Just for fun (and because I've received many requests!), I'm going to start posting a little peek into our homeschooling here every few weeks. I hope that it is an inspiration to those of you who are homeschooling young ones or looking for educational things you can do with your little ones which are inexpensive and simple.
If you haven't done so, you can read more about our homeschooling curriculum and philosophies here.
Recently, we studied the letter "L" and our theme of the My Father's World unit was leaves. What fun we had!
The girls collected leaves and we used them for quite a few different things: we sorted from smallest to largest, we talked about big and little, and used them to practice counting.
We talked about patterns and used these lollipops to make a variety of patterns.
This is one of Kathrynne's favorite games. It's just the uppercase and lowercase alphabet printed on cards and we use it to play Alphabet Memory.
While Kathrynne and I work at the table, I have a basket of different fun things for Kaitlynn to play with that I slowly dole out one by one to keep her occupied. Here she's "reading" Caps for Sale–one of our read-alouds from the leaf unit.
She loves the Paint with Water Books–and so do I! I just give her a paint brush and a cup of water and let her go at it. Sometimes water ends up in many more places than the book, but it's much less mess than actual paint!
Next up: bubbles! Again, these make a little bit of a mess, but it's very easy to clean up and she has a blast playing with them. I picked these up at the Dollar Store and they gave the girls hours of fun!
We took the leaves that the girls had picked and made leaf rubbings.
Who says you have to wait to teach Home Ec. until high school? The girls have a real interest in cooking and baking so I've been making a point to spend time teaching them basic cooking skills. It takes extra time and effort now, but I'm hopeful it will pay off in the long-run with my girls being able to do much of the cooking and baking for our family in the not-too-distant future.