GLE Week 8 Q is for Quail

Curriculum found here.  This week we talked more about Moses.  He had a verrrry interesting life!  Lots to talk about.  We also talked about Qq and what sound it makes and what it looks like.  She knows all her capital letters and most of her sounds, so we just focus on the lowecase one most of the time.  Although sometimes for Q she said /k/ and sometimes for G she says /j/ which is especially tricky because sometimes G does make the J sound!



















We had that little pheasant-I mean QUAIL, ahem- on her desk all week.  Pretty cute little guy (I assume it's male since it's tail is super colorful).  Got him at Hobby Lobby.


 

We painted with feathers and went out and tried to make our own bird nest.  I think we made the walls too thick because it took all week to dry out (we used mud) and then it wouldn't even hold together!  Them birds be smart.

Tot School Letter Bb!  He actually started saying /b/ by the end of the week.  Today I started to show him T and asked what sound it made and he said "/k/k/k/.../b/b/b/..." Pretty funny!  However those are the 2 sounds he has learned so far (C and B-we did do an Ii week, but he never even got close to understanding /i/i/i/) so I'm pretty impressed!

Playing in his pasta bin with ABC Find It from 1+1+1=1.  He does really well with that so we do it pretty much every week.  He is pretty limited in what he can do without getting super frustrated so we keep it simple around here for my little man!  A perfect example is the school bus craft from No Time for Flashcards.  DISASTER!  He had a total meltdown when I glued the pictures down.  He didn't want to color the bus and he got mad at me when I sang the wheels on the bus song.  So I did the craft without him and then he happily carried it around all day! :)  

One thing Mr. Man will do happily all day long is read.  Autumn crafts way more than him, but he reads way more than her so go figure!  So far, they both have a healthy dose of appreciation for books for which I am exceedingly happy about.  

Caleb's books focused on the /b/ sound and Autumn's were just bird books I had.  None of them fit the theme very well, but we made do. 

GLE Week 7 I is for Insect

This week for our bible study/preschool at home, we talked about Moses and the plagues.  Curriculum found here.

Only a couple of pictures this week!

Our 10 plagues index cards.  For the 5th plague (sick livestock) we ended up putting pictures of farm animals on it.  The bottom picture is some activities we did.  Both the iguana with the Avery stickers and the big I with the iguana's glued on it came from 1+1+1=1.  The dragonfly is a paint, cut, and glue from learncreatelove. 

Books about INSECTS! (or, bugs!)

  Tot school!  I tried to just go with whatever letter Autumn was working on (in this case, Ii).  I have now decided to work with him on letters he already knows or is somewhat familiar with (the letters of his name for example).

Painting an egg carton inchworm.  Some printables from 1+1+1=1 and The Mommy Teacher. 

We were putting Avery stickers on the igloo, but they ended up all over his legs! :)

Finding I books that feature the /i/ sound was a challenge for us.  We basically had no book focus this week.  He also didn't really get "I".  The whole point in doing things with him is simply for exposure though and now he does see letters and points them out so I know he is absorbing more than meets the eye.  I think in his head he believes he knows all the letters and they are all called "E" :)

GLE Week 6 "c" is for colors

Also, week 6 encompasses the story of Joseph and his beautiful (if problem causing) coat.  Curriculum found here.

Wearing her paper bag coat, retelling the story with her Joseph puppet, and some of the crafts we made. 

This child.  We mixed these one day and now she knows them.  Model student!

I thought I would also teach Caleb his letters along with Autumn (even though they have their learning times separately from each other).  Caleb is 22 months.  We learned all about what sound C makes!  All of the materials I used with him can be found at 1+1+1.  (LOVE that woman!)

Finding C words in a kidney bean sensory bin and some artwork

Even baby sister got in on the action! Yes she puts things in her mouth and yes I was watching her like a hawk. See my hand in the bottom of the picture? 

Literature for both kids!  Autumn's (left) goes mostly with the theme (colors) and Caleb's goes more for the letter sound. 

