Summer School and Spielgaben Schedule

Well for us Classical Conversations is over. It's 24 very intense weeks of school, so when it's done we are breathing a big sigh of relief. We absolutely love it and would encourage all to check them out. www.classicalconversations.com They are nationwide. I am not sure if they are overseas or not. (If someone knows let me know)
So now that it is over we are ready for our summer schedule. After working out how many weeks we have till we start school up again and taking out all the weeks for vacation and birthdays, we ended up with about 15 weeks. I came up with a rough schedule and showed it to my beloved. He helped me think through everything and this is what we came up with.
We will do school four days a week in the summer. Our goal is to only be in the homeschool room 1-2 hours each day. Now each kid has certain things they do so it wouldn't be 1-2 hours per kid but for all four of them to get their work done. I plan to continue math, reading, and Spielgaben through the summer with light review.
We will do Math two days a week. I think its good to keep them fresh on all their fact cards etc. Its amazing how quickly they forget. For the older two we will do phonics at least 2 days a week if not 4. Spielgaben will be done 2 days a week as well for all four kids. I was going to try to do everything everyday but we would be down there too long and not outside enjoying God's creation. We will also review our facts from Classical Conversations. I hope to review each subject two to three times over the summer.
And that is it for us. We hope to play outside as much as possible and learn through play and just enjoy the sunshine.
What are your summer school plans?

All four kids enjoying the creek in our woods. 

Pencil solution and more!

Do you guys struggle with pencils everywhere? Pencils, markers, rulers, etc...drive me nuts! So we came up with this solution. I have seen one of these on a larger scale and without duck taping the tp rolls on pinterest. We used a little box and duck taped it and then duck taped the tp rolls (makes them more durable). You squish them all in there tight and then place your markers and pencils in there and voila! We set very strict rules about these as I could forsee them becoming a fun distraction. We don't rearrange them during school and we don't play with them. And of course the little boy is not allowed to touch them ;-). 

So far they have  been working out great! 

KK is coloring a Dd page I made her. I do not care if she colors it or traces it. My goal is that she recognizes that its a Dd. 

We did more Spielgaben Dd's. 

Today I said Dd was for Dinosaur. I gave her the Spielgaben pieces and let her make her own dino. This is what she came up with. ;-) I can see it has a head and legs. hehe. Again our objective is Dd and its sound and making it fun. So I didn't care what her dino looked like. 

These three pics KK was being a dinosaur. I love doing multi-sensory activities. I think it is very important. 

She really got into it. 

The two big girls did the 4 leaf clover activity sheet. 

Its interesting to me how each one puts the pieces. I usually do not show them the picture of what they are making, because I want them to use their own creativity and thinking to come up with what to do. I do give them broad instructions, but do not tell them exactly how to put each piece. 

Buddy found a cotton ball and toothpicks and put them in and said SPIDER!! I let him free play for a while, when I was working with the older two. 

He has really been into lining things up. 

The girls decorated their four leaf clovers. They both put roots on theirs. I branched off and we talked about why the plant needs roots. So many moments are teachable for these little ones. Spielgaben provides so many opportunities and moments to expand their minds. 

KK and Buddy are going to do a food chain activity sheet. I felt like it was a lot so we just played and talked and read books today. We will complete the activity another day. We talked about producers, consumers, and decomposers. The first pic of KK is her doing consumer motions. 

Here is our producer motion. 

Buddy tried hard to do the motions. 

This was the favorite book by far!

We also flipped through this one. We talked about carnivores, herbivores, and omnivores too. We have already mentioned these words to the little two so this was just more reinforcement. My desire is that they will be familiar with these words and maybe remember the terms. I am not really concerned with them knowing the definition. 

These last two pictures are how I ol. rganized our books for our Spielgaben lessons. We have books in their rooms and books in the living room, but I needed to separate these books out so we could easily access them during our lessons. This seemed to work well. The big girls did steal some of them out and we ended up reading them at other times, but isn't the goal to have your kids love books!? 

This last picture is how we spend the rest of our time (when its cold outside at least), just playing! I recently read an article on how great it is for kids to just play. How do you spend your homeschooling day?

3-D shapes

Today KK began learning the letter Dd. Here she is looking at our homemade Dd flashcard. Before I introduced it we went through A E I O U B C flashcards. We say the name and sound together and go through them three times.I hand her the new flashcard and we say its name and sound about five times together. 

