Headed to the Vet ...

We started off our week in PreSchool by heading to the Veterinarian's Office. 

Okay. So we didn't literally go to the Veterinarian's Office, but we sure had a great time pretending that we did. 

Monday we started off our day by asking what it might be like when a baby animal has to visit the doctor's office. We talked about different reasons why they might need to go, what the doctor might say, what kinds of tools they would use. We picked out a few stuffed animals from the PlayRoom and grabbed Khloe's Doctor Kit. Kohen and Khloe had so much fun! Way more than I expected they would. This activity was so simple and yet they played and played and played. Mother Goose Time always gives us great ideas for activities that will use their imagination. 

After we closed up our Veterinarian's Office for the day, we immediately had to re-open our doors because an animal broke a bone. And of course, we had to make a cast for this poor baby animal. It was that puppy up there in particular. Imaginary broken bone leads to a cast leads to ...

PAPER MACHE! 

We were given a Recipe Card from MGT to mix up the ingredients needed to make our paste. I only had whole wheat flour on hand, ha! So it was a little brown, but oh boy!! This was ooey and gooey and messy and fun! I watched Khloe mush her fingers all around and just laugh! 

So in this activity we explored how a doctor would make a cast for a broken bone. And we made our own "casts". Besides the fact that I ended up having to wash this blanket, twice, this was tons of fun!

After we made our casts, we had to administer some medicine! 

Y'all, this activity was hysterical! We changed out the picture on our Mother Goose Time cube to piggies. Each side had a different number of piggies, we rolled the cube and whatever number we landed on was the number of piggies who needed medicine. In our bag for the day was included a dropper, so we filled a cup with water and after each roll we squirted that number of piggies with "medicine". 

I think this was Kohen's favorite activity. He has asked to play this game multiple times since Monday. He's learning. He's having fun!

I want to note how many skills we accomplished in just one day with Mother Goose Time. In just these few activities, we did science, mathematics, practiced fine motor skills and art. 

So many skills covered in just a few activities, another reason why I love doing MGT with my kiddos!

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

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

A Week In Words - 03/23

Life This Week - 

It is Saturday night and I am in my pajamas and have been for a few hours. Good Lord, I love nights like this. I need nights like this. 

This week has been great! Although, I think any week following a week like the one before this past one, would be great. Know what I'm sayin'? 

For the most part, life was pretty low key. We did have a play date on Wednesday at the park and (swoon) it was wonderful. It was wonderful to see our friend Livi, it was wonderful to get to know a new friend, it was wonderful to sit and chat to another Momma of five about struggles and such. It was, just, wonderful. 

Here is Khloe and her newest friend and possible future husband. You can check out their family blog over at House Of Kent. 

We did StoryTime for the third time in a row this month. And I can see Kohen start to come out of his shell more and more. He's actually dancing to the 'get your wiggles out' song before the story and this week he pulled his own carpet square and sat with his brothers, without me. Huge step for him! 

This week I took Kruz out on a date, just the two of us. This child. Oh this child. 

He opened the door for me, without me saying anything. He picked O'Charley's for dinner and somehow landed both me and my Momma for dinner. And loved every second of it. After dinner, he insisted on "the place with the big brown cones" aka Dairy Queen. So we hit up the drive thru and ended up with this ginormous-dipped in chocolate-filled with M&M blizzard cone.

I should've known it would've been a dripping mess. We pulled over into a grassy spot and enjoyed our ice cream there.

Kruz: So this is what a date looks like?

Me: Well, yea. Sometimes dinner, but always something sweet. And I normally just talk to Kollin and Kolt.

Kruz: Talk?

Me: Yea, talk.

Kruz: Hi.

He ate about 10 bites (none of the actual cone) and was done. Go figure. 

Here are a few more random moments from the week.

Khloe (and Mommy) are loving her BowBands from Lindzee's Bowtique. And who knew how great Kruz would be at folding socks? Kohen plays in the walker more than Khloe does. And sometimes a baby girl just needs her Daddy to fall asleep with. And yes, I let Kollin drive across the church parking lot. 

I survived. 

School This Week - 

Kollin and Kolt finished up another PACES Math Book this week and have started to learn how to carry in addition problems. It has been fun seeing them faced with a challenge, something different. They both took to it easily though! They are both doing really well in Math this year, they must take after their Daddy in this department.

In Mother Goose Time we are continuing to blast through space. 

One thing we learned about this week was galaxies! We talked about what they're made up of, Earth's Milky Way (the study complete with a Milky Way bar of course) and made our own galaxies! Oh glitter, how I loathe thee.

I always make it a point to do Math with Kruz (and Kohen when he is in the mood to sit still) while Kollin and Kolt work in their PACES books. Every month MGT provides Math Cards with each box of curriculum. 

We love these cards! Love them! And I use them as a building block for more. I'll start with the easier ones and just continue to give him different addition and subtraction problems. We work through the advanced cards together. And those aluminum foil balls are our very own moon rocks. Ha! 

MGT also provides Folder Games each month. This month the game gives us practice on shapes. 

Outings - 

Friday was Family Day and we headed out to see Paddington at the Dollar Theater. It was cute. I mean what I saw of the darn thing. By the time I dished out popcorn, passed the drink around 387 times, nursed Khloe, fed her sweet potatoes and took Kohen potty - I might have seen about 10 minutes of it. But it was cute. 

Who am I kidding? I'll end of renting it to watch it because I didn't see a lick of it. 

Conversation of the Week - 

On our date, we stopped by TJ Maxx and Kruz picked out some new undies. Avengers undies. 

Me: Kruz, why did you pick out Avengers underwear? 

Do you even know what Avengers are?

Kruz: What's Avengers? That "A" - that "A" is for AdvoCare!

These are AdvoCare underwear! 

Favorite Snap -