Around the World in a Month

Our homeschool academy has two days left before a long break until after the New Years! I am excited for the change of pace for several weeks, but it is a little daunting to think of the long days at home, and Will comes home later now because basketball has started. So, what will we do to fill our time?

This summer, as we planned our unit days, we decided to do Holidays Around the World for December. It is a perfect inquiry study for the break because we will have lots of time to study! 

This evening I asked the boys what countries they wanted to learn about. I told them to pick from the flags that are hanging up (from the Olympics still! ;) ) plus a couple of others not up. I love that even Liam is recognizing the flags and countries since they have been up since the summer, so maybe its a good thing they never came down! 

They picked Italy, Brazil, Japan, Kenya, and India! The plan is that each week we will focus on a country, read some books, and try out the food. 

Here are some resources and ideas if you want to plan country studies for your kiddos at home or school:

Give your Child the World is an AMAZING resource! We did a book club with it this summer, and it is definitely a resource that I will keep coming back too. I went through and made a list of some books to put on hold at the library. 

For food options, I am going to check out some recipes from Global Table Adventure. A family has made recipes from every country in the world and blogged about it! How cool is that?! I think it would be fun to try out some different restaurants, and I will ask some friends for their favorite recipes too! 

As we learn and do some research, I think we will try out these books that I made. I am not sure we will use all the pages, but I do want Alex to record some of what he has been learning! There are currently 11 books in this set, but I am going to be adding 3 more soon! You can read more about suggestions on how to use it here, or check out the resource on TPT by clicking on the picture!

Don't forget to buy a map so you can keep track of the countries you learn about! We add pins to the countries that we read about, and we refer to the map often when we are talking at the table. The world is so big and the kids need a visual to help them understand where they are in relation to everything else!

Once we get started, I will try to share our activities each week! I need to catch up on some things that have been going on in third grade too!

What countries would you want to study?

Pizza, Pizza!

Child-led schooling is very easy when you only have one child to worry about! :) As a parent, I can start the inquiry and learning, but then I really enjoy letting Alex help decide where it will lead! I also love having the flexibility to do that in Kindergarten. I feel like my job this year is really to foster a love of learning. 

A couple of other moms and I have decided to have an inquiry/unit day each month where we get together and do some fun learning activities. While at home, we carry out the unit in a variety of ways. So we celebrated the end of August with a pizza party! This unit really leant itself well to a math focus, so in my process of planning I created a math pack with lots of fun and engaging math activities that we can continue to use throughout the year. I tried to make it really versatile, but even in the process of using it, Alex and I have come up with some new ideas for the games included!

Alex wasn't really interested in drawing the card and counting pizza toppings, so we added in a die and the first person to get ten toppings won. We also used the 2 sets of toppings to figure out the different ways to make 5. We also used these to help us answer some of the story problem cards! 

We first used this set of counting cards to count the number of toppings. We were ordering them from least to greatest and then Alex thought it would be fun to play memory with them...

So that's just what we did! 

We played with some sequencing cards too. It was interesting to listen to Alex's thought process on the order he chose. It's a good reminder, that instead of just saying something is wrong, to have kids explain their thinking. His thought process was a little bit different then mine, but it still made sense!

Here are some great book choices to add. Lots of fun books that are engaging and so funny!Dig In, Secret Pizza Party, Pete's a Pizza, Pizza at Sally's, Grandpa and Me, The Pizza That We Made, and Pizza Counting (affiliate links) are all great!

It was very fun to gather together with our friends to have a pizza themed day! We read books, played chefs (the packet comes complete with menus, order forms and receipts), made some bar graphs, and ate lots of yummy pizza!

Have a pizza party day! Your kids will thank you! Just don't forget to have dessert pizzas too! ;)

If you want to check out some of the math activities we have been doing click on the picture!

And now I am starting to put some books around the house for our new unit. Can you guess what it might be? Stay tuned!

