Summer Homeschool Marches On...

We continue to work on learning activities here in our home. We usually start the week out strong and end it fairly week, completing few things on Friday. I need to figure out how to keep the momentum going through the entire week.
Lane loves to paint so it was easy to get her interested in mixing colors. She learned about an artist's palette and the color wheel by using a free printable on this site: http://www.mamamiss.com/2013/07/06/learning-monkeys-paint-palette-color-wheel/ She loved it and told me that she felt like a "real" artist.

I want Lane to work on her letter and number formation. Her writing needs quite a bit of practice despite her developed fine motor skills. I printed neat number formation sheets from this site: http://teachinglittleonesathome.blogspot.com/2013/07/printable-number-formation-practice.html She likes these pages because the different sized boxes are intriguing to her.
I found a clever math preschool idea on Pinterest. Unfortunately, there is no link for me to give credit to the original person. However, it challenged Lane and that is what I want because the basic math problems are too easy for her. I wrote numbers on squares of paper and taped the flags to pipe cleaners. She counted beads as she threaded them on the pipe cleaner.

This site: http://deceptivelyeducational.blogspot.com/2011/12/its-all-same-math-puzzle-game.html has twelve three-part puzzles that are free to print. I cut them out for Alex and set them out. It took him a while to complete the puzzles but he was so proud of himself when he was done. It's called "it's all the same" - a perfect name for a game that showed Alex how each of the problems came to the same resulting number.

Gabriel and I worked on ending sounds, his computer work, and geometric shapes. I printed out shapes and names and we matched them. 

Gabriel has been fascinated about creating Angry Birds. He has a huge bag full of Angry Birds he has drawn and cut out. I found a cool down Angry Bird printable. He talked about it all day. Maybe it will be successful cool down strategy for him. It can be found here: http://kbkonnected.tumblr.com/post/19926961536/dont-be-an-angry-bird-cooling-down-strategies-and

Time...time... time...

Teaching time to children is much more difficult than I realized. I started teaching time to the kids last week with a baseball game. It can be found here: http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Spring-Math-Center-Time-to-Batter-Up-128984 The boys were able to figure out the o'clock for the most part. It got confusing when the hour hand was in between numbers rather than pointing straight at a number.

On freehomschooldeals.com I found printables for the clock. We taped a paper plate on the cabinet and wrote the numbers around it like a clock. We then taped the printables around our paper plate in order by 5's. The boys did a great job counting by 5s and they almost have the concept of connecting the number amount to the minute hand. Lane was able to recognize the numbers.

It was a challenge to find a clock activty for Lane so she could participate. I found a clock activity for Lane on this site: http://www.harcourtschool.com/teacher_resources/math/grade_01/g1_time.html She glued the numbers in order without any problems.

The boys started a time telling book today. It's located here: http://stepintosecondgrade.blogspot.com/2011/07/telling-time-printables.html They worked hard on writing different times in digital form.
We have a long way to go before I have two young men who can tell time. Alex isn't even impressed with the idea as a whole. He said that he would be fine with reading a digital clock for the rest of his life. I didn't have many arguments back for him except that he would have to learn how to tell time at school this upcoming year so he might as well learn it with me.