Letter B, catch up

Letter B is moving along wonderfully and Joshua has really gotten the hang of writing his capital letter B, but still has no interest in trying to write his lower case b, but i'm sure it will come in time. I'm not pressuring him at all.

I have done a VERY bad job, this past week, of blogging due to a massive migraine. We skipped school on Wednesday and worked hard again on Thursday but my migraine was back on Friday in the morning so we only worked on one thing. Our weekend was crazy busy, but fun and enjoyable, so I didn't get around to posting about our B week, so I will catch you up on some of the things we did last week.

Joshua has really enjoyed writing his B's and has gotten really good.

Each day we practice writing his letter of the week, talk about what sound it makes, practice signing the letter of the week and signing alphabet from weeks prior. Take a look at Joshua's B's

After we worked on writing B's we switched to our letter B magnet page.

Joshua always gets a kick out of this one! He has to place magnets onto the empty spaces on the worksheet to complete the picture. He loves that he gets to use the cookie sheets for this project, and he loves the magnets too. Here is the completed project

After our magnet sheet we went on to using out Do-A-Dot markers/just like bingo dotters, and worked on filling in the little circles!

Joshua loves to 'paint' with these and is getting better with staying withing the little lines. See...

Another thing that Joshua likes to do is work on cutting shapes out and gluing them. A few weeks ago he was using his scissors with 2 hands to make them open and close, now he has gotten it down to using one hand, though this picture doesn't show a good shot of that happening :)

Joshua's cut and paste project today was to cut out the body and wings of the butterfly then glue it to a sheet of paper. He did pretty good with the cutting and gluing.

And this was how the project turned out

After Joshua was done cutting we moved on to Butterfly Letter Sorting. Joshua had butterflies that had either a capital or lowercase letter b on them. Joshua needed to sort them into the correct spot on the board, matching the b with the b and the B with the B

This picture cracks me up, because he was really enjoying himself until I asked for a final picture.
Or final project for the day (Thursday) was to create a letter B collage of buttons. Joshua did AWESOME and he LOVED it!!As Friday morning came, my headache was back and I wasn't feeling the best, so we only worked on our letter B project for our ABC binder. Check it out!!

So there you have it, a wrap up of letter B. Later today, I hope to post our start of letter C

Letter b, day 2

Tuesday was a long day, filled with time consuming activities/frustrations/and the need for things to be perfect, so we didn't get everything done I had planned for the day. But this is what we DID complete.

We started our day off with prayers and reviewing what letter Bb looks like and sounds like. We talked about what kind of words start with letter be: ball, bike, bottle, blue, baby, and butterfly to name a few.

Our first activity was counting butterflies. Each butterfly had a number on it and Joshua needed to identify the number and them place the correct number of clothes pin on each butterfly.

If the card had a 2 on it, Joshua needed to say two and place 2 clothes pins on that butterfly.

Joshua LOVED this activity and he ran through the set of 10 a few times.

After the cards were complete and I insisted that we move on, we went to letter matching.

Each letter set had a capital and lowercase letter of the matching color. He did really well with matching the letter/color combos,

but the fact that they kept sliding all over the table caused for some major frustration. But we completed it!

Moo took her shot at the matching cards :)

We then moved on to letter B tracing with multicolored bears. Joshua, again, did a great job and this was another activity that went without frustration.

He lined them up and followed the letter around, placing bear in front of bear.

Our last activity that we attempted was the poke page. Normally Joshua LOVES using 'pokies' aka push pins but not on Tuesday. Wow he was SO crabby, annoyed and frustrated and this took forever!! I didn't want to allow him to just give up, but after all the tears and whatnot I opted to help him finish the project.

SO glad Letter B, day 2 is complete!!

