School Day Fun

The kids have really been enjoying the extra white board I put up under the counter for them to use. It's been the source of much fun the last few weeks.

The kids have enjoyed playing with all the magnets that we have so that inspired me to start making magnets out of anything I could thinking of! :) So now we've got pom pom magnets, colored tiles, big buttons...

And Joy's favorite, the googly eyes!

It's been a fun new way to practice all those basic skills like colors, counting and patterns.

I think this is one of my favorite 'sweet moments' caught on camera...

Samuel is sitting in Faith's lap while she draws and writes her 'name letter F's' (her favorite thing to write) on the board.  :)

Faithy is loving her swing (with pink play-doh on her pants!)  :)

Faith helped me to make her name letters out of Bendaroos...

And she did a great job making several others all by herself!  :)

Our 'Earth Day' rocks...

We got our strawberry plants that we brought home from our field trip planted.

We also planted 'Mars Gardens' during our Mars study. And they are growing like crazy now!

I love her sweet angel face in this one...    :)

A Cool Trick

The lower case letters 'b' and 'd' I've found to be often mixed up by my little ones when they are reading. I've known of the trick for years making 'b's and 'd's with your hands but this week I learned and even more fun way to remember which is which without having to stop in the middle of reading and look at your hands...

 A mom friend taught it to me and apparently it's from an educational kids show, but I'm not sure which one, she couldn't remember. The words go, "Liiiiiiiiine, circle is the letter 'b'! Ciiiiiiirrrcle, line is the letter 'd'!" She didn't know what the tune was suppose to be but she started singing it to the 'Green Acres' tune and it worked! So we decided that must be it! :) The kids love ANYTHING put to a song, so they picked this up right away! We practiced drawing circles and lines in the right order, sticking them together to make b's and d's and laughed while we sang it over and over that day. Now they sing it all the time and it makes me smile knowing they'll probably never again forget which one is a 'b' and which one is a 'd'.  :)

Labels! and Labels! and ABC'S!

You've probably noticed the words on everything in the background of some of the pictures this week. That's because we had fun one day going label nutty in the house! The kids thought it was great fun.

 We all tried sounding out the words and I helped with the tricky ones. When someone figured out what the word was, they got to go put it on whatever the word said.

"WindOOOOOOw!"

 Faith was silly and only wanted to sit in the labeled chair! She thought it was pretty cool that she could 'read' the words and kept telling us what everything said. It ended up being another tricky game to get the kids comfortable with letters, words and reading in a really fun way! Even Faith has been chanting "W-A-L-L, wall! W-A-L-L wall!" and many other words around the house with the other kids.

We had more fun with our alphabet cards this week too.  I wrote the alphabet on some wooden clothespins and let Joy and Joshua start by alphabetizing them on the ribbon we hung. 

They did a great job and finished so much faster than when we first started alphabetizing!

Next it was Faith's turn to put the letters up on their matching pin. Pinching the clothes pins was a bit of a challenge for her, but a good fine motor workout for tiny fingers! We said the letter sounds as we put them up too. Here she is with her 'F'...she's been excited about finding 'F's since we've talked about her name letters so much this week. 

 The big kids helped with a few...

The next time we played we did it "SPEEDY" and the big kids alphabetized and hung them all up as fast as they could! More sneaky learning fun.  :)

Name Games with Faith

Today we took some time to play with names. Faith played match with her name on index cards and we practiced the correct order of the letters. 

Then we played with our name on the lids. She matched her letter lids up with the circles and letters I had drawn. Then I mixed them up and asked her if it looked right? She knew right away it wasn't right and told me, "I am an 'F'!" 

I told her, "Yes! You're name does start with an 'F'!" Then I put the 'F' in the right place and we continued to unscramble them, call them by name and sound them out until we got them in the right order. 

We sang our family name song. One that I started back when it was just 'MOM', 'DAD' and 'JOY'. With each sibling we've added their names and we sing it often. They have all learned how to spell 'MOM', 'DAD' and their own name as well as the names of their siblings because of it. Our song goes like this...

"M-O-M spells MOM, D-A-D spells DAD,

 J-O-Y spells JOY and (say it fast...) J-O-S-H-U-A spells JOSHUA! 

F-A-I-T-H, FAITH, S-A-M-U-E-L, SAMUEL. 

We are the Adams Family, (shout...) A-D-A-M-S!" 

So simple, but it's been such a great way for Joy and Joshua and now Faith to learn how to spell their first and last names. 

So after singing through our family name song a few times, we played a fun little game I learned from www.teachmama.blogspot.com called Letter Connect. To play Letter Connect, you simply make connections between the letters in two names at a time, drawing lines to connect the matching letters. When there isn't a match, you make a big 'x' alongside the names. But we found matches in all of our names.

We started with the names of our immediate family. So she drew a line from the 'A' in 'FAITH' to the 'A' in 'JOSHUA' and said, "The A's are the same! And the H's too!" I said, "You're right! Hmmmm. Can you tell me whose name I wrote next and connect the letters?" I wrote 'JOY'.

She said I wrote 'JOY'. Then she drew a line from the 'O' in 'JOSHUA' to the 'O' in 'JOY' and said, "The 'O' is the same!" Then she continued to connect the 'J's in both and was excited that there was another match. I added 'DADDY' to the list next, followed by 'MOMMY', and 'SAMUEL' and Fatih connected letters and we talked about the sounds as she went. When we finished with our immediate family, she decided he wanted to do grandparents and aunts and uncles and friends. Our lists went on and on, we erased our board and wrote new names over and over again, and we got to see how everyones names were connected by letters.

It is so exciting for me, getting to be there when each of the kids learns something new or makes a new connection and figures something out. I LOVE it! It's one of the most rewarding parts of my day!  :)