Brown Bear, Brown Bear~~Day 1

Well today was our first "official" day of school.  Kind of weird starting in the middle of the year, I know, but my goal is to try out the "Before Five In A Row" method with Hayden and see how we both do with it.  I want to get a good comfortable learning style with him.  Something that he has fun with, but something that he learns well with.  So for now we are trying Before Five In A Row.  I have not purchased the manual yet, because I keep thinking maybe I can just do this with all the good resources for BFIAR on the internet and not purchase the book, but then, I come across info that says "on page so and so of the book" and I start wishing that I had the manual...so we will see.


So since we have read the book over and over (and since I couldn't locate it in our house ANYWHERE!!), I let Hayden listen to Brown Bear, Brown Bear being read on youtube.  Many, many books are available to listen to (and look at the pages of the book) on you tube.  So that was cool and different for him.  He asked to listen to it twice. : ) 


I had purchased some small wooden blocks at Staples for $1.00 a couple of weeks ago and thought they would work great for learning colors and sorting.  So that's exactly what we did.  He sorted all the colors, then we counted each set of colors.  After a few, he got a little bored with it (he is only 3 after all!), so we changed it up a bit to keep him interested.

Here is a little video of him counting as threw the blocks in the glass dish...hey, it kept his interest a little while longer!!  

Then we moved on to another matching type activity.  I had made a folder game with the silhouetted animals of Brown Bear, Brown Bear.  I also had the animals in color for him to match up with their silhouette/shadow.  I had shown him this when I first made it, and it took him a few minutes then to figure it out.  This time, he easily matched the pieces up.

Next, we did another matching activity with the animals.  This time it was Heads and Tails.  The animals were "split" in half and he had to match them all up.  Again, this was very easy for him to do.  Might have to find something a little more challenging!  But that is a good thing!!

Then we moved on to the fun stuff!!  M & M's!!

We used a pack of M & M's for sorting.  Of course every few minutes he would look at me and ask "I eat one now?"  I had printed off a page that had all the Brown Bear, Brown Bear animals and laminated it (knowing that we would be using M & M's, I thought that might be best if I wanted to use it again!).  We talked about the color of the animals and the color of the candy and he matched the colors to the animals.  He did very well with this!  And of course as a treat when he finished he got to eat them M & M's!!

        

          

           

I believe Hayden really enjoyed our first day.  We spend about an hour doing our activities.  It was laid back and fun and that is what I want, but he learned!  We will continue with some more Brown Bear, Brown Bear activities the rest of this week.  My goal is to spend 2-3 days on each book.  By the way, Brown Bear, Brown Bear is not actually on the list of Before Five In A Row books, but I used the same concept and will be doing a lapbook to go along with our week of learning for Hayden to look back on. Most of my resources for Hayden's school are coming from a wonderful site called Homeschool Share.  If I use other resources, I will try to remember to link to them so that you can use them also!!

Happy Learning!!

Sometimes the best learning is...

HANDS ON!

Learning His Name

As I have said, Hayden is starting to recognize some letters and so we decided to start working on spelling his name. Here is a cute little video of him spelling his name out.

Letter of the Week ~~ P

This week we worked on the the Letter P.  Again, it was the letter Hayden chose.  So I picked out a few of his books that had the letter P in them.

We started with Barney Goes to the Pet Shop.  As we read, we read about lots of "P"ets!!  We talked a little about each one and where they lived and what they ate.  Then after we finished the book, we went back and listed all the Pets that Barney, Baby Bop, and B.J. saw at the Pet Shop.  We listed (I wrote...with a little help from Hayden..lol!) them all down.  Then we also talked about Barney being "P"urple.

