WOW! Where did the time go?

I cannot believe my last post was in February.  What a tremendously busy and fun year it has been so far.

Besides the wonderful learning journey we've been on (my husband and myself included), we also took a nice long vacation to Florida including 3 days at Disney World.  Fun, fun!!

Entrance to Magic Kingdom

We rowed the following fantastic books from the Before Five in A Row book list:

Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown

The Very Hungry Caterpillar, by Eric Carle

 

The Little Rabbit, by Judy Dunn

and...

We're Going on a Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen

We spent one month on each book.  When time permits, I'd like to do a post on each of the books so I can pass along all of the fantastic resources we used to cover them.

I had planned to take the summer off, but at the end of the first week Hayden asked me if we could do some school work.  Soooo, we dove back in finishing up June by covering all things 4th of July.  We started learning the states and their capitals.  We hung a small flag in our school room and started every day with the pledge and finished the day with the Star-Spangled Banner.  And...we read two books by Patricia A. Pingry titled, The Story of America's Birthday and The Story of "The Star-Spangled Banner".

I've been looking for a good United States puzzle for several months.  We have a couple.  One is a large floor puzzle and the other is a magnetic puzzle that I found at Hobby Lobby one day.  Neither one really fit the bill, so I started looking for a wooden puzzle and finally settled on the Melissa & Doug Deluxe Wooden USA Map Sound Puzzle.  It's a talking puzzle that tells you the names of the states and their capitals when you put the pieces in.  The two biggest problems I have with this puzzle are first, each state doesn't have it's own piece, and second, the cut out lines don't necessarily follow the boundaries of the states (some do fairly well).  The kids like it well enough, but they don't understand why one piece might have two states on it instead of one.

Right now, we're rowing the book Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?, by Nancy Wright Carlstrom.  In a couple weeks, I'll have some fun stuff to show you...I promise!

Hayden progressed so far this year with reading and math that we've decided to start kindergarten this fall.  In preparation, I will be attending the Texas Home School Coalition conference in 2 weeks to finalize my choices for curriculum and listen to lectures on a wide range of topics.  Very exciting!  I've been filling every bit of spare time I have researching various curriculum for math, reading, and handwriting and gathering resources for bible, science, memory work, art and last but not least...how to organize it all.

Sophie will be working on mastering her letter sounds this fall and we'll continue to row several more books.

After everything has been finalized, I'll post about our choices.  Have you already had a child go through kindergarten or are you preparing, like I am, for kindergarten in the fall?  I'd love to hear what you used or are using and your experiences.

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