Wife, Then Mama

Nursery Rhymes are the theme of our Mother Goose Time curriculum this month.  Although Little Guy and I are known to play rousing games of Little Miss/Little Mister Muffet, that is about as far as my interactive nursery rhyme education has gone.  He knows quite a few, because I apparently like to hear the sound of my own voice and am always singing or reciting something, but it hasn't be a focus of our time.  This month we have been doing A LOT of fun activities that not only have helped him learn new nursery rhymes, but worked on a variety of skills, including numbers, phonics, and motor skills.  Since I am working at making homeschooling work for us , we have not really followed the plan, but have been tackling two topics each day, in an order that fits with our schedule for the day.  So I will be sharing some of the fun things we have been doing, along with what skills the project focuses on and the assessment question that is related.  Each assessment...

My mother came and visited for a week early in the month so we had a long break early on in our Nursery Rhymes unit from Mother Goose Time , but I am proud to say we made some changes to our routine and have been ROCKING IT overall.  In previous months I was pretty stuck on that fatal flaw in homeschooling: bringing school home!  It is frequently something that leads to failure in homeschooling, and apparently preschool is no different, at least for this mama.

Today was the second day of Nursery Rhymes with Mother Goose Time , and this time Little Guy didn't know the nursery rhyme!  Sing a Song of Sixpence just isn't one of my favorites, because it doesn't make much sense to me.  However, it was an EXCELLENT choice in this instance because the activities to go along with today's rhyme were perfect.  We started off by making play dough, which wasn't really necessary since I have lots of Play-doh, but it was fun, so why not?  Our Science Card had the recipe on it, which we split in half because there is just one Little Guy (Little Girl only comes a few days a week), and didn't need so much. I love that the directions are easy for him to understand even though he can't read.  I still helped him, but he was able to tell what to do next by the pictures. We set the play dough aside and played Fill a Pie with one of our manipulatives we got this month: Shape Beads.  I put the Shape Beads in a ...

Little Guy and I took a bit of a break from Mother Goose Time when Baby Girl came into our home.  She was brand new, and I had another baby at the time and we were not getting anything done school wise, so I wasn't doing well blogging.  I was generously offered maternity leave, which was great!  I love Mother Goose Time, and am really excited to be back to using it.  While Little Guy is great at his workbooks and flash cards, I know that he really enjoys the hands-on, learn through play model that Mother Goose Time uses.  I firmly believe that you should teach a child in a multitude of ways, so he learns to be a good learner, no matter what teaching style someone might have.  Plus arts and crafts are fun!  This month our theme is Nursery Rhymes.  I love nursery rhymes, and Little Guy probably knows most of them already, but I know we are both going to enjoy doing related activities.  We also have a new "student", a two year old litt...