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Monthly Archives: January 2008
Babies!
We have our first kids of the year. The doe we picked up this winter was apparently due earlier than we were told. Aidan went out to feed the calf and she had one kid on the ground. By the time he got us and we got back to the barn there was another – a buck and a doe. Oh my GAWSH they are so cute! She was bred to a Nubian so they have floppy ears and Oberhasli coloring. Pictures to follow : )
Friday Funschool L
L is for Ladybugs.
L Template holepunch and ‘lace’ around it
Colors – red and black
Shape – circles
Literature/Science:
The Grouchy Ladybug – another Carle favorite
Ladybug Ladybug – the familiar verse
The Ladybug and other Insects – be sure to get some life cycle books like this
Listening Walk – L is for Listen too
L is also for Love which makes this the week to be sure to read Love You Forever. If you don’t cry before it’s over then we can’t be friends. ; ) You really must own this one. Another classic is Guess How Much I Love You You know, I have to add an aside here. My second son has been reading the Funschool posts (he lives in an apt) and was saying he enjoys these most of all. He said it reminded him of growing up and all we did. That makes me happier than I can say. They WILL learn to read, write and do math eventually. Make sure you are making happy memories along the way. : )
Montessori trays:
L is for Landforms (pic from site). These are models that demonstrate complementary pairs such as island/lake, peninsula/bay. You can make your own using flat square Ziplock plastic storage containers and self hardening plasticine. Traditionally the land is painted brown and then blue water is used to pour into the trays by the student doing the exploration. Alternatively you can print the cards and/or make a more kinesthetic set by brushing glue over the land parts and sprinkling sand over.
Flashlight – preschoolers cannot get enough of this one. Get an inexpensive plastic flashlight and disassemble it. Keep the parts in a large plastic box. Self-checking – the students have succeeded when they can get it together and shine the light. LOTS of fine motor and critical thinking involved here! Throw a blanket over the table and allow them to make shadows when they finish.
Light/heavy – sort cards of light items like toothbrush, feather, sock and heavy items like bricks, car, oven into appropriate piles.
Lacing cards. Another early childhood mainstay. Easy to make by laminating old calendars or cards and hole punching the outside edges. Provide shoelaces. Christmas cards of the Holy Family are especially nice.
Art/Math:
L is for Landscape. Landscapes by Scholastic is a children’s introduction to this classic art form. This little book is spiral bound with plastic covered pages that lend themselves to lots of handling. Transparent overlays add a way cool dimension. Very simple text introduces famous artists and some of their landscape paintings and asks some engaging questions. I really enjoyed this one! Don’t limit your children to ‘crafts’. Be sure to include fine art in your lessons.
Make a ladybug – trace and cut out two circles, one in red and one black. Cut the red circle in half and spread it apart slightly before gluing over the black. Glue googly eyes and black string for antennae. Double this craft by using it with black beans for…..
Ladybug Math- It is important to provide lots of opportunity and incentive to practice the basic math operations in a very noncoercive, no-stress manner in the early years. This week, use black bean counters and place varying amounts on each ladybug ‘wing’ and add them together. A small chalkboard such as from the craft section of Walmart or a craft store is ideal for these games.
Alternatively your Funschooler can paint large dry lima beans red and use a black marker to make dots and a line on each. Cut a large leaf from green cardstock and count how many ladybugs land on the leaf. Take some away and recount.
Be sure you are mentioning LEFT and RIGHT when putting on shoes and socks and pant legs etc. Reviewing songs from past weeks like the Hokey Pokey is another painless way to bring in this concept.
Songs/fingerplays:
London Bridge (Peter Spier has a book by the same name that works well this week)
Ladybug Ladybug fly away home, Your house is on fire and your children all gone. Coloring page for this verse here.
Five Little Ladybugs
Five little ladybugs, climbing on some plants,
Eating the aphids, but not the ants!
The first one said: "Save some aphids for me!"
The second one said: "These are tasty as can be!"
The third one said: "Oh, they’re almost gone!"
The fourth one said: "Then it’s time to move on!
The fifth one said: "Come on, let’s fly!"
So they opened their wings and flew through the sky.
Snacks: lemonade, licorice, Ladybug Rice Cakes – spread rice cake with red jelly and add raisin dots
Bible/Saint:
This is a good week to learn or review the Lord’s Prayer. There are Catholic and Protestant versions here with lots of nice manipulatives to make puzzles and mini-books for the notebooks. Tasha Tudor has a beautiful little book called Give Us This Day which is perfect for this lesson.