We decorated pumpkins this week and I thought it was funny there was a pumpkin for what both kids were leaning.  Caleb's has a big C on it and the pumpkin on the end has rainbow crayons melted all over it to emphasize colors!

GLE Week 4 & 5

We are still using God's Little Explorers as our bible study every day.  It is wonderful!  We are also learning sight words using Reading the Alphabet.  We are going pretty slowly with this, but so far she has learned to read 3 sight words ;)

I am really no good at taking pictures.  For the last two weeks of our time together I have 5 pictures.  I got tired of documenting everything but then this week I decided it will come in handy when I got through it with Mr. Man so I started trying to take them again.

So, week 4 was z is for zoo (Noah's Ark).

I actually only took ONE picture this week, HAH!  Autumn and I (Autumn and I? No, it was just me.) found this online graphing game that she loved.  We actually found an entire mega pack and did quite a few things out of it.  Cutting and pasting, q-tip painting, and other fun stuff.  The picture on the left was just my big kiddos playing in the rain!  It seemed appropriate!

Week 5 was t is for tent (story of Abraham).

We set up our play tent and made a campfire and played with it all week!  This week was harder for Autumn to grasp for some reason.  I think trying to explain traveling around from place to place living in a tent all for the sake of obedience was just over her head a bit.  She loved the star crafts we did though!  You know that verse about Abraham having more descendants than stars in the sky?  That is the reason for the star crafts.

We are also practicing writing our last name.

 

GLE Week 3 "A is for Apple"

You can find the amazing curriculum we are using here. A is for apples!  Plus the story of sin entering the garden.  Autumn loved reading her bible each day because there is a picture of a big snake.  This girl loves snakes...not in real life, but she loves stuffed ones and pictures of them.  Crazy child! 

Our verse for the week on apples we printed.  I saved these in a plastic bag for review. 

More fun with printed apples!  I labeled them 1-10 and we practiced putting them in order.   I laminated these for future practice.   The bottom picture is a few of the crafts we did throughout the week.

Apple pie playdough :)
We also tried to make stars with paint and an apple core (kind of like a stamp), but it totally did not work at all for us!  Even I couldn't get them to look like stars.  So they just smeared some paint around.   

We had an apple taste test (top right picture) and then we took our apples and made applesauce.  Another day we made mini apple pies.  I tried to review the letters we've learned so far with the pie topping.

Last, we ended our week with an apple tree bath.  This was because my son doesn't know his colors yet and I am trying to teach them in fun ways and also because they both love fun baths!  They absolutely LOVE them!!

This was a super fun week for me.  Maybe my favorite so far!

GLE-Week 2 "G is for Garden"

Ok, week two of God's Little Explorers.  G is for garden!  Highlights were...

Soda pop flowers.  She dipped the end of a 2 liter into paint to make the petals, then painted the insides yellow.  I added the stems and leaves.  We made enough to send some to a few family members.

We printed and laminated these cute flowers and bugs and made some homemade play dough and dyed it green and brown for grass and soil (at the expense of my hand!).  Then we played "flower garden" for a long time. 

 

2 different sensory bins.  The top one was soil, glass gems (pretend seeds), and fake flowers. Then my parents actually sent a nature box from their back yard in Tennessee this week so it was perfect! There were pine cones, acorns, and lots of other seed pods from their yard. 

2 fun snacks: dirt cups, found here. Plus yogurt with orange slices around it to create a flower. 

We also do some tracing pages, puzzles, letter workbooks that I don't take pictures of (kind of boring!).  I normally print off lots of options from Confessions of a Homeschooler Letter of The Week series or Carissa from 1+1+1=1 and then let Autumn choose what she wants to do each day.  She loves to cut right now so we cut A LOT!

I am LOVING this curriculum as it is centered around the bible! Every day we do "bible study" and she doesn't even realize she is learning letters, sounds, and math while we are doing it.  She is getting more familiar with her bible and is starting to take ownership over it.  These times together with her are truly the highlight of my entire day.  

GLE-Week 1 "X Marks The Spot"

This week for preschool we talked about the letter x!  We learned that God's word is treasure and we became explorers/pirate princesses for the week and went on treasure hunts and explored a little bit of God's world.  Preschool curriculum found here: God's Little Explorers.

