A little bit of everything update

We are finally getting back to normal around here again.  My little guy has been sick for over a week, but he's finally feeling better after a visit to the Dr.  He has/had (hopefully it's going away :-) an ear infection.  So, anyway, here's a little update.  It's got a little bit of tot school, park fun, hair-do's, and school stuff all wrapped into one happy post!

First we have our window fun for tot school.  It's time to let all that nice spring sunshine in, so we've decorated the windows a little. 

Aric loves these gel window clings.  He will play with them for quite a while, pulling them off and on.

Then for our preschool time we made these duck suncatcher's.  I love how simple these are to make, and they are so fun to look at.  You cut up some tissue paper, and sandwich it between to sheets of contact paper.  You can do almost any shape or theme you want.  I just found a duck outline I liked and traced it onto the contact paper.

And for the final window fun picture we have Mr. Aric having fun at the park.  Yes, it totally grosses me out that he's licking that window, but he was sure cute.  Could this be why he was sick? Hmmmm...

Hair-do's:  

For a whole week my cute girl let me do her hair up.  She doesn't usually like to have her hair done, but she said she wanted to start a blog about hair do's.  So, I said that she had to let me do her hair for a whole week before I'd think about starting a hair-do blog.  She totally went for that, and didn't gripe when I said "lets do your hair!"

Here is one of the days, I made this one up.  It turned out very cute, sorry it's still sideways.  But, it's 3 regular braids on each side tied together. 

I think this one was by far the cutest.  It was actually one from her American Girl hair book.  Basically it's separated into 5 sections and twisted partway down.  It held better than I thought it would and was adorable.

A close up of the twisty one.

 It was fun doing her hair each day.  I don't think we'll be starting another blog though, I just don't have the talent to keep up with more blogging.  I think we might do this more often though and post some of the cute hair-do's we do right here.

Calendar time:

For a long time I wasn't sure about calendar time.  Well, I should say, I wasn't sure about extended calendar time.  We've done the number on the calendar each day, but we didn't go much beyond that only because I didn't really know how to go about doing that.  I have always really wanted to have a more formal start to our day though, something to get us going and talk about things we're working on.

So, we've started doing more:  Here is our usual calendar we've had for a few months now. 

And here is the part we've added:  A foam poster board with weather, temperature, skip counting (which you actually can't see in this picture because it's behind the board), color, days, months, etc.  You get the idea.  Most of these things I printed up here at 1+1+1=1.com, and got some very useful information about doing a daily calendar from Carisa who hosts that website.

 It has been a good addition to our day.  Eventually I would like to add even more.  I'd also like to note that we start with a song, a prayer, a scripture, and an article of faith. 

Homeschooling one day at a time--as long as it takes!

St. Patrick's day

This was how my 3 munchkins were dressed on St. Patty's day.  Yes, I know, that was like over a week ago.  It's still March, right?  I had hopes of posting on the 17th, but who knows what happened.  Life happened.  Anyway, the two older kids were lucky enough to find out that they didn't have any cavities, and got lots of goodies from the dentist that day. We also got to have lunch with Daddy, that's always lucky :-)

Did you know that green is Aaron's favorite color?  He was thrilled to find his green clothes, and he proceeded to tell everybody that he met that day that they would be pinched if they weren't wearing green.

Miss April wore her lucky Justice shirt.  It must be lucky because she got it from her favorite girly store, right?

Oh, and I'm pretty sure we aren't irish in anyway, we just have fun with the day.

Homeschooling one day at a time--as long as it takes!

Spring...

I woke up this morning feeling a little overwhelmed, stressed, feeling like we didn't get much accomplished, and just a little grumpy.  Thankfully, I didn't let my grumpiness get the best of me and we got through calendar time and a little school.  Then we decided it was much to nice out to be inside so we called some friends and went to the park for the afternoon.  It was nice.  It was nice to feel the warmth of the sunshine, and let the wind blow some of those overwhelming feelings away.

Seeing these helps my grumpies go away too:

They are so cheery!

So many signs of spring are popping up everywhere.  I just had to share these nice pictures.

So, along with Spring we have some VERY rainy days, and that means we have to come up with some fun rainy day activities.  This was last weekend when I decided to let the kids play with sand inside.  It wasn't too much of a disaster, but if you ever try to convince yourself that it's no problem to clean up a little sand, don't listen.  Ha ha.  It really wasn't that bad.  We just brought the shop vac in, and the kids played with it off and on for most of Saturday.  It was such a nice and peaceful day.  They each had their own box with their own sand, and each was a different color.  The boys had blue and green, and April had pink.  Oh, and I found the colored sand at Wal-mart.

They had fun rolling their cars around in the sand.  This is the outside of the sand box :-)

It was a mess worth cleaning to me.  I enjoyed watching them play all the while it was pouring rain outside.  It was fun to see the colorful sand too.

On a much cleaner note, this is what we did get accomplished for school this week.  April is doing the Spring surprises download and go from This old school house.  It has been great, she loves it!  I love how it's a whole unit study with everything all in one download.  I don't have to do a whole lot of searching and putting things together, so nice!  It has a lot of interesting fun activities that she works on each day, from copywork, to writing, to lapbooking, to coloring, to crafts, and much more. 




