Homeschool: Kindergarten week 3

(Charlie making a collage of drawn trains and train pictures he cut out of magazines)

Charlie had another good week of school. He continues to do well with his lessons. I am hoping that within a few weeks of having the baby that we will be able to settle into a daily schedule, for now we are doing school between my doctors appointments etc. So sometimes we are doing school in the morning (which seems to work best for us), during naps (Charlie is usually pretty tired by then and needs a rest as well, not the best time for school) or after naps (which works fine, but Mama is low on steam by then). Mornings seem to be our "good" time of the day for all of us, so we try to sneak school in then whenever we can.

Charlie continued on with his core lessons of Language Arts, Phonics and Math. Charlie also took the KRAL test this week and one online session with his K class.

We have gone back to Explode The Code for Charlie's handwriting practice as well as supplemental phonics. He really enjoys these workbooks far more then the Handwriting without Tears program...which literally brought us both to tears at one point :)

For fun we made Mummy Pizzas for lunch. I used toasted English Muffins, spaghetti sauce, pepperoni, sliced string cheese and grapes (for the eyes). The kids loved them and ate them right up!


One of the craft projects that we did this week was make suncatcher leaves using contact paper and tissue paper. Both boys loved doing this project. Charlie started off by making a pattern with the different color paper and then dumped a bunch of tissue paper over them to fill in the spaces. Tommy placed piece by piece and refused any help. His attention span these days is incredible. I have had both friends and his speech therapist comment on how amazing it is.

After the boys placed the paper down, they rolled out the air bubbles and then I sent them out to the backyard to find as many types of leaves as they could. Charlie brought back 4 different leaf styles that I then traced and cut out of their mosaic tissue paper creations. Daddy and Charlie later identified what kind of trees the leaves came from.

Charlie also did 2 different art pieces this week using pastels, which was his first go with them and he really enjoyed using them. So much in fact that I had to cut him off after he completed 2 art pieces one right after the other. My friend Susana, over at Our Homeschool Fun, introduced me to an amazing new art site for kids. I allowed Charlie to pick out one of the fall art projects from Art Projects for Kids and use his pastels for the first time. He choose the How to Draw a Fall Tree project.
This was the first time I had assigned him to look at a something and then draw what he saw. I think that he did a great job. He smudged the pastels with his fingers and tried to blend colors together to make the clouds. I also sat with Charlie and drew the same picture. We talked about how each of us was looking at the same inspiration picture and yet our pictures were very different and why that was.


Charlie had such a great time that he begged to make another drawing. This time he choose The Symbols of the Season project.

The only thing I made sure that he did was divide the paper up into the 4 boxes. I was really kind of surprised at how with this picture he added more detail and paid closer attention to the actual inspirational picture. He added the lines for the pumpkin and his eggplant had great resemblance to the other picture.


We did a lot of fun things this week alongside our normal studies. However,it was a hard week in terms of scheduling everything we needed and wanted to do. The 4 weekly doctor appointments are truly putting a damper on all the extracurricular activities and fun projects that I would like to do and had planned for the boys. We have had to withdraw the boys from the homeschooling co-op that meets on Mondays for this semester. It just wasn't possible to make it on Mondays until the following session that starts in January. I am really bummed about this (thankfully I hadn't talked about it too much with the boys!), but I know that this is a short season in our lives and in a few months we will be settling into a new routine and will be able to add more back into our daily lives.