Here are some pictures from the week:

Some of our x snacks

We went on a treasure hunt to find new school supplies, decorated an explorer's kit (from a Chick-fil-a drink carrier) and made binoculars!

This was her sensory bin for the week.  It was supposed to be sand, but the bag got left outside and so it ended up being very wet sand!  The mess was more than I anticipated, but she loved it.  We looked for pirate coins, necklaces, and jewels.  We also practiced drawing x's in the wet sand.

We also made treasure boxes out of an egg carton from Red Ted Art's blog but I didn't get a picture!

I thought I might also mention what Mr. Man and I did this week.  We did a blue week inspired by Play Create Explore's color of the week series.  I didn't get very many pictures of him since he is MUCH  more hands on than his sister, but here are a couple.  I painted a box blue and we (read: mommy) filled it up with blue items from our toy bins. 

This is the aftermath.  I wanted to show a real life experience. Caleb looked at his blue stuff for about 15 seconds and then threw it all over the floor.  But, hey, he is still interacting with blue :)

Another one of my "brilliant" ideas to do with him was to read a bible story out of his toddler rhyming bible (which I LOVE) and then color a picture of the story.  He read the story with me and then these crayons and picture sat out literally all day long.  Haha! Actually, when his big sister came home she wanted to color it so I printed off another one and they both colored :)

We also took a blue bath!

This was a lot of fun, but next time I am going to do a bath like this, I am going to make sure my husband is there to help me! They had blue shaving cream, a spray bottle filled with blue water, blue shapes, blue jewels in the bottom, and blue sponges.  Also, blue circles and squares cut out of foam and stuck on the walls.  

We also played with blue rice and had a blue water bead fight in the backyard, but no pics!  I think he might know the color blue, but I haven't "quizzed" him or anything, so I'm not sure.  It's all just for fun!

Preschool

Autumn starts preschool next month.  I'm sad.  Not because it's not the right choice (I think, although I am praying through that currently), but because I don't want her to grow up.  I mean, I'm SAD.  I cried last night and it's a month away!  I have always thought that people who cried over their kids going to school were insane.  I just didn't get it.

People don't get upset because they can't handle time away from their kids.  People don't get upset because their child is taller than they were a year ago.  People don't get upset because their child is becoming independent.  (Well, maybe that one a little bit).  People get upset because their child is entering a new stage of life that is scary.  Yes, it is just preschool, I get it.  However, it is a concentrated number of hours every week that my child will be under the influence of other people/children.

My 3 year old is very sweet and is under the impression that everyone she meets will love her.  She is under the impression that adults are kind and will protect her.  We have tried to teach her about "stranger danger" without scaring her, but I'm not sure she gets it.  I don't think much about her beliefs will change with this preschool because we are sending her to an awesome, Christ based school with amazing teachers.  But, from this point onward, her days of innocence are ticking down.  She will learn, if not now, then at some point, that kids can and will be mean.  She will learn that some girls will hurt her for no reason than she is different than them.  She will learn that just because she likes a boy doesn't mean he will like her back and that will hurt.  One day, she will learn about drugs and child abuse and so much more than that.  A lot of that she won't learn for many years, but this is where it starts.  This is where she leaves me (and my protection) behind (or so it feels).

Another minor (selfish, insecure) thing that is making me weepy is that I know she is going to be like "peace out mom" and take off playing.  That's great, I know, but I want her to kind of feel like I do and she doesn't.  She isn't going to miss me, she isn't going to be sad about us losing time together every day...she is going to be way too busy having fun.  I know that's a good thing, but if I'm being honest (which I try very hard to be), it hurts me a little bit.  It makes me feel unnecessary and who wants to feel that?

