Ramblings...

A vast number of parents with preschoolers are familiar with starfall.com; it’s a wonderful free site that helps teach the all-important skill of reading. General Disarray loved using the site, and will still check it out every now and then even though he has mastered reading; it’s just that much fun. Professor Chaos has started to enjoy using it more lately. At first he wasn’t really sure about it, mostly from a navigation/mouse clicking standpoint. Now that he has all of that worked out he is always begging to log-on.

This morning while he was using it he clicked on the More.Starfall.com section. It only allows a limited selection of items if you don’t have a membership, but he greatly enjoyed what he was able to do, so I looked into the cost. It is 30$ a year, not a bad price I figured when you factor in all it allows you to do. More.Starfall.com features interactive number lessons, similar to the alphabet section on the free portion of their site, as well as fun math songs. Once a child has mastered their numbers they can then click on the addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division buttons and do lessons in those areas.

Aside from the math activities this portion of the site also features more reading/phonics activities, songs and rhyming, as well as a talking library! Which I think may be my favorite part of the site. The More.Starfall.com portion of starfall.com also works hand in hand with the Starfall Kindergarten Curriculum too. I had considered buying that curriculum this year but decided to make a custom curriculum for Professor Chaos like I did with General Disarray. It looks like a great program though, if you are looking for an interactive kindergarten curriculum check it out!

Starfall.com is not compensating me for sharing their product information; I just like to plug the things we use to help other families find useful materials and programs to use with their kiddos!

We are into our third week of break, and it has been extremely refreshing. Of course what I am learning about my “weird” homeschoolers, is that no matter if we are breaking or not you can’t stop their desire for knowledge. This afternoon while I was putting away laundry General Disarray was downstairs going through our school closet. By the time I had returned downstairs he was happily working on a Kumon Subtraction workbook. He worked up until it was time to get ready for karate, and then started back once he finished his dinner. We didn’t pull him away from it until bedtime at which point he says “don’t move my book because I’m going to work on it in the morning.”. It amazes me how you can create an educational rich environment and children will gravitate to whatever strikes their fancy.


It does a mother’s heart good.

We made this fun little “pizza” the other day using a paper plate, some construction paper, and shapes I got from Enchanted Learning *I used pages from their shape book and shrunk them down before printing* . I’m pretty sure I got the idea from www.kidssoup.com, although I can’t find the exact link that mentioned it now.



Ideally the paper plate would have been colored brown for the crust, but the only plates we had were the ones with the plastic type coating on them *and I wasn‘t about to go out and deal the typhoon freak out crowd*. So we couldn’t color them brown and red *which is why I cut a red circle out of construction paper*. The red circle is our “sauce” and our “crust” is just special.

Anyways, I gave Child#2 the coloring pages and he looked at them and then decided he didn’t want to do anything *although he had just said he wanted to color*. So I figured if I did it with him, then maybe that would change his opinion. Thankfully it did. As soon as I picked up a crayon and said I would like to join in with him, he got really excited and off we went coloring pages and humming together.

While I don’t have photos of us coloring together, there is that moment you can’t capture on film, that twinkle in their eye that comes from that special one-on-one they can’t get anywhere else. While homeschooling isn’t always a bed of roses…in fact some days it’s more like a bed of rose thorns. But those special moments, with made up crayon inspired songs, make the thorns worth it for us.

After coloring, I cut out the shapes and handed Child#2 a glue stick, and he spent some time pasting his “toppings” onto his pizza. Afterwards we went over the shapes, I was shocked *and very pleased* that he pretty much already knew most of them.

He was able to show The Spouse when he got home from work and got multiple high fives as he named off the shapes. I think that may have been his favorite part of our little activity. I know his smiles and giggles sure made it seem that way.

Ah…the little moments. I should print this out and hang it up, so I can remember why we do this when he is gluing things to our walls and demanding candy.

As part of my tweaking last week I redid our learning poster. I got the idea for a learning poster from Brightly Beaming Resources, but haven’t stuck to it very well. Hopefully with these changes I can actually stick to it. The poster was originally designed to go with Brightly Beaming’s Prep Curriculum, but I wasn’t really feeling it. I did like having a letter to focus on weekly, as well as the shape/color/number learning. I just needed to do it in a way that works for us.

So here is the original poster:




And here is the revised one:



I’ve gotten rid of the weekly theme, vocabulary word, and nursery rhyme. Instead of those we have our weekly poem, and our monthly virtue. Along with the virtue there is a weekly quote, the quote won’t always tie into the virtue, instead it would act more as food for thought. This learning poster will be for both boys to use as well *unlike the previous learning poster*.

I’ve dropped the letter of the week and have made a phonics section. It will feature a weekly letter for Child #2, but we will be focusing on the letter sound as well. I found these awesome phonics cards at our base bookstore. On the front they have the letter *upper and lower case* along with a picture of items that have that letter sound, then on the back there is a list of words with that sound as well.

For Child #1 I’m using the combination cards, which also feature words on the back that he has to read to me each day. To further help Child #2 learn the letter sounds and recognize words I’ve also added the words to a small dry erase board. He reads them with us every morning to help him hear the weekly sound in the words, and of course get a jump on the reading process.

I use to do this with Child #1 as well, we kept the small board on our front door, and before we left the house we would read the words. The words would either have the same letter sound or they would belong together some how *like family members, or rooms in a house, etc.*.

Also on the board is a math section. I’m going to alternate every week between numbers, colors, and shapes for Child #2. For Child #1 I made sheets with addition and subtraction facts on them, and he has to read a new sheet everyday.

So far the poster is working out great. The boys enjoy doing each piece, and Child #1 really loves reading the words with his brother. He gets to help his little brother learn while showing off what he is capable of doing, and while they are busy at work with their learning poster I can actually get breakfast cooked. It’s great!