School Days, School Days, Dear Old Golden Rule Days

Long title for post but when I think of school days, my mind automatically goes to this golden classic "School Days."  No....I wasn't alive when it was written or recorded!  We sing it a lot at the nursing home in our music therapy session so I know it by heart now.  I think my kids do to!

Moving on.  Now that B is 3, we have started doing preschool here.  He loves school and has begged since he was 2-1/2 to do "school."  That school consisted of Before Five in a Row things when I would get a chance to prepare it.  I kinda fell off the wagon a bit through summer and he has asked nonstop about doing school since then.  Because of his enthusiasm for learning, which I say he got from me because I would still be in school if we could afford it and I could balance life, I decided to start preschool.  We do school for 1-2 hours (some days more and some days less) depending on his level of focus.  I've spent lots of time planning, prepping, laminating, cutting, and printing.  I'm LOVING all that I've found for him to do.  I'm so excited about the themes for this year.

To start off, I'll show you our morning school routine.  It's a fun way to start our morning.  I used several different websites to get calendar ideas, but I mostly got my printables from here.

Here is a look at our foam board calendar.  We also have a laminated calendar beside it where we add our days to the squares.

Every morning, we start with singing our books of the Bible.  I learned my books of the Bible through song, so we're using that song.  The song is actually from the Wee Sing Bible Songs CD.  I like the tune and still sing it to this day!

 I think that it's never too early to start learning character traits.  I know I'll be teaching it to them throughout their entire lives, but I want B to give an idea of them.  For this month, or maybe longer, we are learning about obedience.  I found a workbook that is meant for his age that is full of games, puzzles, and coloring pages based on the Bible.  We spend a few minutes each morning talking about how certain people in the Bible obeyed and then what happened when they chose to disobey God.  We are also learning a Scripture verse that corresponds to the trait.  B has actually had this verse memorized since he was 2, so we're just saying it every morning now.

I used the Days of the Week Songs to start this section of our calendar.  We sing the songs, going through the days.  We then find what today is, label the day for tomorrow, as well as figure out which day was yesterday.

I haven't put the Velcro on this section of the calendar yet, but it has cards to go with it.  They show snow, rain, sun, and clouds.  This will help us be able to look outside and observe what the weather is like at that moment.

To be honest, this is the part of the calendar that I'm the MOST excited about!  We are using the Children's version of Operation World and are spending about a month going through different countries, learning the basics about them for right now.  I started with the U.S. because I thought that would be a good place to start.  We are committing to praying for the people in that country and are going to be writing a missionary to each country, as well...unless there aren't missionaries in the hard-to-reach countries.  I plan to use this throughout our homeschooling time and expand our knowledge on the countries, religions, and learning more about the people groups, and praying specifically for them.  We'll probably start out with the countries of several of our friends that are missionaries and then go to the countries where our Compassion and World Vision kids are located, since they hear from them quite often. (So in the next couple of months we'll be studying Argentina, Brazil, Thailand, Uganda, Philippines, and Rwanda.)

We are learning seasons and have learned we are in summer now, but headed towards fall.  Perhaps it will start raining again in the fall!  We desperately need it!  Our house hasn't gotten rain in over a month.

So, that's a look at our calendar.  I'm excited about our school year and all of the fun learning things we're going to be doing.  We'll be adding lots of things that I'll share as we do them. 

Welcome to Preschool, B!

Shopping Lists

I'm on a quest to be more organized and to purge and clean out my house since we're hoping to move soon.  I'm a list person and I tend to do better when I have a list and when I can mark things off.  Over the past month, I've been doing E-mealz, which plans healthy meals for me according to what is on sale at the store.  I love it!  I can't seem to find time to pair up coupons with items that I would actually eat because it's healthy.  Most of the coupons tend to be junk food items and things I don't really need or use.  With that said, e-mealz takes care of that for me when it comes to dinner plans.  That leaves 2 snacks, lunch, and breakfast to plan for.  Yes, I'm turning over a new leaf and cooking breakfast, too.  AMAZING!  I'll share some things along the way, but for the moment, I'll leave it at that. 

E-mealz has you print off a grocery list, but it still leaves me frustrated when I have other items for the rest of our meals that I have coupons for.  I haven't been able to find a great way to mark the fact that I have a coupon for a certain item so I can remember to use it.  With that said, I created a shopping list form so all I have to do is check the box when I bought it and check the box on the other side if there's a coupon to go with it.  Because I love you so much, I'll share it with you.  It's nothing fancy, but it's not like it's going to be hung up and framed!  If you want the actual document, send me your email and I'll forward it to you.  Perhaps it can be useful to someone else besides me!