Life with my Cowboys

I finally have Froggy's school stuff ready for our first trial week. So, I'm posting this before I finish my DIY tot school materials post. Just a little bit excited and wanted to share what I finally decided we'll be doing. We're using ABCJesuslovesme for tot school time and I'm really excited to start. He is still going to sit in when we do calendar time and [if he wants to] Monkey's daily board, but now he has his own weekly board to cover some simple fun learning activities. Froggy's tot school board is our old art board for when we did large art projects, that's why it's so colorful. I decided to just use it instead of buying a new one, it's going to be covered most of the time anyway so what it looks like isn't a big deal. Although, the more I look at it, I'm more than likely going to work on painting it at some point.   For the shape section, each week we will focus on one of the eight shapes . Froggy will be able ...

I honestly believe that with tot school, purchasing a ton of materials is not necessary. However, there are some things I have picked up from thrift stores and other things I would just much rather save myself the time and purchase versus making homemade. In this post, I am going to share with you the materials I find worth purchasing. I've decided to make a bonus post about DIY tot school materials as well, so be looking for that in the near future. My final post in this series will be when I'm starting official tot school with Froggy. Right now, I just leave out activities for him to freely choose from. We have calendar time, story time, art time, and music time together. A peg board set is a great tool for developing fine motor skills. You can also use it to teach colors, patterns, counting, or just use it for imaginative play (trust me, your kid will probably go for this one most of the time). I purchased mine from the Goodwill for $1.91, I don't think it...

School time has been getting progressively better, especially this week. Attitudes are better all around (me included!) and things are starting to run smoothly. Today I decided to document our day with a few pictures. Mainly for proof that today actually worked. Heart and teddy bear shaped buckwheat pancakes with vanilla soy milk pudding made from scratch. My breakfast: vanilla soy milk pudding with carrot cake buckwheat pancakes. Impromptu bath time (the pudding was messy!). We read the book and at the end I gave them their own blue ice "boats" in the bath water. Letter Ee tic tac toe. I made it in word with clip art. Fancy, I know. Letter x xylophone game from Confessions of a Homeschooler . We used playing cards instead of a die. He had to draw one card at a time, count the shapes, then find the corresponding xylophone bar. Color by number sight word from 1+1+1=1 . Monkey hardly ever uses markers, I was impressed that he actually colored th...

Since tot school for Froggy is coming sooner than I'll know it, I decided it might be helpful to post about how I did things with Monkey and some of the new things I will be doing with Froggy. This first post will be showing the more frugal and time efficient methods of beginning tot school, the second post will be products I think are worth the money, and the third post will be when I actually have Froggy's materials ready to show you all.  To start with, a learning poster (or even a notebook version) is a great tool to use each day to review what you have done together and what you are currently focusing on. I used one of these before I made our calendar board and daily learning boards: http://www.letteroftheweek.com/preparatory_learning_poster.html Baby Gator University has a really neat  learning poster that I'm thinking about emulating for Froggy's tot time. My favorite part are the clothes pins, so much better than rolled up painter's tape that I used...

I'm slowly but steadily getting out classroom and school areas around the house the way I want them to look (as in not a huge heaping mess). Here are a few changes I have recently made that make our lives easier. Finally took off the misplaced Ll, it will be moved to the extension to this board below. Our September calendar board. We now use a weather graph instead of month with stickers. We have new sticks for our days of the week. I also included a books of the bible song. This pouch holds fact cards for every day of September. We are using weather calendar cards since we'll be studying weather. Our daily board for this week. Our songs are "Jesus loves the little children" and "Every move I make". There's a poem about doing good deeds and the ten commandments. Our letter X cards are in the baseball card holders. In the pocket chart we have our sight word and sight word reader and our letter X memory verse . Our new ...