Homeschooling one day at a time--as long as it takes!

stART--10 little rubber ducks

This is a new addition to our library of books at home, Eric Carle's, 10 little rubber ducks.  For our stART activity Miss April read this book out loud to everybody.  She did very well, she's going to be a great storyteller someday!  She added cute little voices, and emphasis where needed.  Very fun!!  And, she even kept the attention of Aric through the whole book.

This book is about a box of ducks that falls off a freight ship and 10 little ducks drift all over the ocean.  The ducks meet different animals, and finally at the end one little duck ends up at a very special place.  And, if you get the hard back version like we have, there is a little invisible button under the duck that when you push it squeaks.  It is based on a true story of a real happening when some freight of bath toys fell of a ship some years ago (I didn't know that when I bought it).  Very cute book.

This is a pretty simple art project.  First we painted a blue background, this was done previously for a different project that never happened, so I was very glad to to find a use for it.  Then I gave each child a sheet of 10 ducks.  Aaron tried cutting them out, but ended up handing the sheet of ducks to me, they were are little small.

Aaron's picture:

I also let them break out the new glitter glues that we bought from Lakeshore learning.  They really wanted them, and it added a little sparkle.

April's picture:

 She said her's was the stormy sea.

Aric's picture:

I love the simpleness of his.  He only had 5 ducks (mostly because that was all that was left, and I knew he wouldn't care).  He loved squeezing the glue and putting the ducks on the glue.  You'll also notice that he put some squares of tissue paper on too, those were from a different project, but some pieces ended up on the floor nearby.

For other great art and books go check out A Mommy's Adventure's.

Homeschooling one day at a time-as long as it takes.

My HAM

Yesterday for church this cute boy was so excited to wear his new white shirt and tie.  He looked SO handsome!  I just love this kid, and he just melts my heart sometimes.  He can also make me wanna pull my hair out too!

That sweet smile always wins me over though.


He can certainly make us all laugh.

The tie was a little bit small, we'll have to save it for his little brother.

He was trying for his best pose.

It was the perfect time for a photo shoot, so glad I have some cute pictures of this little man.

His smile is getting there!

He couldn't wait to go to church and show all his teachers how handsome he looked.

Someday this handsome young man is going to be all grown up.
But for now he's mine.
Homeschooling one day at a time--as long as it takes!

Fluffy marshmallow bunnies craft

We made a cute bunny marshmallow craft today.   It was actually 2 activities in one, and these cute little bunny marshmallows were so soft and fluffy almost just like a real bunny.  Of course a few were eaten along the way...

First you need a bag of Jet-puffed bunny mallows.  I picked these up at Target about two weeks ago, not sure what I was going to do with them...maybe sorting I thought? 


Ah yes!  Sorting, this was perfect because there were four colors of bunnies.  Aaron sure loved this activity.  Several bunnies disappeared though, hmmm....

Then after the bunnies were all sorted I drew a picture of a tulip on a white piece of construction paper so that he could glue the bunnies on.  We are getting excited about the tulip festival that we have right here in our own town in just a few weeks.  The tulip fields are so beautiful to look at.  He decided to make his a colorful outlined tulip.

Then he decided that he wanted some of the bunnies to stand up on the leaves.

Here's a close up of the standing bunnies.  He did that on the other leaf too.

Of course Miss April could not resist such a fluffy fun activity so she asked to make her own.  Here she made the leaves with green bunnies.

And, then she made the top a nice yellow color.

Here is her completed bunny tulip.


We are looking forward to Spring here!  This was a nice little Spring fling :-)
Homeschooling one day at a time--as long as it takes!

Fun with mosaics

Maybe I had a little too much fun making these mosaics! Ha, ha!

  Well, we had a fun week visiting family last week while Daddy went to Canada for a business trip and here are the highlights of what we did:

First we arrived at Aunt Sarah's house.  Then, we went to build a bear for the very first time.  Aunt Sarah really wanted to take the kids there and they were very happy to oblige.  Here is April with her bear, she picked out a cute little outfit and some shoes to go with her bear.  Aaron got a bear too, but I never got any pictures of him holding his bear.  I was also very disappointed that I forgot to take the camera with us to the store.

Day 2 with Aunt Sarah:  We went to Chuck 'e cheese.  I think we spent 2 1/2 hours there, that's a record!  Of course it helped that the place was almost empty because we went during lunch time, AND there was Aunt Sarah who helped April earn a ton a tickets and had 100 more tokens to spend.  We usually leave when the kids run out of tokens.  They had a blast.  We also had Great Grandma with us and she sure loved watching the kids play.


Then, we headed over to Grandma and Grandpa's house and did things like Gardening:

And horn blowing:

Finally, after Daddy came home from Canada, he came down and joined us and we visited for the rest of the weekend through Sunday.  Here is Daddy and Aaron taking a nice Sunday afternoon nap.




Homeschooling one day at a time--as long as it takes!