Some of Our Home Schooling

Now that the baby is getting older and I'm feeling fully recovered from the surgery, we are slowly getting back into the swing of things as far as home school is concerned.

This is our alphabet wall in the play room. About once a week (or every two weeks, we're not that structured yet) we introduce a new letter to the kids. Mommy draws outlines of the letters and we use different forms of art to decorate them - sometimes glitter, sometimes tissue paper, sometimes colored rice, sometimes paint.

Next, Daddy draws them a character whose name begins with our letter. Anakin Skywalker for A, Dora for D, Indiana Jones for I. We spend the next week or so pointing out that letter in books, on signs, etc.

We have a small group we get together with for spring related activities. Here we are learning wet felting to make eggs.

We also took a bird walk with our group. We have a red tail hawk's nest in the trees near our community garden.

Here we are rolling out air-dry dough to make nests. That's Megashark VS Crocosaurus playing in the background. Our "school" rocks.

We used sticks and yarn with the clay to make nests.

Dalek math! The evil Dalek peg people want to use radioactive frog counters to destroy the world, but first the need to know how many they have! We used our Base Ten math manipulatives to practice counting by tens.

Here a friend helps us with the garden. We also have indoor plants and seed starting activities.

One of our new pets, Hawthorne. We also got him a buddy we named Eugene H Krabs.

Our tiny little caterpillars. They've already changed into butterflies. I'll have to get current pics.

And, of course, the kids' favorite way to learn. Here Deirdre has looked up pictures of Dora The Explorer by spelling and typing "Dora" by herself. Connor has already memorized how to spell over ten words this way, including Batman, Hellboy, Killer Croc and Shark. We write the words down on paper for them to type in, or call the letters from across the room, and they like to look up pictures and videos. They also have favorite game websites bookmarked (yep, they bookmarked them. I didn't even know you could drag a window up top your toolbar to save it until Connor did it one day). They had their own old laptop for a while until it died. We're working on getting them another one.