A Sale and A Giveaway! {now closed}

We have finished our first week of school! It was pretty crazy trying to get all the kiddos out of the house, but I loved being able to peek in on each one throughout the day!

This year I added on some afternoon classes at our homeschool academy, so we have two full days there and we are adding in more structure to our days at home because Alex is in kindergarten. Its sometimes hard to wrap my head around all the different things I need to cover, so I am so thankful to have Teachers pay Teachers around to look for resources for kindergarten AND third grade literature, writing and history! TpT is such a great resource for the classroom, homeschool, enrichment, almost anything you can think of. I love looking through the freebie options, but there are lots of great paid resources as well!

I was so excited to find out TpT was having a BONUS, one day sale, so I could purchase all of those resources I didn't realize I needed before! :) Even more exciting is that TpT gave me a $10 gift card to give away!! 

Pretty AMAZING right! It is easy to enter and there are lots of ways to get bonus entries! A winner will be chosen tonight and a e-gift card sent to you so you can have fun shopping at the sale tomorrow. Be sure to enter before 10:00pm eastern time tonight! You can use the gift card in any store, and it never expires so use it during the sale or save it for another time! Also if you fill in the last entry and tell me your favorite resource in my store, I will send it to you if you are the winner! 

*Giveaway is now closed!*

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Click on the picture to head over to TpT to see all the great resources!

Hello Olympics!

The Olympics are drawing to a close but I still haven't shared about the fun we had for the opening ceremony! This would be tons of fun to do for the closing ceremony too. 

For some reason, because of the business of life, I didn't even realize that the opening ceremony was happening until the morning of! We were on our way to the library and the idea of making a fun party around the ceremony started churning in my head. We picked up a couple of books about the olympics and headed to the grocery store for some international snacks!

Before the ceremony we had our own olympics, including the marshmallow-on-a-spoon race and the cheerios stacking contest. Will and I wowed the boys with a marshmallow straw race. It was a good time! :)

Our main task of the day was coloring some flags to make a banner. I was pleasantly surprised with how much Alex enjoyed the activity! (Let's be honest, these kind of things can be totally hit or miss!) I had printed smaller flags in color so he was able to copy them quite easily! 

We had such great conversations during our coloring. He asked about the song that played when they showed the flag, so we talked about the Star Spangled Banner and how each country had their own special flag and song. We talked about the stars and stripes of the American Flag. He noticed similarities between the Australian and Great Britain flags along with the one 5 pointed star in the Australian flag. I love it when these natural conversations come up. Even Liam has been recognizing flags as we watch the olympics which has been fun. 

Our conversations got me wondering about how other countries chose their national anthems, what they mean, the variety of flags, and how the colors mean things to different countries. So much of that country identity is portrayed through their flag and anthem. I want to understand the things that make each country proud. Hopefully in 2 years we can inquire more in depth into some of those questions! 

Perfect for home or school! :)

Teacher Planners!

Hi. My name is Katie and I loved to be organized. I'm the type of person that gets a little giddy when I see the new planners at Target. Even if I DON'T need one. Weekly calendar dry erase boards, post-it notes and checklists all make me smile. Add in a new set of colorful pens and I'm definitely in my happy place!

It certainly doesn't take much to make me happy! ;)

This year I decided to do away with a personal planner completely. It was also important that I keep my plans for Alex at home organized along with my plans for school, the calendar and all other important life things all in one place. I knew it would be too hard to keep up with too many planners/calendars! 

This year Will requested one too so I took out some of the "cuteness" factor to make it more high school/male teacher friendly! 😉

I always think about what worked or didn't work from last year's planner, then work on adding and updating things to make it easier and more efficient! 

What is it about colored pens that make everything so much more fun?

What I love about putting together my own planner is being able to choose how many of each page I want! Last year I had way too many meeting notes pages so this year I only printed a couple!

Lots of room to write in the calendar and I have months up through July 2018 available. Also 1 page month spread in case you don't need so much space.