The last thing I'm struggling with is the actual educational aspect.  I taught Autumn her ABCs.  I taught Autumn what all the sounds of the letters make.  I taught Autumn how to write those letters.  Someone else will most likely teach her how to read.  Someone else will teach her how to add and subtract.  This makes my heart unbelievable sad and heavy.  I wish homeschooling was the "norm" and/or I wish my husband was all about it so that the choice would just be taken away from me.  I wish I just "had" to do it because I would do it and I think I would step up and do it well (*think* being the key word...I am also totally afraid I would do a terrible job).  But instead, there is a choice (what a nasty nasty word!) we have to make.  And at this point, we are choosing preschool.  I don't know if it is the right choice or not.  I am very emotional about everything right now and feel that I can't be unbiased at the moment.

So, now I understand why people get upset when their kids go to school and you can bet I will sobbing the entire way home after dropping her off.  Unless, I cry every day until then, in which case, I might be ok.  I did that with Chris's deployment.  I sobbed every night before it happened for about 3 weeks and then when he actually left, I did ok.  It was like I had already mourned him leaving.  Weird, huh?

Poof! From a baby to a big girl, just like that!

Sandbox fun

I put Caleb in the sandbox for the first time the other day.  He didn't last too long, but Autumn sure loved having a friend in there!  They played together quite nicely. 

Next time I will be putting more clothes on him.  I thought he woud be easy to "dust off" this way, but sand comes off clothing much easier than skin I found out!

This was obviously during his pre-haircut days.  I look at that hair and I cringe.  I am so glad Chris finally let me cut it!

And then he started to eat it.  

So I kept taking his hands out of his mouth which produced:

tears!  So he had to be taken out of the sandbox.  They had fun though and they have both played in it since then.  I just have to keep a close eye on him and pull him once he gets bored with the toys and starts eating sand :)

I just love it when they play together!  He is totally obsessed with her and she loves having another child to "talk" to and laugh with all day!

Tea for Three

Autumn & I had a tea party with her gorilla, Gumbo.  It was fun (ok, I didn't think it was that fun, but she did!)  and we practiced using "please" and "thank you".  Sometimes she even says it all on her own now so yay!

Sadly, we do not have a little tea table so we had to sit on the floor.  Reason number 896 I like having a baby more than being pregnant: I can sit on the floor!!  And, I suwannee, that dog (his name is Randy and he belongs to my parents) is in the background of hundreds of my pictures.  He hangs around a lot :)

We decided to let Bunny in on the action.  

On another note, I think this gorilla is ugly.  Can I get an Amen?  My brother came in and told Autumn she could anything in the zoo gift shop she wanted (Um, yes, my brother SPOILS her...but it's ok because he only gets to see her about twice a year).  Out of the entire gift shop, she chose this UGLY Gorilla!!  It totally cracks me up!  His name is Gumbo and she loves him :)

And since she has the coolest mommy ever, we even got to eat tea sized cookies!  I'm not sure what tea sized means, but they were little miniature chocolate chip cookies. 

Fun, fun, fun.  Pretty soon, daddy will be home and get to experience the awesomeness of a tea party with a two year old and her stuffed animals!  And mommy will laugh in the background ;)

Baby Girl 2 Years Old

2 year olds are sweet, cuddly, kind, and calm...NOT!  I kid, but actually Autumn is all those things sometimes, but she can also be ornery, independent, selfish, and wild!  According to The Baby Whisperer, Autumn is what you would call a "Textbook" baby and I'm guessing she's a textbook toddler as well.

I would say her Top 5 defining characteristics are:
1. Independent
2. Adventurous
3. Hilarious
4. Sweet
5. Smart (I'm sure moms everywhere think this one about all their children!)

Eating
I think she is a decent eater.  She is willing to try new things.  She loves fruit, applesauce, bread, yogurt, and cheese.   She doesn't love meat or veggies, which I believe is pretty typical for toddlers.  I think if I was more consistent or more "fun" with our meat and veggies she would eat better.  That is definitely one of my goals for when we move to Germany in a month.

Sleeping
This has definitely been her weak point as of late!  Her daddy's deployment has affected her as well as turning two.  She has started waking in the middle of the night and for awhile she would really fight me to go back to sleep but the past couple nights I've just had to rock her for10 minutes and she'll lay back down.  This morning, however, she woke up at 6:30 and wouldn't go back to sleep which is not usual at all! Her normal waketime is 7:45 or 8 (and I like it that way!).

