This summer we are working on learning to write, using Montessori sand paper letters and free handwriting printables. At the current rate, we'll be through the alphabet and the numbers by mid-September. At that point she'll be able to write numbers, and that will open up a world of math learning options.

Once we've finished the handwriting, the plan to continue with reading is to focus upon learning words by writing them. She LOVES to write, especially letters to people. And I've noticed that she remembers words that she has written several times in her letters when she sees them. So we are going to do more with that, writing little captions to pictures, other letters, and things like that. I also plan on using Bob books and maybe revisiting Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons for the last lessons.

As for math, we are using a lot of manipulatives. Montessori materials (addition/subtraction boards, multiplication board, beads through 1000, the stamp game) and toys (Discovery toy's Playful Patterns, a marble run, legos, etc.). I need to remember to do clocks and money.

For science, we are going to use the Science Wiz electricity kit and science experiment books from the library.

I also want to continue doing things with Spanish.

For social studies, books from the library.

That's as far as I've gotten. I think this should take us through December. After that we'll see what we're missing from the content standards, if anything, and fill them in in the spring.

Geography

This month we are studying Central and South America. Through chants, a large shower curtain map of the world, and a globe, she is learning all the countries of this region and their capitols. It isn't as hard as it sounds - songs and chants seem to effectively teach anything at this age. Other vocabulary: Amazon River, Andes Mountains, and Panama Canal. We are highlighting animals from the region (e.g., Green Anaconda, Pirana, etc.). We are also highlighting a couple of countries: Argentina (she has a friend whose dad is from there), Brazil, and Mexico. On an evening of the month we are eating a dinner from each of these countries, listening to music from the respective country. I'm also reading children's folk lore from the region.

Favorite Books

I wanted to make a running list of our favorite books at this age:

More, More, More said the Baby
Some Dogs Do
Swimmy
Inch by Inch
Millions of Cats

When Sick:
Don't You Feel Well, Sam?

Fall:
Runaway Pumpkin

Christmas:
Snow Angel
Swimmy
Inch by Inch
Millions of Cats

Reading

We continue to use lots of books from the library. I'm going through the Kindergarten supplementary books on the Seton Home Study webpage. And I'm teaching her to read using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. We're about half way through. We only do it when she asks for it.

Social Studies

Today we played Candy Land with NO RULES. It wasn't any fun. Then we played it with the rules, and it was great. We did this to introduce the concept of law. We talked about laws she is familiar with - I drew pictures of a stop sign, speed limit sign, and stop light, and we talked about what would happen if people didn't follow those laws. Then we talked about the 10 Commandments. We went over the 3 branches of our government in a representational democracy, and then talked about dictatorships with good dictators and bad dictators. In the kingdom of God, God is the one and only ruler - a supremely good dictator. Our country is the USA, and it is a rep democracy. We talked about how we have reps at a state and national level, and worked our Melissa and Doug state map to draw her connections between state government and something she is already familiar with - states. Did we really do all of that??? Seems like a lot for a 4 year old when I write it out, but she seemed to really follow it.

Science: Botany

I'm using the curriculum standards from Core Knowledge (http://www.coreknowledge.org/) and the NJ Dept of Education Core Curriculum Standards.

We've been growing beans and seeds and doing simple plant experiments, like putting a carrot in water and seeing what happens. We put kidney beans in damp tissue paper wrapped in foil, one or two a day over the course of a week. Then we unwrapped them and arranged them in order of least to most developed, talking about germination. We did some experiments with this. Like, with some beans we tried using too much water - she thought it was fun to use too much water, but then when she smelled the saw the rotting bean she decided not to do that. She designed her own experiment - putting pine needles in a bucket of water to see if they would turn green. The experiment was successful - she learned that they will not turn green through water alone. She also helped improve on the carrot experiment.

Science

GREAT early elementary science resources that are not too expensive:

http://www.sciencewiz.com/books/books.htm

Animals

Today was my husband's day off, and it turned into a homeschool animal day. We took the kids to the zoo. It was loads of fun. My daughter rode a camel. When we got home she and I read/worked through the first portion of her Little Kid National Geographic magazine of this month (complete with punch-out cards with animals on them with their names and fun facts), learning about owls and playing some of the games in the magazine. Then we spent a lot of time just running around outside while my husband trimmed the shrubs...

Fall

So this fall...

Science:
1. I'm checking out books from the library on different things in nature. This week we used a children's flap-book on birds - finches, flamingos, birds of paradise, peacocks, and penguins. Flamingos were her favorite.
2. My parents ordered her a subscription for National Geographic for Kids. It is fabulous. This month's came with punch-out cards with pictures of different kinds of animals on them and facts about them on the back. There was an extensive "article" on bears, and games (rhyming, matching, etc.) to play inside.
3. We have a membership at the Aquarium and the Zoo, both really fabulous facilities. We went over the summer, and we'll likely go to each once more this fall.

