Make and Play ...

There is so much to each box of Mother Goose Time! 

So I want to highlight one of our favorite activities we do in this post. 

It's the Make and Play!

 A Make and Play activity consist of three parts:

1. a card showing an example of what the project could look like

2. supplies to make the project however the child would like to

3. an activity for the child to do with the project they made

I love the Make and Play activities! These allow the child to focus on making something and then to use the energy they've been saving up while sitting still to use their creation in action. 

On Monday we made Fishy Cups. 

Kohen seems to always surprise me when we do school. Each day this week I started each lesson by asking Kohen and Khloe if they knew of any animals that carried their babies like .... whatever way we talked about that day. On Monday, I asked them what animals carried their babies in their mouths.  Immediately Kohen shouted out fish! Um, totally admitting here that I had no idea fish carried their babies in their mouths until I opened up the packet for Monday. I love being surprised by all that he knows! 

What is it about markers that children love so much? I mean crayons are fun and all, but markers? It's like the jackpot! They took the tops on and off, on and off. And they colored their cups all different colors, we added the fins and tails. We took a bag of Goldfish, one of our favorite snacks, and counted them out into our Mama Fish's mouth. And then of course, we ate them after we "swam" around the house carrying our babies around.

On Tuesday we made Turtles.

When this girl gets focused, that tongue comes out! And I love it because I catch myself all the time with my tongue just like that when I'm concentrating! Ha, like Mother like Daughter. 

After we made our turtles, we let them dry while we tried carrying objects around on our backs like Mama Turtles carry their babies on their backs. This was hilarious and it was a great opportunity to incorporate our word of the month, GENTLE! 

Once their turtles were dry, we took them to the backyard and made habitats for our baby turtles or hatchlings. 

On Wednesday we made Kangaroo Pouches.

Here is another great Make and Play activity we did this week. Kohen and Khloe sat and colored their baby kangaroos or joeys and colored their pouches. We put them together and they spent the rest of the afternoon hopping around the house like kangaroos! I even caught Khloe trying to feed hers a bottle. Such a sweet Kangaroo Mama! 

This Mama is thankful for another great week with Mother Goose Time!

Please note: I received these materials and resources from Mother Goose Time free of charge in exchange for me telling all about our experiences using their materials.

You can check out their website here.

​www.mothergoosetime.com

Jumping Back In With Mother Goose Time ...

Jumping back into school in January can be the worst. It's like wrangling a bunch of cats and trying to get them into water. Trying to pull them away from their new Christmas belongings and their warm beds that have been occupied a little longer in the mornings can be a real good time. To keep my own sanity, I always like to ease us back in. Usually by the beginning of the second week, we're back in full force.

Kohen is the least hardest kid though to get to the table. That unopened box of Mother Goose Time goodness drove him crazy over Christmas. 

Toward the end of the break, I opened up our box and dove in to see what would be in store for this month.

Our theme is Baby Animals.

 We'll be tackling the letters Gg, Qq and Yy, the numbers 5 and 15, the hexagon shape and will talk about what it means to be gentle (Lord knows we need that around here with all these boys). 

Our weeks will go accordingly:

Week One: Waiting For Baby

Week Two: Carrying Baby

Week Three: Keeping Baby Safe

Week Four: How Babies Change

Each week we start out with asking what We Know about the subject and what We Wonder about the subject. This is the perfect way to introduce anything to kids. By asking these questions, we get the wheels turning in those brains of theirs and get them excited. This gives us the opportunity to celebrate what they already know and to recognize that there is so much more out there to learn! 

This week started out with a bang! We talked about all the animals that grow in Mommy's bellies and how they nurse from their Mommys when they're born. Well, y'all know we have Krozby here and he nurses and oh how quickly Kohen was to ask if Mommy was like a pig then. Um, sorta? I guess?

Oink. Oink.

Regardless of me being compared to a pig, it was fun to watch Kohen use his Pig Counters to see how many piggies could nurse from the Momma Pig he made with his PlayDoh. Along with Imaginative Play, we also use these counters for math. These are great for doing addition, subtraction, making patterns and sorting! We also talked about litters and how many baby pigs a Mommy Pig can carry in their tummy at one time. Imagine the look on Kohen's face when I told him they could carry 8-12 at once! 

