Homeschooling durning October

The month of October was so busy that I forgot to take as many pictures of Lily's homeschooling projects. We mainly focused on leaves and Halloween. I absolutely forgot to take any pictures of Fall and leaves, but we made leave collages and went on nature walks to talk about different leaves. We talked about seasons and did several other things. We read lots of books about pumpkins and Halloween this month! During reading, we did a poem theme. Each week she got a new poem to memorize. She did great with this and pointing to each word as she reads.

I'm a Jack O Lantern is a really cute song that Lily has loved singing!

Jack O Happy is one of my favorite poems and Lily also learned hand motions to go with this one. Very cute!

During science, Lily and I made our own playdough. She is a great help in the kitchen. We added lots of pumpkin spice so it smelled good enough to eat.

We have also been talking about our five senses so Daddy was showing Lily how to make impressions of their face in the playdough. lol.

Lily also got to use Halloween cookie cutters to play with her playdough!

To learn more about our five senses, we used our pumpkin. Lily got to feel, smell, see, hear and touch the inside of the pumpkin.

Then we did a chart about our five senses. I am glad I got this picture when we were almost done b/c Val wrote all over it while I was cooking the pumpkin seeds. Oops!

I left off a bunch of other stuff, but this gives you an idea of some of the fun stuff that we did this month!

Halloween Costumes

For Halloween 2009, the girls decided to have different costumes from each other. However, their costumes kind of go together. Lily is a 1950's little girl complete with saddle shoes and a poodle skirt. Lily looks so grown up and pretty in her costume!

So Lily had a poodle skirt and Valerie was a pink poodle. Valerie loved being all cozy and barking like a doggy in this costume!

Here the girls are together. They so love each other!

Valerie also has a cute little lady bug costume. Doesn't she just look adorable!

What a lil bug she is!

Happy Halloween 2009!

Grandparent's Day

Lily and Valerie absolutely love their Grandparents so Lily was super excited when I told her that we were going to do a week of Grandparent's Day stuff. We read lots of good books about Grandpa's and Grandma's. We also made special gifts for each set of Grandparents.

This first one was for Grandma and Grandpa Mundhausen. Lily loved all of the cutting, coloring, and gluing that was involved. I love how colorful she made her Grandm and I think she got carried away with Grandpa's dark hair. lol. The arms say, Grandparent's are Grand by Lily. Then the arms open up to reveal a special letter that Lily wrote with assistance for them.

Lily wrote, Grandma and Grandpa I love you. They came down for a visit and loved getting a special card!

Lily really had fun with a special poem for Grandma and Grandpa Peters. She got to have her hand traced..which she has now gotten very good at doing her own. Then she needed some help with the cutting. We worked on patterning by doing orange and yellow hands. Lily is very good at patterns.

I think it turned out very nicely and Lily gets to give it to her Grandparents this weekend. She is very excited!

Community Helpers

The past few weeks have been so busy with vacation and joining new groups. Lily is now involved in ballet...that fulfills some of her p.e. time for homeschooling and we are now a part of a MOPS group. During MOPS, I get to go eat, talk, playgames with friends and the girls both do learning activities in their classrooms. Super fun! We also got involved in a co-op. So I attached a picture of Lily on her first day! She is doing an hour of p.e., an hour of drama, an hour of art, and one other thing...can't think of it right now. It has been a lot of fun for her. There are 7 children in her class and one of them is also named Lily. She has been learning alot about leaves and Fall and having fun! We spent a week talking about community helpers. Lily has learned so much about teachers, doctors, nurses, policemen, firefighters, astronauts, etc. Lily gets really excited now when she sees a policecar or firefighters. One of her favorite activities had to do with firefighters!

Lily first thought of a sentence and I wrote it. Then she copied my writing onto her paper. She then wrote her whole name by herself.

Lily and I then used construction paper to practice cutting and gluing. She made a great firetruck. I love the hose she made...I had forgotten all about that. lol.

Lily also got to play dress up at church and act out what firefighters do! Dress up is fun!

Lily also made a policeman using a toilet paper roll! We printed a colored police officer out and Lily had to glue the pieces on where they should go. Isn't it cute!

