Caffeinated Homeschooler

This month has been all about Bugs and Crawly Things with our awesome  Mother Goose Time curriculum. Every month we receive a box with everything we need to have a themed month of learning, and when I say everything I mean everything. It is as simple as open a daily bag and start teaching. There is little to no prep most days and everything fits together beautifully. For Bugs and Crawly things this month I am in love with the manipulatives that they sent. The kids have been using them for not only fun additions to the learning in the kit, but also for creative play. I love when we get things that stimulate the imagination. This month we received some bugs, some insect builder shapes, and an amazing book. The magnifying glass was from the March box about ponds. See I am serious about the good manipulatives! So far we have used the little bugs as counters and game pieces in our educational activities, but we have also taken them out for use with play dough, and we have built bu

This week with  Mother Goose Time we learned all about Bug Homes. We talked about bugs that use plants as their homes, live in dirt, make hills, webs, and hives. This was such an interesting week especially for my older daughter. She had so many questions and these topics sparked so many conversations. I think our favorite day was about hives. We learned so much about bees and we even did a fun experiment. One activity we did was the Honeycomb activity. This was an invitation to create project so I set up everything that they would need and then let them create. This helped my son with his fine motor skills because we used little hexagon stencils to draw the picture, It also gave me a chance to have him verbally tell me what he included in is picture. He did a great job and retained quite a bit of information. I loved that after the project was over he was able to tell me what was going on in his picture. He included the hexagon cells of the honeycomb, them he used some pain

We have been happily learning all about Bugs and Crawly Things this month with our Mother Goose Time  curriculum. We have gotten a little behind so far due to this great Forest School we have been going to, and let me tell you there are a lot of bugs to be seen in the damp Pacific North West Forest. The Banana slug is definately the biggest slug I have ever seen. We have also been seeing worms, and beetles as well. Such a great theme for Spring! We took another break from our daily bags this week to use our Mothers Day Celebration Kit that came in this months box. We do a weekly Poetry Tea Time on Thursdays as part of my daughters Language Arts program and I thought that the Mothers Day Kit would pair perfectly with this. Plus I see no reason we shouldn't celebrate me twice this week. Here is a link to get a printable version of the Mothers Day  kit in case you want to celebrate this weekend as well. So on Wednesday night I filled out the Invitations from the kit and left it on t

I have been using  Mother Goose Time for several years. I discovered this company when my daughter was in preschool, it looked like a lot of fun so I gave it a try. What's not to love about having everything all planned out for you and ready to go. I had never homeschooled before and was super intimidated by it all. We ended up loving the ease and flexibility of it so much we continued with it for her whole preschool year. A few years later when my son hit the preschool age I went right back to Mother Goose Time. I noticed that some things had changed, but the changes I noticed looked awesome. I also noticed that the core of the program had not changed, they still offered a ready to go program with lots of exciting sounding monthly themes. The ease and flexibility was still there, and now having two to homeschool I knew I needed something to help make my life easier. My point with this is that I want to talk about how they have really exceeded my expectations the last couple of