Further into the week we talked about baby animals that grow in eggs! 

Our Theme Poster is down low so Kohen and Khloe can explore as often as they'd like to, not just during school hours. 

We opened up the conversation by allowing Kohen and Khloe to point out the animals on the Theme Poster that grow in eggs. We talked about what the temperature might be like inside the egg and how long we thought it would take for an egg to hatch. 

Mother Goose Time includes something called an "Invitation to Create". I love these! Sometimes kiddos just need some motivation to get their own creative juices flowing and this does just that!

We used crayons and watercolors to design and decorate our eggs. Even the big boys got in on this project! For us, doing a discussion while their hands are busy helps them to retain more. So we did just that. They worked on their eggs and we discussed more about baby animals, the patterns that are shown on the eggs in the photo and the "wax technique" they were using to create their designs. 

Good start to a great theme!

Please note: I received these materials and resources from Mother Goose Time free of charge in exchange for me telling all about our experiences using their materials.

You can check out their website here.

​www.mothergoosetime.com

Bringing Back Mother Goose Time ...

Hey Y'all! Remember Mother Goose Time? That adorable preschool curriculum we used a couple years ago? Well, we just started back up this month and we're a little excited about it. 

 

Kohen making his Owl.

Just in case you don' know about it, I'll fill you in. So we get this amazing box every month filled with 20 days of pre-bagged bliss for any preschool aged kid. And it is so organized for us Mamas, so it's bliss for us too. Each month there is a different theme and this month we are talking all about Winter In the Woods. 

There is so much included in each month's curriculum. Art activities, themed music, activities for number and letter recognition, manipulative toys, a planner and a scheduled month for us Mamas. There is also everything needed to learn about days of the week, months of the year and the weather.

Right now, we are homeschooling through 4th, 3rd and 1st grade - y'all know this Mama needs all the help I can get when it comes to making our mornings as easy and smooth as possible. MGT does just that for us. 

Kohen is obsessed with animals. 

All of them. All the kinds. Ocean animals. Woodland animals. Dogs, cats. Even beavers and turtles. So when I saw this month included days that were all about animals that lived in the woods, I got excited. 

The first week was all about different animals we would find if we took a stroll through the woods right now. We learned about deer, bears, hedgehogs and owls. 

There is always an opening question to start that morning off with and I may or may not have died when I asked Kohen what he knew about deer and his response was, "I know I just ate one at Poppie's house!"

 

 One of my favorite things about homeschooling is being able to watch my children use their imaginations, to watch them play, to watch their little minds go to work - so learning about bears this week was my favorite. We took a little walk in our wooded backyard and collected items that a bear would use to create their own den. Kohen and Khloe picked up leaves, pine straw, sticks and bark. Each of them were given a bowl as their den and they covered their bear's home with all of the items they collected. We had so much fun! Each of them had some of the Counting Bears (manipulative toys sent from Mother Goose Time this month) and used those as their bear families.

 So far December in our preschool world has been lots of fun! If you have a preschooler at home, I encourage you to take a look at Mother Goose Time. You'll be impressed at how much goodness can fit into one box ...

Please note: I received these materials and resources from Mother Goose Time free of charge in exchange for me telling all about our experiences using their materials.

You can check out their website here.

​www.mothergoosetime.com

Mother Goose Time: Swirling Storms, Swirling Rings ...

It is only Tuesday and we have had so much fun already this week in Mother Goose Time. 

We are learning about the planets!

This morning we learned about Neptune and Saturn. 

MGT provided us with two fun art projects to learn about these two planets: 

For our Neptune project, the boys used a bouncy ball and a container to paint their own Neptune. I dabbled some paint in their container and they used the ball to swirl the paint around. At first I used a box lid, then I got smart and used a wipe container with a lid so the ball would stop flying out. They really got crazy (and not too messy to my surprise) and had a blast doing their projects.

After their paper was painted to their liking, they cut a circle out for their planet and glued them onto black paper. Then we added white circle stickers around their planet to represent the 14 moons of Neptune.