Bb like "ba ba blacksheep"

Yesterday we started the week off with a BANG!, well, with B that is :)

Joshua loves doing school, and honestly, I love teaching school. It has always been a passion of mine and it is an even better experience when you can guarentee that each and every student will learn what you are trying to teach. That reason is one of the biggest I decided to stop prusuing my dream of becoming a teacher after I got me 2year (AA) in Early Education...but my love for teaching is still here, and if anything, it has gotten stronger now that my kids are old enough to sit and learn for more than 5mins.

But moving along, let me give you a look into yesterday's school day-Learning the letter Bb!

Our introduction to letter B was very similar to that of letter A. We did our morning prayer, asking Jesus to help both Joshua and I to be good listeners, teachers, and that we both will follow directions with understanding and patience. We then talked about letter Bb and how it sounds. When I told Joshua that letter B sounded like ba he IMMEDIATELY squealed and started singing "ba ba blacksheep" (one of his favorites lately!). He loved that! And it was great timing that his favorite song would be linked to letter B! God is so good!!!
After talking about the sounds that Bb makes we worked on tracing the letter Bb.

After he had traced his letters multiple times, he wanted to try it on his own, and he did a GREAT job!!!

After our letter practice was done we worked on our color sheet for our letter binder. Joshua has never really been interested in coloring, and staying in the lines, or even attempting, is something he has no interested in. So to hurry up and get the coloring over with, Joshua just scribbled all over this butterfly,

but he did take the time to trace the letters Bb at the top of the page.

He is such a stinker sometimes!!!

After our coloring was done, Joshua used wooden tiles to spell our the word "butterfly" and "BUTTERFLY" . The green tiles are capital letters,the orange are lowercase,

and he's getting really good at spelling out the words, repeating the letters, and then locating them in the sea of letters beside him.

Joshua knows all of his printed letters, both capital and lowercase, and points them out where ever we go.

Our last activity for the day was to do a butterfly size sort. Joshua had 3 different size butterflies on a graph and those same size butterflies in pieces.

He needed to figure out whether the butterfly he picked up was a small one, medium one, or a large one.

This one took some time, and some frustration was had, but he got through it and he was SO pleased with himself, as was I.

Everyday he amazes me more with what he is able to understand, retain, and accomplish. I can't believe my little guy is doing this and he's doing it all on his own. School was HIS idea, not mine, HE asked me to teach him, HE asks every morning if it is time for school and HE thanks me, mulitple times a day, for teaching him new things. I love it!!

Gardening-Harrison Style

This summer we, as a family with a ton of help from Auntie Debbie, started a garden (on Deb's property, using her time and money-we just provided a bunch of seeds) and the kids have loved it!! We haven't been able to make the trip up north this summer as much as we had liked, but when we do go up, we make sure to stop by and spend a day in the garden. We have planted, watered, weeded and harvested with the kids in tow and diving right in and it has been wonderful for us and them. Deb's garden has done amazing in some areas (raspberries, cucumbers, tomatoes) but some things planted in the back lot didn't turn out as well as we had hoped (corn, squash, guards).

Our last adventure north came on a perfect day both weatherwise and harvest wise. The kids had a BLAST pulling fresh produce from the garden. Check out our little harvestors!!

Cucumbers

Raspberries

The kids also had a blast riding "the gator" around the yard, taking turns driving it. Joshua could spend HOURS at Auntie Debbie's house driving this thing. I fear that as he gets old enough to drive we will NEVER see our car!!

Later in the day as we were weeding the squash patch, we found a few little frogs. This was the first time the kids had seen a frog in real life and they were in LOVE! Madelynn, my little bug girl, did not want to put the poor thing down, and surprisingly the kids did really well with the frog. We kept giving warning that the frogs might pee on them, but it never happened, the kids were very careful! Take a look at their love for this little guy.

So, some gardening tips for you from us:

*if you have kids who love to be outside-put them to work in the garden
*getting your kids involved and dirty is being a good parent
*when your kids get bored, find a creature to provide some entertainment (make sure it isn't a bee/wasp or stinging bug first!)
*and make sure you have enough time to sit back and take in their love for gardening and LEARN FROM the little ones

Hope you have a hoppy weekend!!!