We are reading about St Louis as well. In addition to our Alphabet of Saints we are checking out Amy Welborns Saints book.
L is for Library – be sure to visit with your child this week : )
funschool
I haven’t forgotten L. I haven’t actually written L but it’s in the works. I have a husband home this weekend so it will have to fit into family plans. If nothing else will shoot for Monday. I don’t know if anyone is actually on L? If so, my apologies. : / There is just no fast way to knock these out.
Have a wonderful weekend!
More on Getting Things Done
I told you yesterday I was reading through the Babauta site with vigor. It is funny how things come together sometimes. Rebecca already had me thinking about the purpose for our stuff and spaces. I have been hitting our schedule reliably and working the binder system. I actually have looked at several other binder systems but after reading Leo’s articles and links I realized this really does work best for us and now I can articulate why.
His work builds upon David Allen’s Getting Things Done, which I haven’t read since I am busy getting things done. <g> (and let me tell you it is plugs like these that endear me to Amazon lolol!; )) GTD was designed to help corporate types boost productivity and eliminate stressors. While I mostly shun the concept of running a home like a factory there are some parallels to be made. Some of the guidance can be adapted to our situation. 43 Folders sums up the GTD system this way:
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identify all the stuff in your life that isn’t in the right place (close all open loops)
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get rid of the stuff that isn’t yours or you don’t need right now
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create a right place that you trust and that supports your working style and values
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put your stuff in the right place, consistently
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do your stuff in a way that honors your time, your energy, and the context of any given moment
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iterate and refactor mercilessly
Now if you have visited Rebecca’s site since she started the Peter Walsh book, It’s All Too Much, you know how similar the advice is – Declutter, have places for what is left, always put the stuff in the right places, reconsider both the stuff and places regularly. There. That is easy enough. Easier if you have less stuff anyway. And excepting the fact that childrens’ stuff tends to multiply in the dark I am almost certain. Note to self: keep purging the stuff….
There is also #5: DO your stuff in a way that honors your time and energy, which is what we have been talking about a lot lately. What is worth my time? (see Doing it All) What does it mean to do things honorably? If I am a Christian wife and a Montessori mom then for me it means to do things cheerfully, peacefully, and respectfully. (Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love Eph. 4:2)
Creating a supportive working environment means surrounding myself with encouraging, enabling messages and avoiding places and people who are less so. Never underestimate the power of suggestion. A discouraging word can weigh on your heart and slow you down.
Honoring my energy means acknowledging that there is a fixed amount of time we are given and we can’t get it back. Since I have some stamina issues, time and energy have to managed carefully and responsibly.
Leo B mentioned that the best rule of thumb for GTD is to make short lists and follow those lists. We are doing very well with that. I have considered some of the other list systems I have seen and my feeling is you can have too much of a good thing. The opinion seems to be if one list is good then ten are better, but the inverse is true here. At some pt your mind shuts down and you stop seeing things and start glazing. Better to have short lists you and your family can memorize and make work.
If you task yourself with tracking every book read, every window cleaned, gift bought, calorie consumed, all your bible verses, etc you will end up a slave to your binder. The goal is to spend most of our lives LIVING vs planning and documenting. Make the plan – yes, but make it the least cumbersome possible. Life is short. : )
More on MITs
When I listed our daily musts and extras I should have clarified that these reflect our family’s priorities. As a rule, in-home work takes precedence over off-site activities. However, if your children attend school someplace else then that outing and its requirements are a high priority for your family. If you are like Elizabeth, whose husband’s livelihood and recreation is focused around the sports world, then your MITs may include a heavy, but important, sport team schedule.
It is crucial that your understanding of what is most important mirrors your husband’s. I will be candid. My priorities did not reflect my husband’s for many years of our marriage. This caused untold and unnecessary strife in our lives. It took me stepping back and realizing that God gave me THIS man with THIS vision. It was not my concern how other people’s schedules or homes looked. What mattered was how ours worked, which required us to be of one mind. Success – maritally and otherwise – lies here.
What then should we do?
"Better do a little well, than a great deal badly." -Socrates
I noticed the Large Family Logistics site has been closed pending the publication of a new book. While I don’t begrudge her that option, it does leave a void. Since I have linked to her system in the past I wanted to provide some new links and thoughts as I revisit my Home Mgt Binder and flesh out our routine.