As the boys worked through their art projects we talked about how far away from the sun Neptune is, who his "neighbors" are, how many moons Neptune has and all about the storms in it's atmosphere. 

Once our Neptune were done and drying, we moved along to Saturn! This project allowed the boys to get up and move, so we did this in the middle of our homeschooling morning to let them get some energy out! 

Each boy made their own Saturn Ring by using a craft stick (decorated by themselves) with a long piece of satin blue ribbon attached to the end of it. 

Each month MGT provides us with a CD of fun tracks that relate to our theme! We danced to Swirling Saturn over and over and over again. The song talks about the rings around Saturn being made of ice and rocks - another fun tidbit they took in about this planet! We also played freeze with turning the song on and off and Kohen (2) loved it!

We had such a fun morning with Mother Goose Time today! 

A Week In Words - 03/16

Life This Week - 

Hi there! And Happy Saturday Night to you. And me. Because I'm pretty sure this week tried to kill me. I just giggled out loud here people. Like I really think this week tried to kill me. 

Monday I had a bird fly into my house. And proceed to fly up and down the stairs over and over again, ramming itself into the window. In the middle of nap time. Please, close your eyes and imagine me chasing a bird around my house, tip toeing oh so quietly trying to not wake up my children in the capturing process. With a hamper. Yes. Yes, I was trying to catch a bird in a hamper. Somehow the dumb thing finally flew out. 

After nap on Monday Kollin spilled a jug of fabric softener on the kitchen floor. That was fun to clean up, said no one ever. And immediately following the clean up of that slippery mess, Kolt knocked over a bottle of olive oil while I was cooking dinner. In the same spot. And that was just Monday afternoon. 

Somehow, I broke away and spent the morning with some amazing ladies Tuesday morning! I'm learning that with AdvoCare comes a new family to love on and to be loved by, and well, I love that! Lets just say Tuesday morning was needed.

One afternoon this week was spent hanging out with my Momma. On the side of the road that is, waiting for a wrecker to pick up her broken down car. For three hours. Best thing out of that was the ginormous amount of laughs that were had because, we were exhausted, the kids were exhausted and thats what you do when you're exhausted and waiting on a wrecker for three hours: laugh.

Wednesday was StoryTime at the library and we had just as much fun this week as we did last. Other than Khloe tipping over in Kollin's lap and banging her head on the floor that has NO padding. Yea, you should've heard all of the lovely gasps in the room from the other mothers, followed by Khloe screaming and Kohen asking over and over as I am trying to slip out the door "Mommy. Khloe hit head? Mommy. Mommy. Khloe cry Mommy. Mommy ..." I'm telling you: this week tried to kill me. 

Thursday was mine and Kolt's night to slip away for a couple hours, just the two of us. The goal of these One-On-One nights are not to do anything fancy or long winded, but really just to talk and spend some quiet time together. We used to make our date nights with the kids these extravaganzas and it got to be too expensive, so we quit doing them. We've made it now to where these nights are just doing something small, like Kolt and I going to have yogurt. 

This kid is so grateful for these nights. His little face lit up when we headed out the door Thursday night and that just means the world to me. And it made changing out of those yoga pants that I wanted to stay in for forever, a little easier. 

School This Week - 

Thank the Lord, we are back on track with it all. I'm telling you what, something in February threw us off completely! This week I feel like we found our footing again and are headed back to our good ole' normal homeschooling days! Whatever that is! 

Mother Goose Time brought us some gems this week! I've been such a slacker about sharing what we are learning with MGT lately. Trust me though, we are doing lots, learning lots and having lots of fun doing and learning! This week we learned about some of the planets! Kollin and Kolt still do the art projects with us and I have added them to Science4Us.com to learn more on their level about the history of Earth and our Solar System. 

Monday we learned about what makes Earth different from all of the other planets and imagined ourselves as aliens from another planet. We made these awesome alien headbands and played outside in them! 

