The girls found the flower button board that I made for O(6) about 4 years ago. O loved it, but E was only moderately interested.
We had a Valentine's Day themed homemade playdough playdate. The kids helped make the playdough and then had fun playing with it.
We cut hearts from flour tortillas to make heart shaped cinnamon and sugar tortillas for a playdate snack.
Goobi magnets are the most chosen work in our school room! E(3) had fun making different shapes.
The chocolate playdough was a little crumbly! It made a mess, but clean-up was fairly easy.
O(6) enjoyed her Rightstart Math lessons this week. She created and solved math problems using the balance, and then recorded the problems in her notebook.
E(3) enjoyed spreading out and looking at the cards from our Impressionism memory game.
We took a long walk on a beautiful day!
E is running to me with her arms open for me to pick her up. Love!
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The girls and I have had so much fun playing our bird song identification game! We take turns wearing an eye mask while someone else chooses a bird from the basket and squeezes it to hear it's song. If you guess the bird correctly, you get to keep the bird. They beat me every time!
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I am happy to have Jo from My Organized Chaos as the first ever guest post on Chasing Cheerios! Jo's blog, A Bit of This and That, was one of the first blogs that I ever read years ago before I started Chasing Cheerios, and she has always been an inspiration to me.
Jo Ebisujima is a Brit living in Japan, she has been raising her bilingual son in a Montessori environment and is the founder of My Organized Chaos, where she helps busy moms to organize their home and kids so that they have more time for the fun stuff.
Make A Home For Everything: This is my mantra and I say it because it works. If everything has a specified home it is much easier to keep the place tidy and organized, (and much easier to find things when you need them).
Storage Bin and Boxes: Perfect for keeping things looking neat and tidy on the shelf. Make sure they are well labelled and you keep the contents according to the labels.
Store Subject Items Together: This might be easier said than done, depending on the size of your home but having subject zones make it easier for you to grab what you need when you need it.
Learn The Art Of Rotation: Often we have too much 'stuff' to have it all out on the shelves at one time. If that is the case, rotate your activities. Using a seasonal basket or shelf is one easy way to introduce rotation. I also recommend setting a time each week to swap your shelves around. Rotating items keeps them fresh for your child and having less on the shelves makes it look better, tidier and more organized and makes it easier for your child to decide what to study with next.
Use Colour Coding: If you have more than one child then colour code your binders, the children's notebooks etc. Alternatively use colour coding for subjects, Montessori makes good use of this and it makes it easier for bother teachers/parents and the children. Whatever your labelling system of choice is, be sure to stick with it for the year to prevent confusion.
Set A Week To Declutter: It is easy to over accumulate 'stuff' so set a week aside before the start of your school year to give your homeschool area a good de-clutter. Throw out, or pass on anything you no longer need or your children have outgrown.
Family Schedule: You can do this on paper or on the computer but try and get the whole family into the habit of keeping up with their schedule making. We use google calendar for all our scheduling, we all have our own calendar, a family one and my husband and I have our work schedules on there too. It is easy to check at a glance to see if a new event will clash with something else.
Pinterest: Use pinterest to keep project ideas and lesson plans all in one place. Set up boards for each topic or subject then anything you stumble upon as you are surfing the net can be kept all together in one place, much easier than wading through hundreds of bookmarks.
Specify Your Work Area: So often we end up having homeschool bits all over the house. Decide where is the work area and make sure that your child has all the items they need at hand in that area. Of course you can have different zone, they might have a writing statoin in one room and a study and experiement are in another room.
End Of Day Clean Up: This should be applied to everywhere really, when you and your children have finished for the day, tidy everything away so that you have a nice clean desk/room/kitchen to start on the next day. Having to clear away the previous days mess before you can et started for the day is a downer and a waste of precious time, much easier to get it done at the end of the day.
The next My Organized Chaos e-course kicks off February 18th, the doors for early bird registration are open now.
You can expect to see fairly frequent posts without too much wordiness since I recently learned to blog from my phone! It is SOOOOOOOOOOOOOO much easier and faster than before, so blogging is actually fun again! However, I'm not very good at typing on my phone, and autocorrect just kills me (if I say something that makes absolutely no sense then you can assume that I have been autocorrected).
Now that I am (temporarily) on my desktop computer, I'll add captions for these photos.
The girls LOVE our world map, and we sing the continent song each morning while locating the continents on the map. Lately, we have been focusing on Great Britain (since we've recently finished reading The Secret Garden), France (since we studied Picasso in January), Canada (since we are reading the Caroline American Girl books), and Russia (since we are studying Tchaiovsky this month).
Our smartglobe is also used frequently by the girls. They love to listen to the national anthems of the different countries.
O has recently become interested in the knobless cylinders (they came from Montessori Outlet, I think).
Both girls love these blocks. They came from Lakeshore (I think).
Inchimals are always fun! E was putting them in order and having lots of fun doing it!
Toob animals are always a hit with E! These animals are from our South America bin.
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!!!
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!
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.
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!
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!
Goobi magnets are the most chosen work in our school room! E(3) had fun making different shapes.
