Caffeinated Homeschooler

We have learned so much this month with the  Mother Goose Time Alphabet Island theme. This has been sort of a wrap up month for the curriculum, we have reviewed numbers, letters, and colors that we have learned all through the year. We gotten to be pirates going on treasure hunts, ship captains discovering new islands, and cave explores searching for beautiful and amazing natural treasures. This curriculum comes with everything you need to have a well rounded and fun month of learning. And while all this is great they also offer add ons to help make this curriculum work for babies and toddlers or all the way up to about age 5 or 6. We have been receiving the More Literacy and More Math workbooks for a few months now and are really enjoying the added practice with the skills and concepts being taught. We don't use the books everyday right now, but I do see us using them more next year as part of our school day. The workbooks match the months theme and are really cute. Here are some

Anytime we can combine play with learning I get really excited.  Mother Goose Time was full of play opportunities this week with the Alphabet Island theme. We learned all about Volcanoes, Treasure Maps, Caves, Water Falls and Coconut trees. Also our Make and Play projects got a lot of use this week. I think our favorite day was the Treasure Map day. Now that summer is upon us and the weather is getting warmer it is nice to have such a fun playable curriculum. There is just enough structure to help the day run smoothly, but it is also flexible enough that if we want to have a lazy do nothing but eat cookies and play kind of day we can do that too.  Most kids love treasure maps and mine were excited to start their adventure for the day. They dove right into the make and play project which was making your own treasure map! I had an opportunity to do a little map lesson while they were making them. We talked about different kinds of maps, and map keys, as well as directions such

I love love love that  Mother Goose Time uses music, dance, dramatic play, storytelling, engineering and construction to help learn. This is a very multi sensory way of experiencing education and I feel that it gives more depth and meaning to the material being learned. I absolutely believe that a hands on learning approach in education is the way to go. Learning can be fun and does not need to include a bunch of worksheets. Don't get me wrong, worksheets have their place and we use them sometimes, but it is way more effective to learn something by playing a game or making a prop to play with. Mother Goose Time fits in perfectly with my personal ideas about education and they are flexible enough to make it play based or sit down and get to business. This week our favorite day was day 7 which was all about Sand Castles, I mean what is more fun than sand castles, they just scream summer and fun. I wish it was a little warmer here to go along with this theme though. As I am writing

It is June and we are pretty much wrapping up our year. I can't even believe what a difference I have seen from the beginning of the year to now in my son. When we first started with  Mother Goose Time he couldn't write his name, could barely count to 10, and knew none of his letters. I couldn't even get him to color his own coloring sheets, do the art projects himself, or sit for any length of time to even try to do a lesson. Over this last year I have watched him connect with each monthly theme and get excited to learn. He stays excited and engaged for each theme and eager to find out what we are learning about next. He just this week started writing his name on his own. We started off the year by doing his name for the name tags and the journals by using a yellow marker for him to trace, then I wrote his name on a piece of paper for him to copy, and just this week he told me he didn't need the paper and he wrote it all by himself. He is also counting to 20 with only

We are wrapping up our month of Bugs and Crawly Things with Mother Goose Time . This week we had a lot of fun with the Inchworm day which was day 19 in the Teacher Guide. The Activity we did was the My Inchworm Story activity and it worked on Social relationships and communication. We were encouraged to lay out all the Daily topic posters, but I didn't keep them all... oops! I did have all the invitation to create photos though so I decided to use those instead. We looked through the photos and discussed all the bugs and tried to remember what we had learned about them. Then we compared them and tried to find similarities and differences between them all.    After we finished looking at the bug photos we used the storybook that came with our supplies earlier in the month and we went through the book and tried to point out all the bugs that we could remember. He was so proud to be able to name and point out most of the bugs on the pages. The back page of the book wa

Ever since we started receiving the More Math and More Literacy workbooks from  Mother Goose Time as an add on to our normal monthly curriculum I have noticed such a difference in my sons learning. He loves these workbooks. He likes having workbooks to do while his older sister is doing her work and I like that they provide extra practice in the skills he is developing. Earlier this week we worked on estimation and measurement. He started off by cutting out the different sized moths and a ruler. I let him cut them out so he could get better at his cutting skills, he still has a little trouble with this but did a very good job cutting out the moths. After cutting them out we spread them out on the table and I asked him to put them in order from largest to smallest. I asked him to guess by looking at them which was the largest and once he picked the biggest one out we used the ruler to measure it. Then I asked him to pick out the next biggest moth and we measured that one as well a