Got to love To-Do list!  I printed off our state standards to add for easy access too.

Lesson plan pages!! I have lots of varieties and can customize them for you to meet your needs! I'm old school and like to write them, and have used several different versions depending on the year and what I am teaching.

For my current school I plan the whole unit out because I'm only planning for two days a week.

Below are my plan pages for Alex at home. I have weekly one page or two page options. He gets his own section in my planner. ;) 

Here is a glimpse of Will's.

He has to do lesson plans online, but still wanted pages to write notes, keep up with what he had covered, and have a place for big picture unit stuff. Of course, since I am me, I had to color coordinate the cover and divider pages with his school colors. :) 

If you want one too you can click here or on the picture below to check them out! My planner is the colorful one. There are multiple options for the covers/dividers.

The best part was I pretty much printed the whole thing for free! I had to get a new printer this summer and enrolled in Hp instant ink which is AMAZING! You get 3 free months when you sign up with a new printer (also check for other promotion codes too!) and if you use my referral code we will both get a free month: http://try.hpinstantink.com/frmbq

Happy Planning!

Unit Days

I often talk about homeschooling as if it is the "Great Experiment." Because that is really what it is. Education is so amazing in that there are so many facets in which to educate your child, and I am thankful to have the amount of choices I do. I don't think one is better then the other, but it really comes down to what is best for our family and each child. 

So now we start "officially" homeschooling because Alex is entering Kindergarten in the fall. Which is quite hard for me to believe. And I am thankful to have the support of an amazing homeschool academy to keep us on track, but I am equally thankful for some wonderful friends I have found to do this journey with! 

It started with a Dr. Seuss Day,

 which lead to Botany Bonanza, 

and most recently Water Cycle Day!

Now we have a whole year's worth of unit studies to take us through our Kindergarten year! We will read books and learn at home, but together our kids can share in some experiences that will cement their learning while having a fun time doing it! 

We usually have a read aloud, a couple hands on activities, a "take home" activity to keep, and some fun snacks! [Thanks pinterest!] So far we have always seemed to over plan, so we always have an activity or two we can do at home. It's a great way to review, at home, the things we talked about together. Also, it is very cute to hear a three year old say "evaporation" ;).

I'm so excited for the fun we will have this year and all that we will learn! Nothing is more fun than watching your kiddos discover new ideas for the first time! 

I'm Back!

It's only taken me about 4 sit downs to get this post written. I will probably get up about 4 times in the middle of writing this one to take care of the needs of my kiddos. #lifewiththree 

At least I am not having to type while hold my 1 month old, which is a bit challenging. She is currently still sleeping next to my husband. I was certain no cosleeping would take place this time around, but then we got tired. Then we traveled. And then she got sick. And so while it is fun to cuddle with a newborn, it is wreaking havoc on my neck and left shoulder. 

born 4.18.16

In some ways I thought this past year would be a little easier. In some ways it has been, but then at the same time it was less stressful but more exhausting. So I stopped writing. Not because there weren't things to say, but by the time evening came, my brain was so dead nothing coherent was ever going to come out. I highly doubt anything coherent will still come out, but I will try. 

I also decided that I wasn't really just inquiring my way through third grade, but really juggling all of life. Because third grade happens twice a week (plus the planning that seems to take the rest of the week). Then there is 3+ days of homeschool with the boys. It had been preschool but now we are moving into KINDERGARTEN! (when did that happen?!) and then there is the day to day joys of parenting and all the other fun stuff that happens, but also those moments when I want to pull my hair out and hide. 

There were definitely moments these past several months that I hid my head in the freezer and stole bites of ice cream. There were moments when I instituted the family nap act and MADE the boys lay down because I was beyond tired. There were also moments were I watched the boys live in their pretend world and play beautifully while I sat back and scrolled through facebook. #keepingitreal Moments where I thought grading would never end, and other times where I read the most beautiful stories or laughed out loud. 