Learning is fun!

Mini vacation

Yay for mini vacations. We went on a big vacation in the spring, but another vacation was in order. We decided to go to Kansas City. We have wanted to go to the T-Rex cafe for awhile now and it did not disapoint. I probably could have posted twice as many pictures, but here are a few.

The girls had a blast and so did we. We loved the dinosaurs that moved although Lily really did have a hard time understanding that they weren't alive. :)

Then we went to our hotel and swam in the pool and just had fun as a family. My hubby picked a hotel right across the street from the Red Sox game that we were going to. That made it possible for us to just walk to the game.

The game went from 7:10-9:30. Since that is way past the girls bedtime, we were shocked that they were great for the whole game. I had been prepared to walk them back to the hotel, but they loved the game. Lily asked lots of questions during it and she loved walking around the place with me. I also packed lots of snacks...including cotton candy so we were all very happy!

In the morning, we headed to the zoo. This really was Valerie's second time, but the first time that she was really able to get into it and excited!

She wasn't so sure about feeding the goats at first, but then she loved it. I thought it was funny that she opened her own mouth to feed them. :)

She loved all of the animals and her big sister was trying to teach her all about them.

The zoo also had started decorating for Fall so that was fun. Lily loved the Charlie brown cut outs!

Mini vacations are so important. They just give you something to look forward to and just enough excitement to hold you until the next big vacation.

Fall pictures!

We always love going to Teresa at www.artfromtheheartphotography.com to get pictures done of the girls. This Fall we got some really pretty ones of the girls. They are modeling dresses from Jens Bowtique!

We also are getting ready to go on a little Kansas City trip. We are going to eat at the Dinosaur Cafe and go to a Red Sox game. Then we will be spending the night at a hotel and getting to swim in the indoor pool. We are very excited! So we got new Red Sox shirts and decided to have Teresa take some pics of us in that!

Jason and I hardly ever get pictures of just us together so we took the opportunity to take a few of us together. I love my hubby! This October we will have been together for 7 years!

Apple theme weeks!!!

To start kindergarten off in a fun way, we decided to do an apple theme. There were so many fun things to learn and do that we made it a two week project. We started off by going to the library and getting a bunch of books about apples and John Appleseed. Lily loved learning all sorts of apple facts and was fast to tell everyone what she was learning.

We had two fun cooking projects during our unit. One was to make homemade applesauce. We peeled and cut the apple and put it in the crockpot. Lily then added sugar and water and cinnamon. It was so yummy for Val and me, but Lily actually didn't like it.

We also made applesmiles with Lily's friend Boston. They used sliced apples and spread peanut butter on it and then used marshmallows as the teeth. It was fun to make and yummy to eat!

Somehow I messed up my pictures as I put them on here...not sure what I did. During math time, we had two fun projects. Lily first colored and cut out apples. Then we used them to count as we put them in the basket and we did some simple addition with the apples. Lily loved this so we did it several times.

We also did an apple graph. Lily asked several of her friends what their favorite type of apple is. The choices were golden delicious, granny smith, or red delicious. We colored in their choices and then looked at the results.

Golden delicious won!!! However, it was pretty close. Red delicious and granny smith tied. Valerie also got to the paper and tried to do a little coloring at the top.

During art time, we had a great time painting with apples. We cut them in half and used it to decorate the apple design.

We thought it was really neat that the seads of an apple form a star!

Lily also did some drawing on her chalk board. Here is a picture of a mommy cat with her kittens. :)

Lily also did some science time with her daddy. They went bug hunting and found a slug and some beetle. They then gave them food and water!

We did some great writing. Here Lily wrote a sentence about her favorite apple. It says, "I like yellow apples."

For writing and science, we talked about seasons and how it affects the apple tree. We painted Lily's arm four times to make different trees. Then she finger painted the leaves and apples on. She also used tissue paper for her spring tree to show the flowers. This was a really fun project.

I realized now that I left off taking a picture of Lily doing her apple poem. It was so much fun. Lily is a little sad that we are done with the apple unit so I may need to find a few more things to do with apples over the next few weeks.

Lily is also super excited about Fall! Can't wait to do some lesson plans on that!