Caffeinated Homeschooler

This weekend I was going through the August  Mother Goose Time box since August starts in just a couple days. The theme for August is Superheroes, and my kids are pretty excited about this one. We are pretty big into Superheroes around here. I always take the last couple days of the month to get ready for the next month. I like to get everything organized and ready to go so that there is a smooth transition from one month to the next. Mother Goose Time already does such a great job at getting everything set up and ready to go so their isn't a lot to do, but I do have a few things I like to prepare before we start. One thing I like to look at is the More Math and More Literacy workbooks we have been getting in addition to our main curriculum. I like to get an idea of what my son will be doing in the workbooks and this helps me decide what I want to focus on with him. As I was going through the books I couldn't help but notice how cute and how much fun they looked this mont

We are down on the river for our last week of Camping with Mother Goose Time ! Today we learned about everyone's favorite camping critter... the Mosquito!! Yeah, we don't much care for them much either, but we did have a lot of fun learning about them today. We started off by making a Swatter. Mother Goose Time provided the fly swatter cut out and the stick. I added in some crayons and colored pencils and a stapler to put it together. After this we played the Would You Rather Game. This has become one of our favorite games every month. There is always a set of new Would You Rather questions each month that match with the months theme and it always ends up extending into our own would you rather questions. We even make up our own throughout the month as we think of something funny. This time though we used our swatter to make our decisions. Usually we use our manipulatives or nature items to place onto the card with the answer we would pick for the question, and sometimes

We are still Camping with  Mother Goose Time this month. This week was all about being on the trail, and we learned a lot. We learned about trail maps, safety while hiking and made trail mix for Trail day. We learned about pine trees and pinecones as we discussed the stages of the pine trees lifecycle on Pinecone day. We also learned about bike safety and just how delicate our brain is on biking day. We made boot print pictures and played a fun game called hiking clothes on Hiking Boots day. And finally on Friday we learned about patterns and made a fun mushroom craft on Mushroom day. We also talked about animal tracks, first aid and foraging while on the trail. Here are a couple pictures of our favorite project this week. We really had fun with the Boot Prints! We read The suggested story Stella and Roy Go Camping by Ashley Wolff and learned about animal tracks before setting up our project. They each applied foam rectangles to the bottom of a tray to make the bottom of their "b

We just finished week 2 of July's  Mother Goose Time  camping theme. Week 2 was about camping at night, we learned about raccoons, stars, flashlights, the moon, and bears. Our favorite day was the flashlight day because it was all about shadows and we got a shadow journal. We started flashlight day with our suggested story from the Teachers Guide and we read this months included story Camping Shadows. After this we wrote a story about how we would feel about camping at night. My son drew his own picture and then I wrote his story for him. We decided to take our shadow booklets to the park. First we had to play because well its the park. But while we were playing we pointed out shadows and paid attention to our shadows. I took some fun pictures of their shadows, they remind me of Peter Pan's pesky shadow. I feel like this could be made into a fun story or art project. After they had plenty of time to play we hunted around the park for things that had interes

We just completed our first week of the July  Mother Goose Time Camping theme. This week was all about being at the campsite. We learned so much about camping and the supplies needed to go camping. I have been inspired to actually go on a real camping trip, I've never been camping and now we are planning on taking a trip next year since we are to late and don't have the supplies we need to go this year. So far we have learned about backpacks and what to pack to go on a camping trip or even a long hike. We also talked about tents and problems that can come about while camping. We played a fun game called Tent Troubles. We put cards that listed scenarios of possible camping troubles in our pocket cube and then we rolled the cube and came up with solutions. It was so fun to hear their ideas on how to solve the problems. We also built a little blanket fort that we are keeping up this month to be our tent. We imagined that it was our tent that we were trying to keep safe while pl

This week was a little light on the homeschooling and we didn't get a lot done. It is the start of summer and my husband took a day off this week, we went to a dollar movie and we went swimming. It was a wonderful week. We did have a day that we stayed home and relaxed. On this day I decided that we wold have an art day. We were already a few days behind in our Mother Goose Time and I wanted to make sure we had a chance to do some of the fun art projects before we move on to a new theme next month. I gathered a few of the projects and set the table up with all the supplies. We put on the Alphabet Island CD that came with the curriculum and went to work. We did the Lei, Surfboard and Strum Drum Activities. I let them do the projects in whatever order they wanted and I let them use whatever supplies they wanted. We had some fun disscusions during this time. We used the Would You Rather prompts as conversation starters and when we got to the one that asked if we would rather ri