tree. Uh..she dressed herself today, in case you were wondering. She calls her ballerina skirt-her princess skirt. I had to fight with her to put on her tights since it is still kinda cold here and I am fighting a cold (due to my week with the T kids). She informed me that princesses don't wear tights but I promptly informed her that this princess does and unless she put them on, she was going to lose her princess skirt. She put them on, as you can see.

I is for Iguana. We made an iguana pocket and colored I word cards to put in it. This idea came from here. This website has so many things to do. I can usually find plenty to do there.

What did Kaleb learn this week? Well, he ate his first carrots...needless to say, he enjoyed them on his fist and shirt more than on the spoon.

He started his exercising in his Johnny Jump Up. I think he likes the freedom he has to move around and around. He hasn't got the hang of jumping yet, but he will. He has been kicking his legs more so it is only a matter of time.

This is his four month old picture that Keke took for me. Keke is the family photographer and she seems to get the good family pictures .

One last cute picture....I couldn't resist. Again, Keke prevailed. J has been asking for a baby sister...haha. She said she would like a baby brother, which she already has, and a baby sister. She loves Kaleb tremendously and is a big help. He loves her as well.

Week H

This is a picture of our pond mural. We have ducks, frogs, fish, and cattails. This week we will add some dragonflies that we created and lily pads. It is starting to look like a pond. We have a couple more weeks to add some turtles, snakes, and possibly an alligator.

We worked on our alphabet this week. It was H week. J is putting together a puzzle of the alphabet. I am constantly amazed at how she is recognizing letters everywhere, even ones that we haven't worked on.

H is for...brown? Nah, J just seems to focus on one color when she is coloring. I am always reminding her to change colors. Today we had to throw away her beloved pink marker. That was her favorite and she hated to throw it away but it no longer worked. Now, she is forced to pick other colors since pink is unavailable.

H is for heart. We made a Valentine's rug for the door. These rugs are relatively cheap at IKEA, less than 4 TL. I needed a new one for the bathroom, so I washed the old one and we painted it. We stamped flowers and hearts on it. I think it turned out cute. The paint I used isn't permanent fabric paint so I don't imagine it will last long but it should last long enough for Valentine's Day. Maybe I will just wash it, see if it comes out, and we will paint it again for another holiday.

We have been practicing writing our letters so I made a book to practice our numbers. Each number has a cute saying to help her write the number. I laminated them to make them reusable. Here is where you can find the printable number book.

J is doing a alphabet dot to dot. This will help with hand eye coordination as well as recognition of her letters.

We are working on recognizing patterns. What comes next? This is a Valentine's pattern activity that I printed out to use for the next month. She has to determine what comes next. This is a new concept so we will be working on it for awhile using different items. The patterns get harder as you go. Right now we are working on ABAB patterns as well ABBABB patterns. You can find the Valentine's printables here.

Here is one of our dragonflies that we made for our pond. We colored coffee filters with markers, sprayed them with water to blend the colors, and waited for them to dry. We then glued them to popsicle sticks and added eyes.

Here is my smiling Kaleb. He joined us for school today.