Monday Mornings in Homeschool World

Does anyone else think the above phrase is almost a bad word? Quite frankly, I do! LOL! For whatever reason, my children and I are completely on the same page about this, and that, my friends, is bad news! We don't like Mondays! Like me in the morning, I need a cup of coffee, and a few (silent) minutes to get used to myself. In the same way, I feel like my whole family takes Mondays to "get used to ourselves" for the week. Naturally, this is bound to turn out bad because as I would love taking Monday's to do this, the reality is, we really need to get school started. We need to usually play catch up on the co-op homework that is not finished yet (mayday! co-op in 24 hours!), we need to get spelling started so that we will get all the week's lessons in and have the test on Friday (whoever heard of a spelling test on Saturday or worse yet, the next Monday?!). But, here I sit, almost 8:30, Monday morning, snuggled up under a blanket in front of the computer wanting another cup of coffee and feeling zero motivation. At the same time, I am listening to my girls talking to and (I am assuming) playing, all quite civilized, with each other in the next room. Why, I ask you, would I want to interrupt that when I know the reaction will be grumbling, whining, and compete anarchy in the ranks?! Maybe they are smart enough to know that if they play nicely on Monday mornings it will prolong the "free time", or maybe they just like each other better on Monday mornings, who knows? All I know, is I am not a supermom homeschooler! I would like to get back into bed with my coffee and a book and let someone else teach spelling, multiplication, go to the post office, grocery store and catch my kids up on co-op. Any takers? Oh well, maybe Kelly will teach them when he gets home from work ;)

Homeschool Happenings

Oops, this picture is sideways (please tilt your head to the left to see the letter "P")





My little one has been working hard on her alphabet notebook and for the letter P, we glued dried peas, what fun!









Here it is in the process.



















My precious preschooler!















The next day we started Q, so I seached high and low for all the quarters in the house (I may have even raided the kids' stash....shhhh) and I found about 60 quarters.

We talked about the features of the quarters and then seperated the old quarters from the state quarters and had a mini geography lesson with both the preschooler and the 1st grader.





I love the state quarters, there is so much info about each state on a little coin!


This is a great placemat map that can be found at Walmart and they even have a world map one.

BTW..we had about half old quarters and half state quarters.

King Tut Lapbook

So, In January, we headed to Atlanta to see the King Tut Exhibit. I was awesome and I hope the kids will remember it for a long time. We did have a scare (literally) at the beginning. It was dark, as museums are and they were playing music that might be alittle scary for a 4 year old. Add the total unknown of what we are doing and the only thing my children know about mummies is that they chase you (Scooby Do in the Dr's office), all this combined, and I had a loudly crying 4 year old that would not go into the beginning of the exhibit. Here I am thinking, well, there goes the $16 for her ticket and the $25 for mine, and I am not going to get to see it. It's a very quiet setting, not something you can drag a screaming preschooler through until she understands that King Tut is NOT going to pop out from around the corner to scare us. :) Well, thankfully, once we did turn the first corner and she realized it was all quite safe, everyone was VERY well behaved. Mid-point there was another very dark place that she didn't want to go into, but once I verified that it was the "gold jewlery" and I told her it was darker so we could see it sparkling, my princess was good to go!

Here is the lapbook that we made when we came home. We couldn't take pictures, so I got them sticker books that worked great for decorating it. I really in a King Tut/Egypt lapbook.

Sorry, I can't figure out why the blog is putting them sideways, the pictures are not like this on my computer. :(

Fold out map with Egypt colored.

We did a little book on the Jews in Egypt. 1st, Joseph brought his family.

The top says they lived there for 430 years. Then the middle talks of the slavery and the babies being thrown in the river. Last part is how Moses delivered them.

Little coloring sheet showing Moses and some of the plaques, this is under the Jews mini-book.

A little mini book on furniture, we even saw some of this in Tut's exhibit.

This is the back, We wanted to show that the pyramids are in Egypt.

Flower Lapbook

I used links from this blog
http://lapbooksbycarisa.homestead.com/flowersandplants.html
for our flower lapbook.
We did alot of "field trip" stuff for flowers and plants, the girls really loved it. We had a group field trip to an educational nature site that included a flower class. We also went to a nursery and looked around. We did this awhile ago, so we will get the lapbook out again soon when we start planting for the spring.