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