This year has seemed to go by at a snail’s pace in some regards and quickly in other ways. There is just 1 more week of school left for Little Bug. I will be so relived when her time at this school is up. I am ready to reclaim our homeschool! In the meantime, I am have taken advantage of these last few weeks she will be in school to get some organizational things accomplished around the house. I am also thinking about what life skills I want/need to teach the girls now that they are nearly six and four years old. This summer, one of my goals with them is going to be to establish a Morning Routine that they do without me prompting them so they can be ready for the day when we start our new school year in mid-July. As a public school teacher, the rituals and routines that I established in my classroom were imperative to things running as smooth as possible. I know it won’t hurt to have a few things be routine for the girls so there is no nagging from me every day and so the girls know exactly what is expected of them each day! The routine I would like to establish is quite simple, but it is all about forming habits in the girls that will benefit them for life: Put pj’s away, get dressed, eat breakfast, clear plate from table, brush teeth. The girls do this now, but I have to move them along. I would like to work to the point where they automatically do these things first thing in the morning, without me saying a word!

During the month of April Little Bug finished reading all the books in the first set of BOB Books and we moved to the second set. She really enjoys reading these books because they are not too hard for her. There are words she must decode, but there are also a lot of words that she can easily read! She continues to enjoy the activities I print off for her to complete after reading each book.

Sweet Pea, especially, likes our Calendar Time. I do not do a preschool math curriculum but having a Calendar Time provides preschoolers with so much math practice that will benefit them when starting Kindergarten! We don’t do Calendar Time every day, but I would say we do it, on average, twice a week. Sweet Pea puts the dates all the way to the present day. Then beginning with 1 she counts all the way to the day’s date. So if it was April 24th, she would count from 1 to 24! We also talk about the days of the week and the months of the year by singing fun songs. We observe the weather and the season. Then Sweet Pea gets her Calendar Notebook and dots the date on the calendar and finds the numeral on the picture for the month. Calendar Time provides us with lots of counting and number practice! If Little Bug is with us during Calendar Time, I will have her count by 2’s, 5’s or 10’s to provide her with a challenge instead of just counting one-by-one.

Little Bug is loving the primer books for Explode the Code. She has completed Book A and has started working in Book B. While she has her letter sounds down pat, she needs to practice her handwriting skills and these books give her an excellent opportunity for some extra handwriting practice. She can write so neatly (if she puts her mind to it!) in these books! I really like the handwriting practice in these books. I am buying a set of these books for Sweet Pea and plan to let her start them whenever I think she is ready next school year. Little Bug will continue working through the primers before starting Book 1.

Our favorite games right now are Sum Swamp and The Lady Bug Game. I recently wrote an entire post about Sum Swamp here. It is such an awesome game for children just learning to add and subtract! The Lady Bug game is just a fun game that the girls really enjoy playing. It is educational too as the kids move their spaces (one to one correspondence), count aphids and recognize numbers. We enjoyed playing both games this month.

Little Bug has started working in her second book of Horizons Math Kindergarten! She is excelling in this math program. I am excited for her to continue working through this math curriculum this summer and on into our new school year. The beginning of the second book starts with learning to count by 2’s and recognizing even and odd numbers. There is a lot of addition practice problems. I have gotten to where I tell Little Bug to only complete 2 rows of problems instead of the entire 3 rows. She, of course, complains about all the problems and since she has the concept down good, skipping some of the problems is no big deal.

This month we started learning all about growing seeds! We’ve been reading lots of books about this topic during the month of April. We read A Tree Is a Plant, How a Seed Grows and The Berenstain Bears’ Big Book of Science and Nature. We are about ready to do the experiment in the back of the book, How A Seed Grows. I will include our experiences with that in May’s Homeschool Highlights post.

Uncle plays for a restaurant in town and one weekend he asked the girls if they wanted to sing and play the harmonica with him! They said they did and I truly did NOT think they would actually get up there are perform! Well, I didn’t think Little Bug would because she is NOT a performer! Lo and behold, to my utter shock, they BOTH got up there and Little Bug sang and Sweet Pea played the harmonica! Thanks to modern technology I got to see the performance because I had stayed home with Sarge so he could get to bed on time. My mom recorded them and they were absolutely adorable!

That sums up our April! The weather is finally warm pretty much every day now. We’ve already gotten the kiddie pool and water table out a couple times. Summer is coming!!!

- Elaine