Social Studies:
1. We are learning Spanish. She has taken to saying "Hola" to people on the bike path, now that she has heard several people speaking Spanish as they passed her. We're using a music CD and kid Spanish/English dictionaries/phrase books from the library to build vocabulary and learn grammatical constructions.
2. I'm teaching her the countries (and their capitols) where Spanish is spoken. So, mostly Latin America, South America, and Spain. I'm using a rap I actually learned in my 6 week introduction to Spanish class in the 7th grade for this, along with our shower curtain (a map of the world).
3. We're reinforcing the states of the US, which she learned earlier, with the Melissa and Doug USA map puzzle that she received for her birthday.

Math:
1. Legos.
2. I bought Montessori math beads - unit, tens, hundreds, and thousands - to teach her how much these amounts are from a tactile and visual perspective. The plan is to use these to teach basic calculations, although she is so interested in blocks and building and playing pretend that she usually wants to use the materials for other purposes. So we might wait on calculation, or just insert it slowly here and there. We'll see.

Language:
1. We're using Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons. She is on lesson 30 and doing great.
2. Spanish.
3. As far as communication goes, she is learning quite a bit at nursery school. Her teachers are doing a great job. She has started saying to me when she doesn't understand something I've told her, "So what you're saying is... [insert paraphrastic reflection]." :D
4. Of course we talk with her and use expansive vocabulary.
5. We read books to her.
6. We're not really doing writing much right now. Her fingers didn't seem ready for it. I test it out every once in awhile to see how it goes.

Art:
1. She is taking dance.
2. We play act-out-the-story, especially with Little Red Riding Hood and also The Three Little Pigs.
3. I got a book on drawing horses from the library. She loved it. She painted a horse, used a crayon, and used a pencil. I wanted her to do this to see the differences of creating the same picture from different mediums. Today I did a little lesson on perspectives. We looked at a cup straight down - it looks like a big circle around a little circle - and I drew it from that perspective. Then we looked at the cup from the side. The top circle looks like an oval, and so does the bottom circle. I drew it that way. She wanted to go back to horses, though, and so we did. We gave the horse food (grass, carrot, strawberry, and grapes), a red barn around it, and a rider with a red hat (like her Little People farmer) carrying a saddle to ride the horse. Some of it she painted and others she wanted me to paint.
4. Music is a part of our lives. We sing as we learn Spanish. We also listen to the Music Together CD from the summer session.

Physical Development:
1. Dance class
2. Soccer
3. Playgrounds
4. She bounces around (and off the couches) at home.

Social Development:
1. various activities listed above - dance, soccer, also church and, I think, the Spanish
2. nursery school twice a week for a couple hours in the morning.

Christian Education:
1. Church Worship
2. Sunday School
3. Participation in all church activities that are child-friendly
4. We listen to "Wild and Wacky, Totally True Bible Stories" in the car.
5. Regular prayers.
6. Our little cross liturgy before she goes to bed at night.

So, in terms of the "7 intelligences":
physical - see above under physical development
interpersonal - see above under social development
intrapersonal - we talk about how she feels, etc.
musical - see above under art
spacial - see above under art/visual
linguistic - see above under language
mathematical/logical - see above under math

Hebrew

We aren't going to do this, yet, I don't think, but this website looks like a really fun way to teach Hebrew.

http://www.cartoonhebrew.com/index.php

Consequences Play

Katie is continuously working on how to deal with the reality that there are consequences to decision... and not particularly nice consequences to bad decisions. Most recently her thoughts and play with regard to this has focused in on food. It started when we read The Hungry Caterpillar. On Saturday, the caterpillar eats a bunch of junk food and then he feels sick. The next day he eats one nice, green leaf, and he feels much better. This really tickled Katie. She wanted to read that part over and over. Then we got her some new play dough, and the first thing she made was a caterpillar with food for it. I said, "Let's make a green leaf!" And she said, "No, let's make a piece of cherry pie!" (That's one of the junk food pieces the caterpillar eats in the book). She made a bunch of junk food for the caterpillar and then he ate it all up, and then he felt so sick!!! THEN he ate a nice, green leaf and felt much better. She is playing this over and over again. I think she is actually a little confused, because she doesn't believe the caterpillar can make a cocoon until it eats all the junk and gets sick, like in the book... I attempted to tell her otherwise, but she is really stuck on this. Maybe I can find another book on caterpillars to show her it doesn't really work that way??? In any case, what she is really working on is the fact that the caterpillar WANTS to eat all this junk food, but the end result is getting sick. She talks about it at meal times. This morning the caterpillar made the decision NOT to eat the cookies before lunch time, just like his mommy told him. :-)

Hungry Caterpillar

This evening we did a play dough acting-out of Eric Carle's The Hungry Caterpillar. Katie made a play dough caterpillar, and then she made a bunch of food for it - I helped with ideas for food while washing the dishes. And then we told the story, with the caterpillar "eating" the food. By the time he had eaten all the food Katie had made for him, he was, indeed, a "big, fat caterpillar" ready to make a cocoon. Then it nibbled a hole in the cocoon, and... out popped a beautiful butterfly!