Good news is, its still in place and I haven’t actually changed much. Bad news is, kids are pretty, well, childish for lack of a better word. Being works in progress means every day you get up and remind them again how things are done. The challenge is to do this cheerfully, as though you hadn’t done the very same thing yesterday…..
Judging by the comment load I would guess there is strong sentiment for the idea that we can’t do it all. So then, how do we do what we must? Before that, how do we determine what we ought to be doing? A bare basics list would tell us that we must clean, we must educate (onsite or off), we must eat, we must be a loving helpmeet to our husbands. Those are the must do’s. When those are done well we can add ‘nice to do’s’ like lessons, meetings, hobbies, outside commitments.
To hit those basics we have divided our house into sections and try to tackle a section each day of the week. LFL called those Focus Rooms or Focus Days. Simply put, we assign part of the house to each day and then try to devote like half an hr to whipping through it – vacuum, dust, wipe, declutter. If you do this daily your house won’t get away from you ideally. (please read words like "ideally" carefully ; )) My focus day lists detail what has to happen in our house to make a room ‘clean’. Don’t assume children will know what ‘clean’ means without such a list. A detailed list keeps everyone nice. Or much nicer than returning to the room with increasing frustration to announce again that no, it isn’t done. You will have to tweak the lists to include things that are in your rooms. They are in word documents so you can do that. (For personal use, please do not redistribute)
Ok, with that basic framework for the week you then break down the individual day. Best advice there – ALWAYS get up before the children. Whatever else happens do not wait until you hear Cheerios hitting bowls or Barney on the tv. The day is already in trouble at that point. Try to get out of bed ahead of your crew and purpose your day. I love Leo Baubata’s site and plan to hash out here in the coming days what I have been reading there. On this page he discusses establishing your MITs – your Most Important Tasks – for the day. He advises you to list no more than 3 major things that must be tackled in a day. You can ‘batch’ little jobs into a half hr slot at some point. An example, yesterday our MIT was getting Colin to the wheelchair fitting. That meant printing mapquest directions, packing the van and baby bag, dinner prep so it would be ready when we returned, and gathering insurance info.
Begin with the end in mind, to borrow a Covey slogan. Actually this was my Grandma’s slogan long before Stephen Covey thought about time management. She sent everyone off for the day then immediately set about dinner prep and table setting since those things had to happen by the end of the day. With that in mind, what can you do this morning that will ensure that your day ends well? Can you prep dinner ahead? If you are married, your MIT includes being relatively coherent and put together when your see your spouse at the day’s end. Can you rest so you are awake when you see your husband next? Can you arrange for a late afternoon tidying? Can you schedule quiet time for the children right after? If you have after school activities is your van clean and packed – this morning? Do you know where the uniforms or music books etc are? Will you return to a relatively tidy house? What will be the next steps when you return home? Are they set up now or will you be tired and scrambling? Bottom line – work backwards.
A point for reflection here – if you do the last things first and the must do’s and there is not much time left then you have just had a wake up call about how much a person can really do. Time to rethink the in-between commitments. This is exactly what happened to us. By the time we prepped the must do chores, the evening stuff, and got school done the day was pretty much full. We have not actually gotten to a bunch of ‘nice to do’s’ because they tend to encroach upon the ‘must do’s’. That is ok. They are not God’s will for us for right now and if they aren’t then they won’t bring us a lot of peace and happiness if we try to squeeze them in anyway. Being rested for my husband and having the evening run smoothly with the children is more important than anything else I can be doing in the afternoons right now.
While I don’t follow a perfect hourly schedule I do recall a story that is always in my mind when I plan. A woman was sharing how she set up her weekly calendar with color coded postit notes. She had a large family and her calendar was full by the time she laid out her tasks, meals etc. When someone called to ask her to volunteer for something or asked her out her husband pointed to the chart and said well, which of these (postits) can you take off? Clearly that new activity would have to replace something in their week. It was just a matter of what. Now, I don’t recommend being anal about your time but you do have to be realistic. If you days are full then any new commitments are going to have to replace something already there. Keep that in mind before you say yes and be sure you are willing to make that swap.
Ok more later. Off to practice what I preach. : ) What are your MITs today?
