Caffeinated Homeschooler

So this month I used our Mother Goose Time Supplement workbooks a little differently. We get The More Math and More Literacy workbooks to help provide more practice with these skills since my son is now on the older side of students using this curriculum. In the past I let him pick pages that he liked, or I choose pages that looked fun. I wanted him to get to know the workbooks first and not feel intimidated by having a workbook. This month with the start of our new school year I felt like I wanted to use them more like the supplement that they are. So I decided to take a few minutes each week to decide which pages would go along with each day of the curriculum. This worked out very well. We learned a skill through play with our daily bags and then we used the workbooks to practice the skill more. Today I used the back pages of the book which include skills assessments. I filled out each section and was easily able to see what areas he was developing, meeting, or exceeding sk

This is the last week of September as well as our last week of the Mother Goose Time theme My Amazing Body. we are wrapping up the week by learning how to keep our amazing bodies healthy! I was so happy to see a hand washing day, because now it isn't just me telling them that they need to wash their hands more often and better. Mother Goose Time has my back on this, and they made it more fun then my nagging. I absolutely love that we learned this so close to the cold and flu season starting up too. This will be our biggest defense against getting sick. We started off our morning with Breakfast and Books like usual, and then we did a fun Germ activity. I pre glued the eyes on the plate and drew a face on it, my kids informed me that it should have been a sad face since it was going to be covered in germs. I then put a little green paint on the plate and had them touch the germ and spread it on the face. This helped them to visually see how a germ might get spread. T

When I first started homeschooling I wrote out schedules and times for when we would do certain subjects and activities. I pretty much drove myself crazy trying to keep up with our strict schedule. I felt stressed and most of all I felt like I was failing. I've come a long way since then. Our homeschool is so much more relaxed and homey feeling. I think the biggest change I made is going by a routine instead of a schedule. A schedule is so rigid and gives you this feeling that you can't stray from the schedule. A routine, for me anyway, is so much more flexible, and  Mother Goose Time has fit in so seamlessly with our routine. In fact I will be a little sad when my kids are to old for this program because I love the way Mother Goose Time enhances what we do each day. Our morning routine pretty much starts off the same each day. We start with what I like to call Breakfast and books. This is the time that I introduce the Daily Topic for the day. Mother Goose Time provides a Da

Every month as a  Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador we have a specific prompt to write about. This month is about routines and transitions. I was going to blog about our routine as homeschoolers and share how we use Mother Goose Time throughout the day to help us keep a fun flow for school but this week was just so much fun that I want to share about what we did. Look for a post about our daily routine next week. Last week we learned all about our senses. Each day we learned about and explored a sense. We used lots of books from the library to supplement and I also found a few experiments to do with them from the internet. Mother Goose Time had so many fun projects to do this week we almost did every activity which doesn't always happen because life doesn't always allow it. On Monday we learned all about sight. Each day we used the daily topic poster and any books as discussion starters on the topic. Then we followed that up with an activity. This day had us playing a

We started off our new school year by learning about ourselves. Septembers  Mother Goose Time theme is called My Amazing Body and it includes learning about body parts, five senses, staying healthy, and clothing. We had so much fun learning about or bodies this week, we learned about our head, arms, legs, hands, and feet. Some of our favorite activities of the week included working on shapes, patterns and sorting. We used the included tangrams to problem solve ways to fit the shapes onto the shape Design Mats. Some of the designs required some perseverance to get them to fit together perfectly. We were also given a bag of buttons and laces this month. We used these to fill in the pattern guides and we used them to practice sorting by shapes and color. He has really taken a liking to patters lately and really enjoyed this activity. We also spent some time with our theme poster every morning. We used the labels to label our little kids on the poster. The day we learned

I started receiving the More Math and More Literacy Workbooks from  Mother Goose Time a few months ago. I really like them, but didn't feel like I was using them to their full potential. They are really cute and go with each months theme and work on the skills that I was wanting my son to be practicing. They help to make this program appropriate for my 5 year old, we have only been using them for fun at this point though. Mostly because summer left us feeling like taking it easy on everything and getting outside as much as possible. We have to get the sunshine time in while we got it. Rain will be coming for us again soon. But now that fall is nearing and we are starting to get back into the school groove I started thinking about how I could better use these fabulous workbooks. I decided that it would be best if I could match them up with whatever skill we worked on for the day in our Teachers Guide. Now that does mean a little more planning for me, but Mother Goose Time has all t