Here is our one up on the wall. She had to find it after we introduced Dd. All the while I am having her say and I am saying the Dd sound. (Just a side note make sure your kids are not saying Duh or Buh or Cuh) 

Here is our spielgaben d. 

KK attempting to make the spielgaben Dd's.

Then she said she had to make a bed. I let her since she had completed her lesson for Dd. 

 For Buddy's and Kk's Spielgaben lesson, we have moved on to the 3-D shapes Sphere, Cylinder, and Cube. We already played with this set when Roo and Doodle were learning it and most of it is pretty advanced for these two. Therefore, I introduced the sphere and the cylinder. Here Buddy was picking up which one I had said.

KK was finding the same shapes from the other set. My goal was that she could figure out which shape it was and then also be able to pick it out from another set. She did well!

Buddy was not really interested, he really just waned to put the smaller ones on a stick. 

And pretend they were food and eat them. ;-) So for him we just went with it. He was being creative in his own way and learning how to pretend and also using find motor to put them on the stick. Even though he didn't get out of the lesson anything I really wanted him to, he was engaged, had fun, worked on creativity and fine motor, and got to play with mommy and hear me say the 3-D shapes. So I consider this a win for learning! 

I also set up this little car wash for Buddy. He drove the cars under the "sponges".

He loved pushing them through and collecting more cars to do it. 

He also stacked up these rings and put the little dots in them. I thought this was really good for eye hand coordination and also fine motor skills. 

Doodle joined us today and set up a 3-D shape food shop. I love that even the older ones like to join in on the fun. 

I also set up shape patterns for KK and Doodle to copy. They did well with these. I also as the day progressed would point out a shape and see if KK could name what it was either sphere, cylinder, or cube (since we have discussed cube other times I threw that one in too)

Roo had outdoor school today, so we skipped hers and Doodles activity. She was out exploring nature and I feel that is really important. Its good to have a balance, but sometimes hard to strike as a parent. 

Hope everyone had a great Easter!! 

Shapes revisited

So after our first day of shapes with KK and Buddy, I decided we needed to do it again. I didn't feel like either of them got what I wanted them to. I wanted Buddy to learn the basic circle, square, and triangle. I wanted KK to know the shapes and be able to make them. I set out the basic shapes for Buddy and named them and pointed to them a couple of times. I asked him to pick up each shape I named. He did ok. 

Then to really cement the shapes in his head I had him put the circle on his nose, head, eye, feet, etc. 

We put two different shapes together to make ice cream. This got us very distracted for a while. So I let him go with it and just tried to keep saying the shape names. 

Buddy tried to make more shapes with the cotton balls. 

Made a house shape with Buddy. 

For KK I had her try to make the shapes with her fingers in the air and also with her body. Just another way to see if she knows the shapes. Also a different approach since KK didn't do great with the cotton ball shapes. 

She had fun with it!

I told her to find different shapes and she had to do different things on them. 

Circle

Rectangle

Then I drew just a circle and square on a piece of paper. Here my goal wasn't for them to be able to draw them, but just another reinforcement of the shapes. 

Buddy enjoyed coloring his paper. 

KK tried to draw circles. 

KK also continued on the letter Cc today. We did our usual and then Cc is for clothes. 

I laid out clothes for her with Cc's and other letters on them. She had to pick out the Cc's and I hung them on the Clothes line. 

The older two did sharp and rounded.  First I had the girls make sharp and rounded shapes with their bodies. They could do this any way they wanted. Doodle's sharp and....

round.

Roo's sharp.

This is my poor drawing of a sharp and rounded house. 

Here the girls put some cubes in the top and the rounded or sharp pieces in the bottom. 

We laid them out by shape and felt the rounded and sharp with our feet. 

Roo wanted to reorganize them better. ;-)

Then I had them run around and put their noses on round or sharp item, whichever once I shouted out. It was a little tricky but good. I also made them each find their own sharp or round things. This was good because often Doodle will just copy Roo, especially with them being so close in age.  This forced Doodle to use her own knowledge and skill. 

The older girls seemed to like how I have books to match our lesson for the littles. So I found these two books to go along with our lesson. They really didn't talk about sharp and rounded in the way we did, but they enjoyed it. 

What did you do with your kids today?