I don't know if I was really just tired, but I died laughing. 

I was probably just tired.

So this blog is now going to be a mix of all of the things because I can't separate it all and it is all a process of inquiry, and my goal, now that I have a year of third under my belt, is to build more inquiry into our two days of third, and make kindergarten at home as hands-on and fun as possible. So if you are reading and only care about one topic or the other, feel free to click on the tabs at the top and read just those things! Or follow along with it all!

Life with brothers. It's rough sometimes!

And even though I had to feed the baby, change the leaking diaper, sword fight with the almost 3 year old, explain why you can't marry your sister to the five year old (You just can't), I have finally finished a post. #momaccomplishments 

Five For Friday: Preschool Fun!

My goal this year is to get back to blogging! ;) Since I spend a couple days with third graders and then the rest of the week at home with my preschooler and toddler, I will spend some time each week sharing about both! On Wednesday I wrote about how we wi started our unit on informational text in third grade. You can read about it here!

Fridays will be more focused on some fun things we are doing at home, and this week I am going to link up with Kacey's Five for Friday to share 5 fun things we did this week to build letter and number sense! :) 

Race to 100! Such a fun way to practice counting to ten and then changing out the ten ones for a ten stick! First one to 100 wins! This was his first time playing, but Alex caught on right away and we had fun "collecting treasure" as he called it! Alex is definitely a numbers boy and so we have a lot of fun playing games to keep building that number sense and to let him make connections between numbers!

We love to do crafts! A while back, we started making some of the animals from Brown Bear, Brown Bear What Do You See? It wasn't something I had planned, but Alex decided to make a blue horse because of the book and we happened to have a brown bear craft, so we decided to continue the crafts and we keep them in a special envelope! This week we made the red bird, and then did some exploration to figure out how to make another bird whose wings flapped... 

that was definitely a challenge! ;)

Liam sometimes joins our game time for fun, but Alex is a big time game player! We love playing Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, Uno, Candy Land! All are great for practicing numbers, colors, etc. We slowly added in the rules of the different numbers to Sorry, but this is a fun game to practice counting {and stopping at the right number!} Playing games is not only fun but a great way to build number sense! Its fun to realize all the different ways learning can take place without needing any worksheets or textbooks! ;) 

We've had fun playing some games to practice letters and sounds! I love watching Alex's eyes dart around the pictures as he thinks about which one matches the letter he rolled! 

You can find the above set of cards here. We kind of made up this version on the spot because Alex wanted to play with the dice, but didn't want to color! ;) 

We also like to play another version that goes a little faster. I just added this game to my store! Be sure to check it out!

I am trying to put a little more effort into some literacy activities because that is not at all what Alex gravitates towards. I had a friend who had her kids write at least one sentence every day in a journal, and I kind of tucked that away as an idea I wanted to try later too. He is not much of an artist either. So on Wednesday I pulled out a journal and we wrote a sentence about whatever he wanted. So he took his toy Mater and noticed that a light was missing. So we wrote the sentence "Mater lost a light." I stretched out the sounds and he wrote down the letters he heard. I was pretty excited with his effort! The picture was a group effort! ;) 

Today he drew a picture of himself eating a lollipop and I asked him some guiding questions to get him to add a little more detail to the picture. 

What does it look like outside? What are you standing on? Anything else you need to add to the background.

He was a little less enthusiastic about writing a sentence today, so I helped out with the word lollipop. But he is trying and that is what makes me happy! :)

These are just a couple of easy things that I try to add into our weekly activities. Most last 20 minutes or less and come out of interest that Alex expresses about playing with dice or making a craft. I think that activities at this level definitely need to be child driven, and we stop when he loses interest. Liam, who is 2, often joins in for a little bit and then gets back to playing or snacking. His turn will come soon, but for now he is learning and enjoying some playtime by himself! :)

I'm linking up with Kacey's Five for Friday! Be sure to check it out!