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! 

On Being Left Behind

I've said a lot of goodbyes in my life. This summer is full of hard ones again. 

It doesn't ever get easy, but my least favorite are the ones where I am being left behind. 

The ones where you stand where you are and wave to the people as they drive away or disappear through the security checks. Because I have to turn around, go home, and its life as normal. No new adventures, life to set up, or cultures to explore. 

This summer marks 10 years since I moved to South Carolina, during those 10 years I have had lots of family and friends that have come and gone, leaving me here waving goodbye. For probably the last 5 years I looked for ways to get out. I wanted us to be the ones getting to leave. I wasn't supposed to live in the States for this long. I was willing to serve God in the difficult places, uproot my family and go. But instead He called us to stay. 

Staying is hard for my TCK [third culture kid] blood. Settling and putting down roots is not something I totally understand or am very good at. My family and friends are scattered all over the US and the world. But this year He has worked in my heart to help me know that it is okay to stay. Here's a couple of things I have learned in my years of being left behind.

God called me to serve Him wherever I am. 

Location doesn't really matter when it comes to serving God. Coming from a family that was filled with people in ministry, I honestly struggled at first that God had called us to "regular" jobs. But I quickly realized what a great place that was to be! I didn't have to go far to be the hands and feet of Jesus. All around me there were needs. Living and working in the States helped change my perspective on the needs here.

I need to pray for the ones who GET to go.

I know what it is like to be the "goer." How hard that is too. How challenging it is to pack up your life and how hard the goodbyes are when you get on the plane. I need to pray instead of be jealous. Which is easy for me to want to be. I need to empathize with their feelings instead of getting lost in my feelings of being left behind.

Don't get too settled.

Last year we took a step of faith that caused some uprooting in our lives. But God settled us again into a better situation. Whether its jobs, houses, cities, states, or countries, we never know when God is going to ask us to go and just like Abraham we will have to trust Him with the unknown.


So as I keep waving those goodbyes to family leaving, these are the things I need to remember. Not that it will make them any easier.

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 

Valentines!

Since we only meet two days a week, we are passing out our Valentine's treats tomorrow!

This year I decided to use up some old crayons and the boys and I melted them down into lego molds! 

We used some fine motor skills taking off paper. Breaking a part the crayons and sorting them into color groups was fun too! :)

We made enough for all of our classes! 

And still have plenty of crayon's left over for more crayon making.

Don't have time to make crayons? ;) Put in a couple of real lego blocks or figures!

And then I made some Valentine coloring cards to go with it! 

Fun to color but ink friendly which is a plus! ;)

They are two to a page, but to print smaller go here for the directions!

You can snag those and my valentine treats from last year here! 

Be sure to check out this post for some Valentine graphing freebies too!

Hope you all have a fun Valentine's Day!

Five For Friday: More Nonfiction!

We survived another week! Third trimester is no joke and I spend life feeling tired! ;) But I'm letting my dishes sit for another day and putting my feet up instead. And actually writing on this blog. It's a mini miracle! 

I used up a bunch of old broken crayons to make some fun Lego crayons for all of our valentines treats! I got the molds from Amazon. Alex was great at helping take off the crayon paper and he loved sorting the colors and adding them to the molds!  I was happy to find a non-food treat because we have some food allergies in our class!

Monday was the most gorgeous 70s day! It was a great way to start February! It's fun to be able to meet up with friends too. A couple of the other teachers from my school have kiddos my kids ages so they have fun playing together and it's a refreshing mommy break!

Back at school we are busy researching information about our nonfiction topics! After learning about several different graphic organizers, we used those to help organize our notes. The kids are working on a final copy at home, but then we will also collaborate together to turn it into a class encyclopedia!

We have also been looking at different nonfiction text structures over the last couple of weeks! Reading A to Z has some great reading passages! I enlarged one for us to look at together and then the kids worked in pairs to pull out information and put it on an organizer! Looking at these texts have reinforced keeping our writing organized too!

Do you all use oils? They are a recent discovery for me, but I love them! the boys and I had fun making some stuff with them today! Alex is a huge fan! He loves sleepy spray for his bed and thinks it's amazing that we can make soap and hand sanitizer! 😉

Click on the picture to head over to Kacey's blog and see what other teachers are up to!

Organizing Our Text

We worked on sequencing this week. We brainstormed how we could use it in informational text. Structures like life cycles, how to books, and biographies fit perfectly with a sequencing organizer! Then the kids got to work.  I had fun walking around seeing the variety of topics that were out there! 

Life cycles of frogs, butterflies. How to ride dirt bikes, make paper airplanes, dress like Hermione, draw the superman symbol... the list goes on! Can't wait to read the final products!

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!