Welcome May!

I try to do something special to welcome each month in our homeschool.  Yesterday, we celebrated the start of May with a little maypole dance.  The girls danced with silk scarves around a broom handle while we watched some real maypole dances on YouTube.  This was integrated into our learning...

Settling Sibling Arguments with a Calendar

Although I'm blessed with three amazingly well-behaved kids (really!), our house still has its share of sibling arguments.  There is always fighting over which book to read, which show to watch, what color cup each girl gets, who brushes her teeth first, etc., etc., etc...  I've found a (hopefully long-lasting) solution to some of these arguments by letting each of the girls (L and E are 3 years old) get a 'special day' on the calendar.  When it's a girl's 'special day', she gets to go first whenever we take turns and gets the first choice of books/videos/toys/food.  For those random sibling arguments over toys, unless it's clear who took the toy away from whom, the 'special day' will settle the dispute.  Even my husband will ask the girls whose day it is when they fight over something.  We've been doing this system for a week and a half now, and it's working really well.  I've actually observed the girls saying "let's look at the calendar" to each other so they can see whose day it is.  They know the turns alternate so they acknowledge that if it isn't their special day today, they'll have their day tomorrow.  I can't take credit for this idea because I'm sure I heard about it somewhere, but I'm very excited about how well this is working, and wanted to share!

The Stuff In Between

This week was especially busy for me at work so there wasn't the usual plethora of new and exciting activities with the kids to post about.  I thought I'd put together a post of some of the typical activities we do in a day that may not be all that innovative and noteworthy, but get woven together in the tapestry of our daily lives.

I try to give the girls a new 'word of the day' every morning:

For some reason, they love the word 'dog'.  Whenever I put up a new word and ask them what the word of the day is, L says 'D-O-G Dog!' before I ask her to sound out the letters of the real word of the day.  We also sing the word to the tune of Bingo. 

A month ago, the girls' grandmother brought them a calendar with pictures that children drew about marine conservation.  They love to point to the pelican and tell me that he's sad because there is trash in the water.  We put a sticker on every day, sing the days of the week, talk about yesterday/today/tomorrow.  The girls are really getting it.  The other day, Barney (the Dinosaur) started singing the days of the week song, and E said "Mommy, look!" and pointed to our calendar.

We have a number of activity books for cutting & pasting, connect-the-dots, mazes, find-the-difference, etc.. which we try to do at least one of every day.  To add a little math-twist to the pasting activity (since I'm a math-geek), I labeled the pieces and their locations with numbers so the girls could match them up:

I love how the resulting pictures are so different and such a great reflection of the girls (L is a good rule-follower, and E is the free-spirit who does things her own way).  L is also getting pretty good at cutting on a straight line:

One of these days I'll have to set up some of those cutting strip activities that I've seen on so many other blogs.

The girls' grandfather (my dad) brought them a crystal garden.  You can see the crystals grow throughout the course of the day - almost right before your eyes.  I'm not sure the girls quite got a science lesson from it, but it was very cool to watch:

Finally, I wanted to share how creative the girls are.  Here is E making drums out of things in her junk drawer (the 'junk drawer' which has all the random objects I collect for the girls to play with is a constant source of entertainment throughout the day).

Notice the dog-food on the floor?  Well L decided that it would make a great manipulative for making letters.  It was actually pretty funny to watch - she'd carefully place the dog-food in a pattern only to have one of the dogs come along and eat it.

 

 

I'm not all that excited about having my kids play with dog-food, but who am I to stifle their creativity?