Caffeinated Homeschooler

I know Valentines Day was last week, but I was so busy promoting the  Mother Goose Time Manipulative giveaway that I didn't get a chance to share much about what we did last week. Now that it's all done I can focus on all the fun we've been having. We decided to use the Valentines Day Celebration Kit that came with Februarys box. February was all about Nursery Rhymes, but they always send a bonus kit that is centered around a holiday or something relevant for the month. January was a celebration of peace kit, we learned about Martin Luther King Jr, did some yoga and made a calendar to start our new year off with. We decided that we would use our Valentines Day kit on Valentines Day. We started the day by doing the Spreading Love Snack Recipe for breakfast. I gave them each a baggie with a few strawberries and a little bit of sugar in it. They smashed it into a jam like spread while I toasted their bread. Once that was done I let them use a cookie cutter to make the

I am so excited about this post!  Mother Goose Time has allowed us to do a giveaway with our readers! One lucky winner will win 2 bags of Mother Goose Time manipulatives. It will be a surprise what they give you but let me ease your mind, we have loved all the manipulatives they have sent so far. Each month of Mother Goose Time has a theme and everything you get works with that theme. This means you get a meaningful month of learning that is all planned out for you. Every month you get a new calendar set up as well as numbers, shape, and color to add to your circle time. You also get a storybook and a music CD that is matched to the months theme as well. But, I think the most fun items you get is the hands on stuff. They include a stamp to go along with the shape of the month, cookie cutters of the letters you will be focusing on, and 2 bags of really good quality manipulatives. This Months theme is Nursery Rhymes and we received a bag of sheep counters and a bag of lacing shape

We had a sick day today and still managed to utilize our Mother Goose Time  Preschool Curriculum to help with any restlessness. My little guy was up pretty much all night with a pretty bad cough and a low grade fever. I don't know about your kids, but mine always seem to be the worst at night. Then they seem to feel a little better during the day until night comes and it starts all over again. I don't expect to get a lot of sleep tonight either. Poor little guy coughed so hard that his back is hurting. But even though we were up most the night because of the cough and some weird fever induced nightmares he still wants to do a little during the day until he realizes that he is tired. So what is one to do when their sick kid thinks they can do things during the day when they are obviously still to sick to do much? Enter Mother Goose Time, a real day saver! We spent the morning reading Nursery Rhymes out of the amazing book that was included in this months box. It has 18 beautiful

So, this post has been a long time coming. But here we are in February and I think we have the majority of our subjects all figured out. Since we moved to Washington and I began homeschooling Independently for the first time I had a lot of choices to make. I was not completely happy with all the curriculum we were using at our Charter school in California, and there were some curriculum that I had used through them that I really liked, but soon found out to use it at home would be very expensive. So the search began, and let me tell you, there are a lot of choices out there. I also have a tendency to get a little obsessed and love to research. So I researched and read review after review, and I looked at other homeschool blogs to get an idea of what different programs were like. I settled on some core subjects and gave them a try. After a few months I found that we loved our reading and spelling program, but hated our Math. So back to the internet I went and I decided to try a program

So far we are only in day 2 of our Mother Goose Time Nursery Rhymes theme for February and we are loving it. I printed out the coloring pages for this months theme in the member resources section of the  Mother Goose Time website. Each color page goes with the days nursery rhyme, it has a cute picture and the nursery rhyme printed on it. After the month is finished they will each have a cute nursery rhyme book of their own. I can not wait to share all 20 of the nursery rhymes with my kids, some of them were ones I had forgotten until I flipped through the book, and then I couldn't believe I hadn't read them to my kids before. As a Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador we are given a monthly focus topic to think about while we are doing the lessons with our kids. This month is about assessments. Mother Goose Time gives you plenty of ways to assess the progress of your students. I started thinking about how I use assessment in our homeschool. Because I only have 2 students and the