Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Saturday, August 16, 2014

Small Space Homeschooling Part 2: Books and Manipulatives.


Living in a small space means getting a little creative with how we organize our homeschool materials.  We're currently living in an apartment and no longer have an extra room to use as our school room.  That means revamping my organization for all our homeschool goodies.

   In Small Space Homeschooling Part 1 I shared our portable workbox with you.  That's where I place all of our materials needed for the coming school week.  It has helped make our days so much more enjoyable. 

Books:

Most of our books are on these bookshelves in my son's room.  For the most part, Bubba keeps from messing it up too bad. 

Up on the top we have a basket of arts and crafts kits.  This includes their art kits, weaving sets, and embroidery stuff.  I believe we also may have a couple of fashion design workbooks in there that belong to Squirrely Girl.

The top shelf houses books that specifically deal with our school year.  It includes current workbooks, textbooks, and many of the science and living history books we'll be using for the year along with My Father's World Learning God's Story  Our Unifix cubes and pattern blocks are up there as well, as well as Squirrely Girls  leveled readers.

The next two shelves house a good part of our other books that we use during reading time.

The second to bottom shelf is where we keep a bunch of our manipulatives.  They're numbered because we used to used these as our busy boxes and I just haven't relabled them yet.

  • Box 1:  Holds some of our Language Arts work.  I have laminated various work heets that I sometimes add to the girls Daily folders.  We have some rhyme strips, punctuation strips, and antonym/synonym strips in here.
  • Box 2:  Holds our geometry stuff.  We have some flashcards, drawing sheets, matching cards, and another set of pattern blocks.
  • Box 3: Holds some of our Math stuff.  We have beans, marbles, number cards, ordering cards, craft sticks, shape buttons, a calculator, a set of 10 ten frames, number magnets, addition and subtraction flashcards, number bond bracelets, and more. 
  • Box 4:  Holds pipe cleaners, string, and beads along with some pom poms.
  • Box 5: Holds some of our alphabet work.  We have magnetic letters, alphabet puzzle cards, alphabet puzzle, upper and lower case matching cards, and some flashcards. 

The bottom shelf has some personal dry erase boards and a basket of coloring books, which I rotate out from our collection that we've accumulated.
 
Other Stuff:

This is our game closet.  I cleared off two of the shelves to accommodate all of our homeschooling stuff.


Here's the binder where I keep worksheets divided by week.
This makes pulling out our stuff for the week so much faster.

This is where we keep the kids nature journals, their reference binders, and a couple of my binders with reference sheets and weekly work in them.


The Clear 3 drawer Sterilite organizer holds their crayons, scissors, pencils, and markers as well as some drawing paper.  One drawer also has some laminated handwriting worksheets, as well as some activities that I'd like to eventually get to.






Do you have any tips on how to organize your school stuff in a small space?  Let me know how in the comments!

Saturday, August 9, 2014

FREE for Kindle: The Crucial Questions Series by R. C. Sproul


As of writing this, books 1- 17 of R.C. Sproul's Crucial Questions series are FREE for Kindle.



 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

The Pursuit of God


I recently read The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer.  I had actually never read the book before, but I had seen some great quotes from the book and decided that it was time to read it for myself.  And I'm so glad that I did!

I read the book on my Kindle, and if the pages of notes and the amount of highlighting I did say anything, its that the book is just wonderful.  Tozer's insight and writing highlights a way to a deeper relationship with God.  It's a book that I think can be of tremendous help to Christians that aren't satisfied with the status quo of Christianity today.

Having been written by Tozer in the late 1940's, the style may not be what many are used to reading, but I definitely think that it's worth the effort.  I loved how Tozer addressed the issues pertaining to the Christian's walk with God.  Each chapter also ends in a prayer, which I enjoyed. 

The Pursuit of God  isn't just some formulaic outline promising to bring us closer to God.  It is more an explanation of how we go about living this.

“We have almost forgotten that God is a Person and, as such, can be cultivated as any person can.” 

When Chris and I began dating, we wanted to be near each other all the time.  I wanted to know what his hopes and dreams were, what his favorite food was, and what made him feel happy and loved.  Through all of this, we forged a strong connection and grew closer and closer to one another.

