More Delaware School

The hardest part about having to teach children in any sort of structured way at home is the little munchkins who also live at the house needing constant attention.  I wish there were two of me.

Most of the time if Will is not asleep, we just decide "if ya can't beat him, join him."  Today we joined in on the band practice.  It's the little things in life that turn out to be the most fun. I found that little recorder in the dollar bins at Walmart during Christmas and stuck it in Hope's stocking.  It is a complete hit.  Even Will has learned to play it.

He's a one man band...Plays drums, recorder and sings all at the same time.

The recorder even doubles as a drum stick!

Uncle John, he's got some true woodwind talent.

On to real school.  I told you that I like books and corresponding activities.  Meet Elmer the patchwork Hippo.  Hope was using foam stickers to make her own patchwork Elmer.  What are we learning?  Mostly we are just having fun but I guess you could call it fine motor skills 'cause those little sticker backings are hard to peel! 

Now here is some real learning!  Bob books are my best friend.   One day Hope woke up and announced that she was ready to learn to read.  I have no idea how to teach a kid to read but I did find these at a Books A Million story time one Saturday morning.  They are great.  Little books that each focus on something different and build upon each other.  For instance:  The short vowel a is first, then we add short vowel i... and so forth.  Hope feels so proud that she can read entire "books."

And we learn about numbers, too.

This game is a big hit:  Mystery socks.  There is no children's book to go along with these, dang it.  Still, they are fun.  I gather household items that are all alike and put them in a sock.  Hope feels and shakes the sock trying to guess what is in it, then she has dumps them out and tries to guess how many of the object were in the sock.  Finally, she counts it to see if she was correct. 

This sock had cards in it. She's counting them out.

Here's a fun book:  The Perfect Square.  Hope has known her shapes for literally years, but who cares.  It looked fun and since we have 2 school years until we have to actually learn anything for real to get ready for kindergarten, we have the freedom to just play.  The perfect square gets changed into all sorts of different objects and so we made all the objects.  That's a fun one if your child does not know what a square is yet. It would be a fun way to work with a square. 

We also have "science" where we recently focused on acorns and trees.  We went on an acorn hunt, estimated and counted acorns, etc. The most fun part was making acorn treats.  A chocolate kiss "glued" to a mini vanilla wafer.  The glue is chocolate frosting.  Yum and pretty cute, too.  I am pretty sure I saw this somewhere on Pinterest but I couldn't find the original post or I would show what the final results should be.