We officially started our new school year. The girls are LOVING using felts for Bible. I wasn't sure, when they were younger I got several sets of felts related to nature or Bible stories and they were never interested, so I originally thought we might just use the book of stories that came with the church history felts and skip the felts, but when I asked them about it, they wanted to use the felts too, so for the last couple months I've been spending every spare moment cutting out and gluing together a million, trillion (ok maybe not quite, but it felt like it) felts. As I was doing it, in the back of my mind was the fact that they've never LIKED felts, and I was probably doing all this work for nothing, but, at least so far, they are LOVING it!!! And were very disappointed when we skipped school one day this week so they didn't get their daily felt-play LOL. I read the story & they move the felts around accordingly, they're LOVING it.
We're also continuing to work on cursive, handwriting, it can be challenging at times, but the girls are sticking with it. Little Bit is so funny, since we do handwriting at the dining room table, she's discovered that she can climb onto a chair and then on up onto the table. The big girls use dry erase markers to learn the letters, so once Little Bit is on the table, she finds a marker, and a piece of paper and pretends she's writing on it. I had to giggle, someone at church this week commented that her "pencil grip" (she was using a magna-doodle) was really good for a toddler, guess all that handwriting practice is helping, hee hee.
With all our travel, AND the struggles the girls (and who are we kidding, me too) have with keeping their supplies organized and not losing things, I'm constantly on the lookout for ways to consolidate and streamline. This summer I got a Pro-click hole punch, so I decided to use it this year to make each of the girls a "workbook" that has the worksheets, paper, etc they need each day. That way, when we travel, they can just bring that one book with them and we'll have what we need for all subjects. So that was another project for this week, finally got A1's done on Friday, I'm hoping to write a post in the next few days, complete with pictures, showing off their books. While I was at it, I made a "lesson plan" book for me too.
Also this week we took a day and went to IKEA and a teacher-supply store that's near IKEA. The girls were disappointed to not get their daily felt-play, but it gave us a chance to listen to a CD of stories about early SDA church history, so that worked well. Little Bit is a challenge to shop with right now, she does NOT want to ride in the cart, and doesn't tolerate hand-holding for very long at a time. As long as we can keep moving, she does ok "helping" to push the cart, but the second we stop, she's off in 15 directions. The big girls were a huge help though, and didn't complain about holding her hand or chasing her, as needed. Of course, a trip to IKEA is never complete without eating lunch there, and as a bonus, they're having a "kids eat free" promotion right now, so I only had to pay for my meal, and got meals for all 3 kids free, woo-hoo!
We're also continuing to work on cursive, handwriting, it can be challenging at times, but the girls are sticking with it. Little Bit is so funny, since we do handwriting at the dining room table, she's discovered that she can climb onto a chair and then on up onto the table. The big girls use dry erase markers to learn the letters, so once Little Bit is on the table, she finds a marker, and a piece of paper and pretends she's writing on it. I had to giggle, someone at church this week commented that her "pencil grip" (she was using a magna-doodle) was really good for a toddler, guess all that handwriting practice is helping, hee hee.
With all our travel, AND the struggles the girls (and who are we kidding, me too) have with keeping their supplies organized and not losing things, I'm constantly on the lookout for ways to consolidate and streamline. This summer I got a Pro-click hole punch, so I decided to use it this year to make each of the girls a "workbook" that has the worksheets, paper, etc they need each day. That way, when we travel, they can just bring that one book with them and we'll have what we need for all subjects. So that was another project for this week, finally got A1's done on Friday, I'm hoping to write a post in the next few days, complete with pictures, showing off their books. While I was at it, I made a "lesson plan" book for me too.
As always, the teacher supply store had SO MANY tempting things, but in most cases, I just made note of the concepts and figured I could make something similar for less.
On Thursday we went to a small local museum that I've been wanting to go to since we moved here. It's literally down the street from hubby's office, and the science museum membership we have includes this museum, so it's silly that we haven't been. It's a small museum, not alot for young kids, though there IS a small "please touch" area that includes costumes and such, so the kids had fun there. They were relatively interested in the rest of the museum, but it was abit over their heads, especially with Little Bit being restless so I couldn't take as much time to answer questions as well as I'd have liked. We do need to go back to the Planetarium sometime (currently it's only open on Sundays) and we'll keep an eye on the banner outside the museum to see what the "special exhibits" are when they change.
To add to the over-all busyness of this week, I had 2 book clubs, which usually are a week apart, but happened to fall on the same week this month.
While Little Bit and I were at one of them, Rodney took the big girls miniature golfing. Sounds like they had a blast, and did pretty well too.
And finally, we finished up our busy week, by hiking at Hawk Mountain on Sabbath afternoon. I'd figured we'd spend some time at the visitor center, then walk up the easy path to the first overlook, and call it good. BUT the big girls and Daddy had other ideas, they wanted to see if we'd see anything else from the other overlooks. So THEN I figured ok, we'll go on up the path and stop at the 3-4 overlooks that are along the path while it's still an easy path, then turn around when it changes from easy to "rough". Nope, they wanted to keep going. Little Bit, had HER own ideas too, she walked the entire way on the easy path, and wanted to keep walking when we hit the rocky trail, but that wasn't safe, so I put her in the sling (with much protesting from her) and went about halfway to the North Overlook (their goal) before deciding that she was NOT going to settle down and be content in the sling and I had had enough of trying to safely navigate rocks, in crocs, with a fussing, fidgeting toddler in a sling (and, since I hadn't planned to HIKE it was a ring sling that I'd brought in case she wanted to nurse for a few minutes while we were walking, not a nice supportive wrap that would have been my choice for real hiking). So at that point, Little Bit & I turned around, but Rodney & the big girls kept going. Rodney said the path got even rockier and would have been hard to navigate with Lina in the sling, so sounds like I made the right decision. He and the girls said the views WERE amazing when they got to the North Lookout though.
To add to the over-all busyness of this week, I had 2 book clubs, which usually are a week apart, but happened to fall on the same week this month.
While Little Bit and I were at one of them, Rodney took the big girls miniature golfing. Sounds like they had a blast, and did pretty well too.
1 comment:
The felt idea sounds interesting - thanks for sharing!
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