 On another day we learned about Mercury! Um, I actually learned something too! Did you know Mercury is 875 degrees during the day and -300 degrees at night? Crazy! We had fun making our own Planet Mercurys - the boys colored one side red and one side blue to represent the temperature differences. Kollin and Kolt wrote a few facts about Mercury, like that it has zero moons, and added them to the planets they made. 

Kohen has been having fun with the foam stars we received as one of the manipulatives for this month. We have been practicing sorting, patterns and counting forward and backwards with these stars. I love having math to do with Kohen, even though he is just two. For me, patterns are one of my favorite mathematical activities to do with the two of them. I can make it easy for Kohen, like just doing every other color as the pattern. For Kruz, I have him make his own patterns up and he loves doing this! 

Favorite Snap - 

Who knew Khloe Ruth would like Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles? Oh wait. 

She has four big brothers. 

A Week in Words - 03/02 ...

Life This Week- 

I haven't done one of these posts in almost a year. But I like them. It's a nice little way to sum up our week, let you in on some of our craziness and oh how I love coming back to these later on to read. With that said, hope you enjoy this glimpse into our week ... 

This week we started a new schedule. And when I say schedule, I mean every minute of every day is scheduled. Right down to shower times. Something like this has been needed for a long time, I just never sat down to do it - to figure it all out - to type it all up. And I knew going into something so different than what we are used to would be hard in the beginning. This week was a trial run of it all. And by the end of Friday, my house was clean, all of our planned school work was done, the dog had been fed 5 days in a row and I still had my sanity. Needless to say, I think it's going to work out well.

We had to hit up Dr. Pott's office on Thursday to check on my sweet Klo. She started running a fever on Monday, no other symptoms, just a fever. I noticed her ears seemed to be sensitive so I was thinking she had an ear infection. By the time we got to the doctor Thursday, her fever was gone and she was back to her old smiley self. Must've just been a virus, something that needed to run it's course. It has been so great to see her smiles again!

And since Little Miss was feeling better, we headed over to my friend's house to play dress up again and take some more sweet pictures. Want to see one? Check out my Favorite Snap down there at the bottom. 

And by the way. When you can't find your baby, check your oldest ones room. I walked in to get Klo up from her nap on Friday and she was gone. I go into Kollin's room and find this sweet sight. The two of them on his bed, him talking all about his baseball cards and sharing them with her. 

This week I also got some one on one time with Kollin. This is another thing I am loving about our new schedules, we have added in one on one time with Kollin, Kolt and Kruz throughout the month. I took Kollin to karate this week, by myself, which never happens. And we shared some cheese dip at Mexican and talked. It was nice. So nice. And I taught him one of my inner kid secrets: the one where you scrunch up the straw paper really tight, drip water on it and watch it grow. Anybody else remember that one? Well he was pretty impressed. 

Our family got bigger this week too! We added a new cousin, sweet Baby Brooks to the crazy bunch! Isn't he a doll?

School This Week - 

This week we started our newest box of Mother Goose Time and are blasting off into space! Last month was so off for us and we missed a ton of Mother Goose Time. And by missed I mean we didn't get to do very many of the activities and we missed it. Like a lot. So this month we are learning about space, which can really be exciting for all age groups. I love to see Kollin and Kolt be able to learn as much with Kruz and Kohen on the same theme. We started the week off by opening our Balancing Moon, which has been entertainment in our house for hours this week! If you have tots and preschoolers, you need one of these things! Seriously. We made our stars, which was a favorite project from this week. 

Two things here. Number one: I love to see Kruz still wearing his Christmas PJs. And number two: Glitter will be the death of me. 

Along with a new Mother Goose Time theme, came moving onto our next PACE Math Book. This curriculum was new for us this year and we are loving it! I think we have found a favorite!

Outings - 

We finally had some nicer weather this week, so we hit up the park on Friday for Family Day! A little muddy from the rain earlier in the week, but this Momma survived! We topped off our Friday afternoon with some potato soup from O'Charley's - one of my favorites!

I love to see the husband with a kid on each side. 

Conversation Of The Week - 

Kollin: Mommy. Daddy says whatever I am now, is what I will become. Does that mean I'm going to jail when I get older?!?

Mommy: ...

Favorite Snap -