Katie's Favorites

I thought I'd make a list of Katie's favorite activities that she can do by herself when I need her to play alone. Its funny that we have all these nice toys, but the favorites are all inexpensive classics:

1. Bubbles
2. Play dough
3. Paint a picture
4. Roller Skate
5. Blocks
6. Tumble on/off furniture

Wash a chair

This was also inspired by Montessori. I asked her, "Would you like to learn how to wash a chair?" To my surprise, she responded enthusiastically. So I got a cup of water and two wash towels. We went over to one of the kitchen chairs, and I explained how to do it. I went back and forth, back and forth, really carefully, just like in the Montessori method. She watched, very focused, and then got her little towel and imitated me. The more careful I was, the more careful she was likely to be. We ended up doing all the chairs, and she did the last one herself. She was SO PROUD. "Look, Daddy! Look what I did! I washed this chair!!! It won't be dirty when you sit on it, because I washed it!"

Long Division

This activity was inspired by Montessori Math. The link is to the left of the blog. I took a bunch of her Easter Egg Hunt candy, along with 4 stuffed animal friends and 4 sheets of paper labeled 1, 10, 100, and 1000. We set up the friends in a circle and told them we were going to give them equal amounts of candy. Then I had her count out 4 candy pieces and put them on the units paper (the one labeled 1), 8 pieces on the tens paper, 4 pieces on the hundreds paper, and 8 pieces on the thousands paper. We said, "We have eight thousand four hundred and eighty-four pieces of candy to give away!" Then we "divided" the candy between the 4 friends (so, in big person terms, 8,484 divided by 4). From the thousands paper, we gave 1 candy piece to the first friend, 1 to the second, etc., until each of them had 2 pieces of candy for their "thousands place." Then we did the same with the pieces in the hundreds place, tens place, and units place. When all the candy was divided, we said, "Each friend gets two thousand one hundred and twenty-one pieces of candy." Then they gobbled it all up. She was like, "Again! Again!" It is now one of her favorite games.

Books

I was inspired by another homeschool blog to go to the library and get books. Katie LOVES it when I read to her, and we usually read once every day, but there are classics we hadn't done, yet. So this is the book list we are doing this week:
Green Eggs and Ham
The Hungry Caterpillar
Where the Wild Things Are
Some Dogs Do
Peter Rabbit
Yurtle the Turtle and other stories
Friendly Fish
Baby Einstein's My First Book of Shapes - this one is really beneath her, but what is good about it is that it engages her really well.

Easter Play

My daughter saw her Halloween angel costume yesterday, and asked if we could play angel. She wanted to act out the story of Mary being told that Jesus was going to be born. Since it is almost Easter, I asked if she wanted to learn a new angel story, and she did. And so we acted out the story of laying Jesus in the tomb, rolling the big stone in front of it, and the women going away sad to prepare spices to anoint the dead body... Then early in the morning on the first day of the week, they go to the tomb, and the body isn't there. Instead - an angel! They are terrified. And the angel says, "Don't be afraid! Jesus is alive! Go and tell the disciples and Peter to go to Galilee, and he will meet them there." But they go away and tell no one, because they are afraid. (We do it up - "Did we just see an angel? That is so strange! I've never seen an angel! What is going on? Jesus is alive? Dead people don't rise from the dead...") Then we go to the part where they tell Peter and John, and Peter and John run to the tomb, and there is no body. We take turns being either the angel in the angel costume or all the other characters.

Fairy Tale Imagination

Katie (3) is really into imagination games, and this is one we have started playing. We pick a fairy tale, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and we sort of act it out. Katie set out 3 bowls from her kitchen set, and she was Goldilocks. The first one was toooooo hot, mama bear's was toooooo cold, and baby bear's was juuuuust right. Then she does the chairs in the living room and then pretend beds on the floor of the living room. Then I (the 3 bears) come home and go to the kitchen, "Someone's been eating my bowl!" And so on. We end with a climactic encounter between me (the 3 bears) and her (Goldilocks), and she dashes away, never to return to the bear's house... until 10 seconds later when she declares "Again! Again!"

Subtracting Daffodils

To work on subtraction, I printed out 6 little pictures of daffodils. Then I made up a little rhyme, and my daughter loves it -

Six little daffodils up on a hill
Along came Jack and along came Jill
They took [insert number] daffodil(s) off that hill,
But don't worry! There are [insert number] more still.

Counting Syllables

Today we played the syllable game. She or I would pick a word, and then we would clap as we said each "syllable" (new word for her). How many times did we clap? we would ask, and she or I would answer. It was a great game, because it was a lot of fun to her, it reinforced counting skills AND memory skills - she had to remember the sound of the clapping to know how many syllables were in the word. And she learned what a syllable is.