'School Time' and Some Art

My girl and I have been doing lots of 'school time' at home for the last several months. It isn't really homeschooling or formal preschool stuff, but we figured that our shy girl will handle the change to real school in another year and a bit if she is familiar with some of the types of learning activities, and skills she'll need when we get to that point. She tends to go slowly in new situations with new people, and to stick close to mom when there are lots of people. When it comes to starting school for real, she'll (hopefully) be more comfortable at dealing with the new people and places if there are some familiar things, like letters, and numbers, and such. And hopefully the little things we've been doing like going to church, and an occasional outing will help her be more comfortable with the human element, since it is just her and I at home, and Logan when he isn't out working hard. So, we've been doing lots of activities lately. I went through the house and made a spreadsheet of all the things I would consider learning activities. I divided them into different categories, and then assigned each category a color. I wrote each activity on a popsicle stick, and put them in tin cans. Each tin can has a color and label, and each stick has colors on the ends to tell which type of activity it is. These are our activity choosing sticks. Elise loves them. She likes to be independent and to be the one making the decisions (we are struggling with the balance of mom/daughter and best friends). So, these sticks allow us both the freedom to do some 'school time' activities together, without repeating the same activity over and over again, and with her getting to 'choose' which activity we do. Well, I found the activities from various places, games we have, workbooks from the dollar store, homeschooling blogs, fun activity books for kids, and all sorts of books from our local used book store. We have also gotten lots of help from family members who have shared their resources and files with us. Some days we do lots of activities, and some days we just get one or two done. Whatever activity we accomplish, Elise earns a bead of that color for her necklace (where she earns beads for obeying our family rules, every time she obeys). The sticks have been a good thing in a time crunch, because most of the activities are already put together, or easily assembled, so we pick one when we have some time, and do it. I like the feel of having it a bit more organized, so if I want to do some activities and stories around a certain theme, I can go to the cans and pull something together quickly. It has really helped me be a bit more on top of things, although it has been a lot of work (and fun) to put together, and to maintain as we get new resources, or learn about new activities to add to our cans.
This last week, we received in the mail a couple books with art activities. Since they aren't on the activity sticks yet, I didn't think we'd do them this week, but save them for next week. My girl had other plans. She went through the book about making animals using paper plates, and decided we should do all of them. After some discussion, we agreed that we can wait until we get the right sizes of plates. So she turned to the second book. It is making various things like animals or cars or other things using different shapes in varying colors and sizes. This seemed more doable at such short notice. The first page she picked was the ice cream cone, which just needed some triangles for cones and some circles for the ice cream scoops. I cut out a bunch of different color and size circles and several triangles, thinking that it would be ok to have left overs, and we could save them and use them for another activity at a later date. I gave my girl a page, and some glue, and she got to work gluing and being creative. The first result....SEVERAL ice cream cones:


Then, as there were still some circles, she requested another page to keep working and being creative. She made a beautiful caterpillar:


Then she decided to use the last of the circles to make trees. I thought it was cool how she drew some lovely trunks on them in white crayon, which she loves to use when it shows up on the colored paper:


At that point, she had used up all the shapes I'd cut out for her, but thought it was a good time to use the stickers that had come in the box. On her new page she put some hearts, and for each one she said, "This is because I love my family." Then she put some stars and said, "This is because I love my family in the night." So her page with hearts and stars is completed:


I love having her be so creative and have fun together. She's been doing lots of painting and cutting lately as well. Some days it is hard for her to decide which color activity she would like to do....she has her favorites, but we are trying to mix things up and include the ones that are not so flashy as well. The categories include: letter/alphabet/reading, numbers/math, colors, shapes, art, movement, music, science, free play, history/languages, and combined activities. Lots of these activities overlap (like painting letters, or counting while we blow bubbles and pop them), but she gets the bead for the main skill being practiced. When we finish the activity, I color a place on one end of the stick red, and the other end green, and we put it back with the red part up.


So far, its been really great, and fits well with our family. And the beads on the necklace help her remember what she accomplished during the day, so she can tell her Daddy all about it. And she loves imagining that she is big enough to go to real school on the school bus....she can hardly wait.....and it is feeling like a challenge to keep her engaged for another two summers before she'll get her turn. So for now, my curious girl and I are having learning adventures everyday....even though some days it is just walking around a store, writing down the first letter of the objects we see in her notebook, while I try to do the grocery shopping! But it IS an adventure!