Initial consonants work

Here is the box for the initial consonants work that I wrote about a few days ago. This activity is leftover from my mom's teaching days, and I have no idea where it came from. Hope this helps all if you who have asked about it!!!

Snowflake Tortillas

The girls and I had a great time making snowflake tortillas last week when we visited our local Montessori school! (So I bought tortillas so we could make them at home, too!)

First, the kids folded the flour tortillas into triangles, and then they cut triangles on the folds to make beautiful snowflakes. After they finished cutting, they spread softened butter all over the tortillas. They shook cinnamon and sugar on top of the butter. We then baked the tortillas at 400 degrees for 4 minutes.

Thanks to Lindsey who was the creative genius behind this delicious and fun snack/activity!

Shop class

O loves helping build the shelves for our school room!

Preschool Reading Work

E(3) loves matching pictures to letters!


I decided a couple of weeks ago to try to do one reading activity with E(3) per day (she spends the vast majority of her time playing pretend and looking at books).  E LOVES these reading activities, and after just a couple of days, she actually started reading!   It clicked for her suddenly, and she is SO excited and proud!


These initial consonant cards are one of her favorite works to choose from her shelf.  She has been choosing this work for a few months and always does well with it.  I love it because it has a self-checking feature, so she can do it completely idependently.


To do this work, she labels the picture and puts her finger in the hole of the correct initial consonant.  She then turns the card over to see if she is right.  Fun!


After E(3) figured out how to put the sounds together to read the words, I wrote several word family words with chalk in the driveway.  I "hopped" her from one letter to the next as she said each sound.  Then I plopped her down, and she shouted the word.  So much fun!


I then wrote a sentence and she stepped on each word as she read it.  She was a little distracted at this point and wasn't that into this activity, but this is definitely something we'll do again soon.  She LOVES reading the first 4 BOB books, so I plan to write sentences from these books for her to read.




It's really important to me that she spend most of her time playing pretend, playing outside, and listening to/looking at books.  We spend 15 minutes at the very most on reading activities a day, and we don't work on this everyday.  In contrast, she spent 6 hours outside yesterday playing pretend, climbing, running, walking, exploring, collecting treasures (rocks, fossils, pine straw, dried mud), and experiencing the world.

Pure Joy

One of the joys of homeschooling is having the freedom to spend the entire day outside on a beautiful day. This day made the challenging days so very worth it!

A Quick Peek Into Our New Schoolroom

We have had fun having school in our new school room!  It is still chaotic and disorganized, but it's usable.  Here are some pics from the last few weeks of school in the school room.

E(3) LOVES these animal word puzzles.


We all love the bells!

The sandpaper letters are popular with E(3).  Both girls were excited that their American Girl dolls joined us for school!  They have fun making Kit and Kaya ask questions about the lessons.

E(3) is making a house on the geoboard.

O(6) loves math!

Elliott is building shelves for our schoolroom at this very moment, so hopefully it will be organized soon!

A Delicious and Healthy Dinner

Thanks to everyone for your wonderfully kind comments!  You've inspired me to keep this blog going for a while longer.  I've been searching through my pics for inspiration for a post, and since I don't like to show my girls' faces here, I'm having trouble finding any pics that I can use.  So, a food post will work for now :)

My mom recently brought us a bag of Israeli couscous (from Whole Foods), and it was a HUGE hit with the girls.  I cooked it with pesto sauce and added in fresh tomatoes and rotisserie chicken.  E(3) said "I LOVE "raylee" couscous!!!"

Along with the Israeli couscous and pesto, we had avocados, steamed baby carrots and green beans, and oranges.  Both girls ate all of their dinner!

To Quit or Not...

I just can't decide if I want to continue this blog or not.  A huge part of me wants to stop blogging here, but I think that I'll regret it eventually.  Hmmm.  Thinking and wondering if continuing is worth the effort.  The huge amount of spam comments are pushing me towards saying forget it, but Mr. Ed really wants me to keep it going :)  So, we'll see...

Blog Break

Since it's been a busy bloggy month, I've decided to take a few days off from posting.   Also, I left my camera at my mom's house, so I don't have access to any pics from the last week :)   Have a Happy New Year!!!

A Santa Playdate

We had a super fun playdate on Sunday with cousins that we rarely see.  E(3) and I worked hard to make goodies for the playdate, and most of them were edible.

We made a rice crispy treat gingerbread man and Christmas tree.  The kids loved the twizzlers, but didn't eat much of the rice crispy treat.




We made cinnamon and sugar pretzels.

We made a brownie gingerbread man that actually turned out to be more brick than brownie.  The kids thought it was funny that they could pick him up out of the pan by his foot.  Eventually, someone sawed off pieces for the kids to eat, and I was glad that none of their teeth came out while they ate it.


My mom made reindeer food (recipe coming in a later post), and it was deeeeelicious!


She also made her famous forgotten cookies.


The 6 and older kiddos had a wonderful time playing in the treehouse while the 5 and under crowd played on the trampoline.

I'm not a big fan of trampolines, especially ones without nets, so I was glad that I had candy cane playdough to lure the little kiddos inside to play.



After playing with playdough, they had fun making foam gingerbread boy/girl ornaments (craft kits from Dollar General).


The highlight of the afternoon was a visit from Santa Claus!  (the girls are lucky that their Grandpa is one of Santa's helpers!)
Here are Santa and my mom!


Santa and the girls


The kids ran off to play after taking pictures with Santa, so I called them back to thank him.  O(6) sang him a song, and E(3) did a little dance for him.

What a wonderful, fun afternoon!  Thanks to everyone who made it a success!!!