We are having a fabulous summer!

A definite highlight for Little Bug would be when her neighbor friend came over and they played in the mud. I love watching my kids play with simple things like buckets, bowls, mud and water.

While we are taking a break from curriculum learning during the summer, I am taking advantage of these summer days to work on fine motor skills with Little Bug. After just a week or so of practice with various activities, I am seeing a remarkable improvement!

First Little Bug made some “blueberries” by painting beans blue and then using a pair of tweezers to place the beans on the plate to dry. Later we used these “blueberries” for a game that we played when we rowed the book Blueberries for Sal.

I filled up one of Little Bug’s workboxes with paper and a pair of scissors. One day while I read aloud to her she just sat on the (new!) rug in the homeschool room cutting away. She asked to take the cutting to her room for Rest Time and, after going over some very strict guidelines for having scissors in her room unsupervised, Little Bug spent the majority of her Rest Time cutting and making a “Paper Cake”. And she followed the rules for having scissors in her bedroom with no problems at all. This little girl is growing up!

Before working with Little Bug on fine motor skills, I did not having coloring books and crayons accessible to Little Bug. Horrible, I know. But, out of necessity, Little Bug didn’t have the freedom to be able to get crayons and color on her own because I couldn’t trust her with crayons and I hadn’t been very intentional with giving the girls coloring time. All that is different now because Little Bug has finally matured enough to be responsible with crayons (although I always have one eye on her when they are out!) and we now have a drawer in the homeschool room that houses all of our coloring books and a box of crayons. The first time Little Bug decided to color, I told her, “Try to color in the lines!”. Last I knew, she still colored haphazardly all over the paper, paying no attention to lines at all. I was SHOCKED when I saw the pages she was coloring. She was staying in the lines and coloring beautifully! We just need to work on how she grasps her crayons (our handwriting curriculum is going to help with this), but this girl can color!

And then just today I did a practice math lesson with her to see if she would actually be able to sit still long enough to do a math worksheet. I am very excited about the math curriculum I’ve chosen for Little Bug’s Kindergarten year and while I can and will make her math lessons very hands-on, there is a workbook component to this curriculum that I think Little Bug will be able to handle after seeing what she did today.

I used a math workbook that I had bought at Costco a year ago and Little Bug did a page where she had to color the picture that belonged with the picture in the square. She also did a phonics page. I had not planned to try and get her to do two pages but she wanted to so I went with it. She did fabulous with both of these pages and it gave me lots of hope for a successful year with the math curriculum I have selected for the coming school year! She did get a little antsy by the end of the two pages, but that was fine because it was more than I had planned anyway.

We’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables before Rest Time on most days. We finished this book today and now there is only one book left from the selection I chose as her Kindergarten Read Alouds! I will obviously need to choose some more before the start of our new school year.

Grams gave the girls a lesson on patriotism, soccer and the World Cup! The day of the USA vs Germany game, we arrived at Grams and Gramps’ house to find that Grams had put out some USA décor and laid an old tablecloth (the same one Wesley and I would sit on as kids when we would eat in front of the TV) out on the floor for a special picnic lunch to watch USA play Germany!

Sweet Pea jumped on the tricycle today while outside and she could peddle herself! She was so proud!

I guess you could say summer is about half-way over depending on when your 1st Day of School is! We still have lots of fun planned for the remainder of our summer. I am having fun re-organizing our homeschool room for the new year and all of our 2014-2015 curriculum is in place and ready to go!

We are actually going to begin our school year towards the end of July this year. I am going to be keeping a good friend of mine’s 4 month old baby girl for 5 weeks beginning in August. Baby C is a Babywise baby so I am not too worried at all about being able to do school while keeping Baby C. She is already on a wonderful schedule right now at 2.5 months old and I know she still will be at 4 months old, but I want two weeks to work out the kinks and get us back into the groove of school before throwing a baby into the mix! My plan is to start light with everything in July and then after Baby C has been with us for a week or two, we will begin our full load – which still won’t be all that much since we are just doing Kindergarten and PK3 this year!

I’m looking forward to the remainder of our summer and a brand new school year on the horizon!

- Elaine