Friday Funschool L (pt 1)
L is for Lapbooks
This is a good week to answer some of the lapbook questions I have gotten in recent weeks. First off, what IS a lapbook? Its a file folder that is opened flat and refolded to look like a closed set of window shutters. Inside, a series of small folded booklets are pasted to the folder. They are usually built around a theme. They provide a 3D presentation format which is appealing to reluctant writers and hands on kids. Especially nice for science fairs and other table top presentations.
You can find how to’s here, here, here and most especially here at the Lapbook Ladies site. Dinah Zike was an original designer of the lapbook concept. Tobins Lab ran with it and eventually copyrighted the term. There are lapbooking egroups at Yahoo with photo share files to peruse.
We have made several in our day. We do more notebooking than lapbooking at the moment but it served us well with some of the kids who took longer to warm up to writing. We have adapted the Lapbook techniques to work on notebook pages. Specifically – we enlarge a miniature book fold to 8×11 size and use it alone on a notebook page. You can find some of our lapbooks here.
Lapbooks can be made independently by older kids or by mom for youngers. They can be a representation of info learned OR they can be used as a teaching tool to relay information. Dinah’s subject specific books are ideal for the latter purpose. The best purchases to get started would be the Ultimate Lapbook Handbook and Dinah Zikes Big Book of Books and Activities.
Ok, off to shop for wheelchairs! I will post the rest of Funschool L on Friday. : )
Tuesday
Hey all, I wanted to thank you for all the positive mail you have sent. It means more to me than I can say. We have appts this week to get Colin fitted for his new wheelchair. I am finishing the reorganization of the Christmas stuff before it goes into storage and we are moving Brendan into a new bed(room) as well. So, that explains the absence.
I have been reading your questions however and plan to address those in the coming days so bear with me please. : )
God bless!
Friday Funschool K
K is for Kite
K template – sprinkle Koolaid powder over glue painted on the letters OR let child apply lipstick and cover the K with kisses – this may result in peals of uncontrollable laughter….
Lit:
Spot’s Windy Day – extension activities here
Henry and the Kite Dragon – true story set in 1920s Chinatown. Gorgeous illustrations, even more important lessons in problem solving, creativity, and peacemaking.
The Story of Kites – these kites chase birds off the rice fields. Gotta love a kid who thinks to use homework paper to make the kite….
The Tiny Kite of Eddie Wing – "…run along now boy, I feel a poem coming on." This one stirs the heart.
Ben Franklin and His First Kite
The Emperor and the Kite – lesson plan for this classic folktale here
Montessori trays:
Keys! Provide various sizes of key locks and a key ring with the coordinating keys on a tray. Very absorbing task! If you have a copier you can also copy various old keys onto an 8×11 paper and match the originals to the copies.
Taste/Smell Test – use your koolaid to make taste bottles. This is a one time use game but good fun. You could use the powder concentrate to make the smelling bottles as well. That way, you don’t ingest so if you are a food purist there is no red dye to deal with.
Art:
Finger paint with the Koolaid powder
Make a kite. Painted kites make REALLY nice additions to the school room ceiling when not in use.
Make a kite wall chart. Construct a kite with construction paper and add a very long string for a tail. Hang on a wide wall and tack the tail horizontally. Add kite tail "ribbon" markers labeled with any academic thing you would like to track such as names of letters learned, books read, memory verses mastered, and so on. Watch that kite tail fill as the semester progresses!
Kaleidoscope – make your own here
K worksheets for Kindergarten
Science:
Ben Franklin and His Kite: Check out this unit study. This is ideal for spreading the study to include older children. Another unit here.
Music: Kazoo anyone? Easy to play. Instant gratification. The Natural Structure folks actually recommend kazoos as a first music exploration option.
Snack – Kix, Koolaid, Kites (make kite sandwiches by cutting bread into diamonds and ‘paint’ cross bars with food coloring before toasting OR make them from graham crackers and frost – thank you Louise!) Kangaroo Pockets – stuff halved pitas with your choice of filling.
Games/PE: Kickball. Our kids can play with two to a team if necessary. Where there is a will there is a way.<g> If space is tight have a kicking contest with a balloon instead. Or a game of Keep it Up – see how long they can keep the balloon in the air without it touching the ground. (snatch up balloon bits immediately if it bursts)
Songs:
Kookaburra – not a kite but a classic. It will stuck in your brain for days – sorry. ; )
Starry Sky Journal 