It is the same with God.  When we become a Christian and are regenerated, we should desire to pursue a deeper understanding and relationship with God.  He has drawn us to himself, and now he is waiting for us to pursue Him just as he continues to pursue us. 

Over the coming weeks, I am going to be writing about each chapter in detail.  I'd like to share my thoughts about the writing as well as share how I find it applicable in my everyday life.



 
Please, join me on this journey!  Grab your own copy of the book, a cup of coffee, and let's pursue our God together!







Monday, July 28, 2014

First Week of Homeschool for 2014-2015!

Last week we started back to our full homeschool schedule.  We decided to go with My Father's World : Learning God's Story for Shania for First Grade.  Kenzie is following along and completing the activities she's able to do, with additional handwriting practices and basic math skills.  Cole, who will soon be turning 2, is doing a whole lot of coloring, playing, and fine-motor skills work! 


Shania (Squirrely Girl) -1st Grade
Kenzie (Bear)-Pre-K
Cole (Bubba)-Tater-Tot Tot School

We were doing a lighter school load during the rest of the summer, but we wanted to have part of November and all of December off for the most part to incorporate a lot of seasonal activities so we thought we'd start the school year a bit early.  Here's what our daily rhythm looks like.

Start the Day Together Basket
This is sort of our families circle time.  We usually start by singing a few songs together and praying.  I also have various flash cards that we use some days in our basket.
 
  • Bible:
    My Big Book of 5 Minute Devotions by Pamela Kennedy with Douglas Kennedy if in the MFW schedule, or a story from 365 Read-Aloud Bedtime Bible Stories by Daniel Partner. 

  • Poetry/short stories:
    Folk Tales from Many Lands by Hazel Gertrude Kinscella. 
  • Science:
    This varies.  On Mondays, we read from one of the science books from MFW (Things Outdoors, Science with Plants, and Science with Water).  The rest of the week, we read from one of our other science books to dig deeper into our topic.  This week, we used Life In a Bucket of Soil by Alvin Silverstein and Virginia Silverstein and Fun with Nature: Take-Along Guide by various authors to learn more about things that live close to or inside the ground.

     

     
  • Kids Choice:Each child takes a turn in choosing a book or two to read each morning.
  • Calendar time. 
  • Number of the Day

Language Arts
  • Handwriting and Phonics:
    This week, and for the next week or so, MFW has worksheets for ABC handwriting practice as well as some phoneme blending worksheets for Squirrely Girl.  I also gathered some for Bear to do along with her.
  • Spelling:
    Squirrely Girl then does her Spelling work.  This year, I simply downloaded a master list online for 36 weeks worth of word lists.  Each weeks list has 8 words.  Monday-Thursday she does different spelling practice pages, and on Friday she takes a test over her words.
  • ABC Work:
    Bear continues to work on ABC words and colors the worksheets while Squirrely Girl is doing the rest of her work.
  • Reading:
    Squirrely Girl reads the same three leveled readers daily for a week, along with any other books she picks out.  She also reads and fills out a reading comprehension sheet once a week.


                                     Math
  • Math Lesson:We go over the math lesson, practicing together using manipulatives. 
  • Practice:
    We then complete any activities or worksheets that are in the MFW, or some days we simply play one of our games (Like Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land, Go Fish, Chocolate Chip Math, Math Bingo, or the Math-o-Matic game).



                                                                         Science
  • Worksheets:
    Some days, we will do worksheets pertaining to the weeks topic.  I got some of these from various workbooks, the rest I printed off from sites online.
  • Lapbooks:I sort of out together a lapbook of sorts to go along with this weeks lesson.  I include a lot of fill in the blank type work for Squirrely Girl to complete, and Bear has added some pictures of a few bugs that she colored.  I'm hoping that as the year goes on that Squirrely Girl will be able to put these together herself.  I am helping with at least the first few, especially since they are mostly handmade pieces rather than printouts.
  • Games:I've put together a few games to review a few of our topics so far, and am hoping to make a few more.  This week, the girls played several rounds of the "Parts of an Insect Game".  We used dice, and they had to say the name of the body part before they could place their pieces in the correct place on their insect.  We had a lot of fun!|
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Finally, we may do some art projects, color, and play some more in the afternoon.  Before bed, we also read a Bible story from one of our storybook bibles.  Right now, we're using these two!
 




















 That's what our day looks like as of now!  What does your homeschool day look like?