Then we read Blue's Perfect Present. As I was reading this to Hayden I was trying to think about what activity we could do with afterward (love my plan on the run mentality??)  I noticed that there were many, many words that began with "p" in the book, so I decided to have Hayden go back and help me find them, since he was already recognizing the letter "p" pretty well.  So here is our list of "p" words:

On Thursday, we had decided to read the classic story The Three Little Pigs.  I actually didn't have the book, but found a cool online version here.  This way were able to take our pig puppets (here is the download for the pig puppet) and act the story out, which Hayden LOVED doing!!  I would suggest making a wolf puppet too (here is a link to one) because Hayden loved to act out huffing and puffing of the wolf!!  This was a fun activity and Hayden has been able to recite a lot of the story back to me...again and again and again!!  Seriously though since we read it last week, several times we have run across the story somewhere else and he has recognized it, so I was thrilled at his recall memory (is that even a term??  haha)

Lettter of the Week ~~ X

(image credits) 

Please note...I am playing catch up a little on my posts (already??  I just got started on my blog!!  Yikes!!).  but seriously, I am trying to only work on one letter a week with Hayden (while reviewing the ones we learn as we go also), so this was actually last weeks letter, because this weeks letter is P.  I have asked him what letter he wants to learn about these past few weeks and he has told me which one to work on.  I thought this would be a fun way to get him started...before we get real serious! : )


So he chose the letter X last week.  That's kind of a hard one, but he is able to recognize it on paper and his magnets on the fridge now.  That night before we started I got out his xylophone because I knew how much he loves music but that is a really hard word to explain to a 3 year old, when it doesn't sound ANYTHING like the X sounds!!  One of his favorite songs to sing at night is Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, and when I was searching information on the internet for teaching the letter X, I came across crafts/activities on the First School website that worked great!  They also had a link to DSO Kids that allowed you to listen to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on a xylophone...how cool is that for Hayden!!  You can listen to it here also!!


So here is Hayden playing his xylophone to "You Are My Sunshine", until he decided he didn't want to be videoed anymore and just kind of stopped...lol!

~To The Moon And Back~

Fun with Colors and Shapes

 I am beginning to work on colors and shapes with Hayden.  I know that I could have gone to the Dollar Tree and bought some flash cards, but I just thought this would be a little more fun! : )  I made the flash cards myself and made them large (like 1/2 sheet size).  I love the cool "school paper" font that I found on my computer!  I cut the page in half and Frank is laminating them for me so that Hayden and I can use them over and over.  I am very excited to see how he does with these.  

I also gave him a matching exercise with colors and shapes.  This was his first time drawing lines to match objects. I gave him the directions and he took the pen and drew the lines.  I thought he did an awesome job!!  I printed this off from Kids Learning Station.  Here is the link.  They have TONS of great printable worksheets for the preschool age!!

Our First Day

We actually had our first day of school a couple of weeks ago, but since I am just now getting the blog up and running, I will post about it now.  I am not doing anything "formal" until Fall when the "big kids" start back to school, but he is having fun talking about his "homework" so,  while the excitement is here I am going to jump on it!!  


Each day (actually evening while we are getting ready for bed) we go over the ABC's, numbers 1-10, and sing some songs.  He knows "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star", "This Little Light of Mine", "You Are My Sunshine", "The Barney Song", "Itsy Bitsy Spider", "Three Little Monkies Jumping On The Bed", "Mary Had A Little Lamb", "The B-I-B-L-E", and many more...and HE determines what we sing each night.  Sometimes, it is a made up song about an object he sees at the moment, like his Lightning McQueen car..haha!!


But this first day, I decided to see how he did with matching.  I printed out some pictures that were to be cut in half and then separated them and let him put the picture back together.  He did great!

A New Adventure

So Hayden and I are beginning a new adventure in our lives.  We are starting Homeschool Preschool.  Conner and Mari Cate both went to preschool at our former church and we were very pleased at what they learned and the "start" that it gave them for Kindergarten, but with the activities that the two of them are involved in and just the "busyness" of our lives, I have decided that teaching Hayden these "basics" can be accomplished here at home on our own time...whether be in our little school setting here at the house or on the road (which translates to mean in the car waiting for Conner or Mari Cate to get out of school or their extracurricular activities.)  Will we homeschool beyond preschool?  Most likely not, but only time will tell. Hayden is very eager to learn and has already learned ABC's, Counting 1-10 (and we are working on further already), he is recognizing some letters and has an enormous vocabulary!  I have never thought of myself to be one to homeschool my child, and was actually very scared to do it for many years, but I am excited to see how he is already learning and picking up on information so quickly, so for now it is fun!


My purpose in this blog is mostly just personal.  I want to keep a diary of sorts of what we are doing and how it goes.  But if anyone can glean any good ideas from me, than that is all the better!!  


Happy Learning!!