Building Polygons: Marshmallow fun!

Here's this week's Kindergarten math hands on activity! To end our summer math enrichment J bug is building polygons! She's memorizing polygons tri through dodeca (3 to 12). To make it come to life, she'll be building with toothpicks and marshmallows! Here's some pics of the fun!

DIY Balance (Nicole)

This week we are learning about measurement. Baby girl is 5 years old and will officially be a Kindergarten student this Fall. To prepare her my goal by the end of the summer is to have her on a 1st grade level for Math. She already is reading at a 3rd grade level, and for me that is such an accomplishment, I'm so proud of her! Math is coming along quite nicely as well! She knows how to tell time by the minute and knows how to identify money by the name and tell what each coin is worth. Currently we are on estimation and measurement. We are continuing to review time and money, this will be an ongoing subject, it takes time for them to really get the idea of counting by 5's in time, and counting by various numbers in money, so these subjects will be ongoing until I feel she is at a mastery level. Here's our DIY balance!

 With a hanger, some yarn and plastic cups we were well on our way to begin measuring!

 Here are the items we would use to measure.

                          

Items Weighed:   1/4 cup, potato bag clip, baby bottle top                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

 The 1/4 cup weighed 11 blocks, the clip weighed 2 dice, and baby bottle top weighed 15 red chips!  For the remainder of the week we will continue to weigh different household items and transition into estimation, estimating how many blocks she thinks it will take to guess the weight of various items! :)

Teaching Homeschool Foreign Languages: Creole and Spanish

Taking our home school to the next level, we are teaching Creole and Spanish Foreign Languages. We cover the basics of education on our own times, in the early mornings. This includes the fundamentals such as Reading, Writing, Math, and any other learning  that we want our kids to learn at this stage. For the past couple of weeks, we have been balancing the blog, our curriculum, and tutor business, and my goodness let's just say it's been crazy over here! We've finally completed the Phonics curriculum, and our blogging process has become a little more routine, so things are getting back to normal.

While adjusting to our new schedule, we've settled on coming together at 10am in the morning to review Creole and Spanish concepts. Alouse, our Haitian descent mommy, directs our Creole learning time, and we are currently learning Numbers, Alphabet, Colors, Animals, Foods, and Communication! We're excited to see the progress the girls are making. We would love to one day create a video showing our Creole and Spanish times with the girls.

Little Jo (my baby son), is even joining in on the fun. Every now and then he adds a "Bonjou" every now and then and "pom," for apple!

Here's a look at our Creole Alphabet Chart!

Check out the Alphabet video that we're reciting everyday with the kids:

Creole Alphabet Song

Teaching a Preschooler to Read (Nicole)

I've been teaching my daughter, Justice to read since she was 3 1/2 years old. Early learning has been a passion of mine since her birth. Ever since I can remember I've been showing her various facts of life and reading everything! When Justice was a baby I read to her, sometimes, 5-10 books a day! Just thinking about it, I'm tired, :) :) :) But I can say that it built her interest in reading, and also helped lengthen her attention span. From opposites videos, to learning shapes, colors, and letter sounds, her first 3 years of life were filled with an educational focus. At 3 1/2 years old, I started baby girl on Phonics. I created my own curriculum from Fall of 2013 and finished it Winter of 2014. Since that time, she has flourished, and is currently reading on a 2nd-3rd grade level, at 4 years old! YES I AM HAPPY about it lol. Soon, I'll post some footage of her reading, and look out for the custom curriculum, it's in the works! One of the things, that I'm trying to get back to, is read a louds! I'm a STRONG believer is read alouds, reading to your children. It helps keep them actually interested in the content. The more varied your content the better, it can include fun stories as well as factual materials on space, animals, recycling, etc...

So I wanted to share with you all, the reading series we use to practice her independent reading. My mother, who is a Kindergarten teacher has been using this resource for YEARS. It's a book series by Houghton Mifflin Reading. The names of the books are Bells, Drums, Trumpets, Parades, Carousels, Adventues, Discoveries, Caravans, Journeys, Flights, and Explorations. The following order starts with 1st grade reading and ends with 5th grade level reading. It's great because the vocabulary builds and each stories introduces new sights words. Anyone that's looking for readers, this is a great series, its easy to read, the stories are made up of sight words, and their very inexpensive! I LOVE THESE BOOKS, I plan to incorporate this series with my all my children, Josiah, your next! Here is our Discoveries, book, she's currently on the story of Sumi and the Tokyo Express!

You can find the series below!

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