About 3 months ago we moved her to a toddler bed and it has been a very easy transition for us.  Like, I'm shocked at how easy!  She rarely gets out of her bed.  When she wakes up, she just moans or calls out or starts talking to herself (depending on her mood) and then I go in and get her.  I keep her door shut and she doesn't know how to open it.  Plus, the only toys in her room are stuffed animals and books.  We did have to invest in a night light, but it didn't correlate with the bed transition.  I think it was more of an age thing.

Playing
She loves to play outside.  She loves to play in the water.  She loves to play in the dirt.  She loves chalk.  She loves bubbles.  She loves Elmo and Mickey Mouse.  She loves pre-school.  She loves her tricycle.  She loves stuffed animals.  She loves to read books.  She loves doing things herself.  She loves to color, paint, etc.

Other
She still isn't potty trained.  I've tried twice.  Instead of thinking I've "failed" as a mom somehow since I have a 2 year old in diapers, I'm deciding to accept her as she is and accept the fact that she doesn't quite "get it" yet.  I am so sick of placing society's expectations on myself and my life!  It's my own fault, my own weakness that makes me try to live up to some American ideal that is based on mostly shallow principles anyway.  Ok, mini rant over.

Her hair is still super curly!  Beautiful strawberry blond ringlets.

She still loves her bunny.  I wonder when kids start outgrowing comfort items?  I'm thankful she doesn't have to take it everywhere.  She sleeps with it and carries downstairs in the morning, but 95% of the time it doesn't go in the car with us or outside with us.

She is still very much attached to her thumb.  It can be really frustrating because she will even talk with it in her mouth at times!  I have started saying, "I can't understand you with your thumb in your mouth" and that seems to be helping some.  Sometimes, I just have to say "Autumn" when she's said something thumb-in and she grins and says, "thumb" and then pulls it out :)  Her attachment to her thumb may be why bunny doesn't have to come everywhere!  Oh well, her doctor says it's not an issue until age 4 so at 3.5 I'll start seriously trying to change it if it is still an issue (which I'm guessing, yes, it will be).

She wants to do everything by herself.  "I do it" or "Autumn do it" is a phrase I hear probably 20 times a day.  I've read that this is a good thing and to let them do as much as possible so that's what we're doing! It might take us 10 minutes to get in the car, but that's ok :)

"How old are you??"

Annual Personality Picture

The title of this post is clearly due to a lack of imagination.  I mean, really... "Annual Personality Picture"??  I even asked my mom and we couldn't come up with anything better.  So, if YOU can come up with a better title for these yearly pics, I'm all ears :)

Luckily, the lame title takes nothing away from the awesome picture!  These are so fun to make and I look forward to assembling them together for her one day (maybe her 18th birthday?).  Of course, Caleb will have his own set too one day!

Without further ado, may I present to you my precious amazing beautiful sweet 2-year-old:

And, just in case you are interested in last years:

http://www.dippedintogod.blogspot.com/2011/09/photo-i-made-from-picnikcom.html

Party Time (Autumn turns 2)!

We had Autumn's party and it was so fun!  I figure this would be the last birthday party where I was allowed to choose the theme (maybe I can squeak by when she turns 3?).  I chose hearts.  It was simple, but pretty and fun.  Here's some pics!

2 year olds are so silly!

The whole she-bang

Snacky snacks.  Chocolate dipped pretzels and cherry tarts from  I Can Teach My Child

Heart cups and fancy pink punch

Twig tree centerpiece from Tater Tots and Jello

Special Seat with Birthday Bear, Heart Balloon, and  Tissue Paper "A"  from  Made During Naptime

Happy Birthday Banner inspired by Today's Mama

Balloons on the mailbox.  I came up with this brilliant idea all on my own! Can you even imagine?!

Caleb got in on the action and he was unimpressed. 

Her favorite toys were:

Her trike

Her water table

Her fairy wings and tutu

And her baby doll

And, just for kicks, here is a picture from when she turned one:

Why do they grow up??