Caffeinated Homeschooler

We still have one more week of our December Winter Wonderland kit left, but I knew that when my January box arrived I would have get into it to find our celebration kit. The celebration kits are a bonus bag of goodies that  Mother Goose Time sends each month. They are fun and helpful when celebrating holidays, and seasons. We always look forward to our little bonus bag and use it to make our celebrations more meaningful. The January Dinosaur Dig box came with all the supplies for us to celebrate a New Year of Peace and kindness. I love this celebration kit and the idea of starting off the New Year with a goal of being the kindest person you can be, and this celebration kit comes woth lots of fun activites to help kickstart a year of peace and kindness. We will be using this kit on New Years Day which is still a few days away. I plan on making black eyed peas and corn bread as well as burning a bayberry candle for luck, and setting some goals for the New Year as well as adding

It is the last week of December, and we only have a few days left of this year. We are really in this strange no one feels motivated to do anything slump. If it wasn't for our  Mother Goose Time curriculum I don't think we would be doing much of anything this week. Again I cannot stress how much I really appreciate having everything laid out and ready for me each day. This has been easy for me to pull out and start using when I begin feeling guilty for not being schooly enough this week. And not only do I know we are going to enjoy the activities and projects, I also can rest easy knowing that we will be learning at the same time. Makes my heart happy and my anxiety a little less. We will be finishing up our last week of Winter Wonderland next week and then we will be starting the January Dinosaur Dig box. I think this is just the exciting change we will need to jump start us back into real life and help get us out of this post holiday fog. The kids are really excited for dino

We didn't do any formal school this week. We were so busy, and had a lot of fun Christmas things to do. I did just want to quickly share the Santa's Workshop celebration kit that we received from this Months  Mother Goose Time Curriculum kit though. Every month includes a celebration kit and this one was about Christmas. So while we didn't really do much school work this week we did use our celebration kit a bit. It comes with a teacher manual that tells you how to do each activity and also some invitation cards. You can use this kit to host a class party if you are in a day care or preschool environment or you can use it for fun Christmas activities to help make the season more fun like we did. Some of our favorite activities from the kit was the games. There was a reindeer training game and a Santa's beard game. These were really fun and my husband was able to use these to keep the kiddos occupied on Christmas Eve while I worked.  We also enjoyed doi

Our first week home after being on vacation has been a success. We took it easy and focused on reading a lot of great Christmas and winter books, and just having a fun and relaxing week. We started our first week of  Mother Goose Time Winter Wonderland theme for December. We are a little behind now for the month, but there was so much fun stuff to do that we are just going to end up finishing this theme around the second week of January. Luckily this curriculum is flexible and does well with schedule changes. We can go at our pace and change things easily whenever we need to. This first week was all about Ice and Snow, and while it is pretty cold here we aren't cold enough to be icy, not to mention we strangely have been lacking in the rain department here in Seattle! We still enjoyed talking about and learning about snow though. We had indoor snow days all week long. On snowflake day we hung up the name tags we had made the previous week before our trip, and we played with th

We just got back from a vacation to Southern California to visit my parents. It was a really nice trip and a nice warm break from the cold and the rain. Because of this we didn't get to do much with our  Mother Goose Time curriculum yet. I am really excited for this months Winter Wonderland theme though, I had a chance to look through it before we left and we are in for another fun month of learning. One thing we did do before we left was our name tags. Every month we are sent a new name tag that matches the theme. Even though we are homeschoolers I still have them do the name tags. It is a great way for my son to practice learning to write his name, and we can look back at previous months name tags to see how much better we are writing. A fun twist on the name tags this month though was to trace the written name with glue and put glitter on it. I loved this because it gave an opportunity to work on fine motor skills. I wrote his name this time and then he carefully traced the let

It has been three months since I posted about using our Mother Goose Time More Math and More Literacy books as an assessment tool. I cannot believe the time has gone so fast. The original blog post explaining how I was using the assessment pages found in the back of the workbook pages can be found  here . I decided that after completing this months Mother Goose Time curriculum as well as the workbooks I would fill out the assessment form and see how my son was progressing after working on his skills for three months. Here are pictures of the first workbooks and then this months workbooks which followed along with our rainforest theme. I took the last couple days of this month and had him fill out the review pages to see how much he retained and I sat with him and talked about the problems in the workbooks so I could see how he was thinking about the pages as well. He did really well and I was impressed with the progress he has been making. It's like he was all the sudden

This week we finished learning about the fourth and final layer of the rainforest, the Emergent Layer. This is also our fourth and final week of learning about the rainforest with  Mother Goose Time before venturing into the Arctic next month. We learned about Blue Morpho Butterflies, Kapok Trees, Hummingbirds, Mangos, and Strangler Fig Trees. We have learned so much about each layer and how it all works together to make an ecosystem. I loved the Rainforest Friends game that was included this week. It was supposed to be a matching game but when I saw the cards and the little strip that labeled the four layers I decided to use it a little differently. We used it as a review of all we have learned this month about the different layers of the rainforest and the animals that live there. First I took down the topic poster and we pointed out the four layers and recalled any information that we had learned. My son knew all the bugs lived on the forest floor, and my daughter remembered

We took this week off as sort of a sick/holiday week. We started off the week with colds and everyone wanting to rest. Then I worked on thanksgiving, my husband had a four day weekend, and then we made a Thanksgiving dinner on Saturday. It was very difficult to stay on any routine this week, but we had fun and that is a bonus of homeschooling. We get to just kind of go with what life throws at us and not stress about it. One thing we enjoyed a lot this week was reading lots of books. We love read aloud time, it is such a cozy time! We like to snuggle up on the couch with a blanket and a couple books and read.  Mother Goose Time has been a fun addition to this time of day because they always include a really great picture book with the months supplies. And not only do they send a book, they also send fun extension activities that go beautifully with the book. This Month they sent a  story from the Takuna Tribe of South America. It's titled Chimidyue A Folktale of the Amazon Rainf