C is for Cat

Another wonderful week!  Malcolm is 37 months old this month.  He's growing up so fast.  I decided that 3 year old Malcolm is awesome.  He is much more independent and has no problems playing while I have to deal with the baby.  He helps me clean and is to the point where he is actually sort of helping.  He loves to give his sister hugs and kisses and has started giving me random hugs and kisses during the day as well.  But my all time favorite are the random 'love you mom' that I get.  It just totally makes my day.

Monday - Since it was a holiday Daddy was home!  I made a new schedule but didn't even do what I wanted because of the holiday.  We started off by doing our new calander and weather routine.  I don't have pictures of this but right by the back door I put a calander I got for Christmas at eye level for Malcolm.  It has pockets so I'm using it as our planning calander and writing down days we go to the park, or field trips we have coming up so Malcolm can see when we have a special day coming up.  I point out to him the day of the week, the month, the date, and the year every morning.  Then I ask him what the weather is like and we draw a picture on that day.  Most of them are little suns, smiling of course, but we do have one sun with clouds and one rain cloud.  It actually rained over the weekend!

We started off school by getting distracted by a hungry baby just as we started.  So I set him up with playdough and gave him his letter A and B sheets to make the letters out of playdough.

Once the baby was fed and happy we moved onto my original plan.  We colored our C is for Cat coloring page.  I ended up putting this and the A and B coloring pages we have already done up on the wall so I  can point to them.  I sing a little rhyme that I got the idea for from Starfell.  "A a(sound) apple, B ba Butterfly, C ka Cat" and we'll just add to it everytime as we do more letters each week.

We then did dot paint of course!  We dot painted a big C that is C is for catapillar.  He loved doing this and ended up with paint all of his hands and even his face!  We also dot painted letters inside of a cat and just like before he paints all the captial letters first, proudly tells me he did all the "big Cs" and then goes and does the "tiny Cs".

Then came our hands on work.  I printed up a bunch of pictures of things that start with C and cut them out on card stock.  I showed Malcolm the pictures and he had to tell me what it was of before he could glue it on the paper.  I still put the glue on for him and I think he actually prefers it that way because he HATES to get his hands dirty but I'm thinking next week I might start trying to get it to do it himself.

After this came our C scavenger hunt around the house.  We grabbed our laundry basket and went on a hunt to find things that start with C.  We ended up with Cup, crackers, cowboy (and girl), car, and cow (on the chick-fil-a watch).

This ended our planned day so Malcolm put the C objects away and then sat down to eat some crackers.  The boy loves his food!  So of course, it was then time for BABY school.  I figured this is a good way to make sure I get tummy time in for Alison since I always manage to forget.  And she just loved all the extra attention and for once didn't mind much being on her tummy.  Of course, she also didn't really try to lift her head at all either.  She was to busy watching Mommy and smiling.

After all of this I fed the baby again and left her at home with my mother-in-law and Daddy and I took Malcolm out to Santiago Oaks for our nature study.  It was still very overcast, spinkley, and cool so we didn't think Baby Sister should be out in that.  Malcolm had a blast throwing rocks into the water but we saw a lot of birds.

Tuesday - Today was a trying day for Mommy. I just ran out of patience and I'm not really sure why.  We settled down to homeschool only to have the gardeners show up midway through and I never did get Malcolm to focus back in.  We started off by doing a matching memory game I made for him over the weekend. I picked 6 letters for this: A, B, C, L, O, M.  The first three to reinforce what we have already gone over and the last three so that we can spell his name!  We played the game first and as he found matches I made him tell me something that started with that letter.  I had to prod him for apple and really walk him through it.  But for B all I had to do was point to the butterfly we made last week and the cat he colored for C and he got them right away.  I got a little thrill when I asked him what started with the letter M and he responded "Me!!"  I'm sure he meant his name, but I just found it funny that Me also starts with M.  We haven't gone over M yet but I point it out to him a lot because it does start his name so he doesn't have any problems with it.  L and O we haven't covered at all so I didn't expect him to come up with something so I just supplied a word myself.

We then did a cat craft mostly to work on shapes.  I found this one from DLDK.  I had him color the templete and I cut out the peices for him.  It's all circles and and triangles so I was able to point out the shapes for him.  While I was cutting the peices out I had him do a maze I found from 1+1+1=1.  It was an A maze where he had to color all the A or a squares to find the path from the apple tree to the apple basket.  He started off doing that and then ended up just coloring all of them because he lost interest.  It was at this point the gardeners showed up and he lost all interest in school completely.  I managed to get him back long enough to finish gluing our cat and putting it up on the window next to the butterfly but that was it.

I took it outside later because I just felt he needed that today.  We worked on getting him practice on his tricycle.  He loved it but I just lost patience with his nonpedeling and dawdling and just didn't want to deal with it anymore so I steered him back before he was ready.  But he sure was cute!  We ended up going to the playground, on foot and with the baby, later in the day to help get more of his wiggles out and boy did he need it.

I also managed to clean the house with his help today while we listened to our composer for the term Mendellson.  We were supposed to do it on Monday but glad we got it in!

Wednesday - Busy!  Today we went on a hunt for white tee shirts to tie dye.  I found some for Malcolm and me at Goodwill but had to go to walmart for plain white onies for Alison.  I also got the tie-dye kit there though so it wasn't out of my way.  Why tie-dye?  Because Disneyland Homeschool Days is the end of this month  and the homeschoolers are supposed to wear tie-dye.  I'm going to meet up with one of my old friends who homeschoolers her daughter and have a tie-dye party.  Fun!

After running around for those two errands we went to a new park to meet our third and last homeschool group for park day.  It was very small, only two other families and the children were preteens so Malcolm couldn't play with them.  But the Mom's included me into this conversations which was really nice and Malcolm played with a lot of other small children at the playground anyway.  We ended up staying 2 1/2 hours which is one of the longest days we've ever had at a playground.  I usually don't have the patience to sit around that long. We packed our lunch and ate at the park which was nice too.

After the park we went to the library.  Malcolm dropped all his books into the book return and we set out to pick new books for the week.  He only picked one himself and I got to pick the others so we have a better selection this week.  Yay!  That wrapped our day up and we just played independently when we got home after that.

Thursday - We hardly did any school today.  We played with playdough, did puzzles, and just had fun.  After Tuesday I thought it was best to just take a break and play, so that's what we did!

Friday - We went to our park group again today.  This time one of the Mom's was putting on a pill-bug study.  Malcolm loved watching the bugs and even used a magnifying glass!  The moms did much more in depth study for the older kids present including diet, habitat, body parts, etc.  Malcolm of course was to young so I was thrilled he was just studying them in general!