We have slowly made our way to letter J and number 10.  :-)  Taking our time has been a great luxury.  One of the joys of home schooling.  But in the meantime I am teaching her to spell her name as well as making sure she has her personal information (phone number and address) memorized as well.  Which is just as important as the other things we are doing.  But I am getting her back on track with our bulletin board and worksheets.  This week we are not only doing the letter J and number 10 but we are also learning about Utah and we going over our shapes again.

I also put up a sheet for me to go over some vocabulary words this month…so that sheet will stay up this month because it is for the holidays.  It has words like decoration that I can teach her.  Meanwhile we sung Jingle Bells when we were hanging up the decorations picture since Jingle Bells has a J in Jingle.

Here is our bulletin board this week:

This week has been a week of being laid back more than usual.  As you can see on the bulletin board, my printer is on the fritz and I’m waiting on it’s replacement…thank goodness for warranties..lol.  Week 7, a week of learning the letter F and number 6.  I added a new shape, ovals and if  you notice on the board I colored them in to help Emmi recognize them.  That worked pretty good to.  I added California to our list of states.  But, haven’t really touched up on it too much, I think next review week we do I’m going to stop teaching more states and do more fun games with them.  But, I did get Emmi a puzzle of the united states that we can do together too.  She loves puzzles so much I’m going to save it for her birthday that is in November.  That will be fun for us to do over and over again.

I added Rainbows to our theme this week and I even printed up a coloring page for Emmi to color the rainbow.  If you notice on the bulletin board the letter F practice lines with fox on it, we did that this week too.  As well as….you guessed it, more sponges!  LOL  I did numbers this week, up to the number 6 for Emmi to play with.

Funny part about doing the letter F this week, this weekend we even went to a birthday party and Emmi got a party gift of a fish to color on that holds a picture.  That was great since we talked about fish and how they start with F.

This week I decided that since it’s review week, we can do a Halloween theme.  So we will probably try a craft with Halloween this week and she is helping to make a pumpkin pie.  Reminder, repeat for Thanksgiving. Needless to say we are laying back and enjoying review week.  Going over A, B, C, D, and E.  As well as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and our shapes that we have learned too (rectangle, square, circle, triangle, and star).  Since we have many states to learn I did introduce a new state, Texas.  With worksheets and crafts this week has gone by quickly.  I did do a bulletin board this week too.  So I printed up some sheets for the letters so we can do sounds with the letters.  On the Halloween picture I took the bottom where there was empty space and wrote in the numbers since I ran out of space quickly with the letter sheets.  I added a small picture of Texas too as well as a couple of sheets with shapes on them.

We did a lot of reviewing along with the new stuff we learned.  Especially since this coming week is review week for us anyways.  We did  a lot of coloring pages and playing on the computer. I also made up some sheets and went over our numbers, letters and shapes to keep them fresh.  Emmi was happy to inform me that she enjoys the worksheets which I’m so glad that she does.  But I think this week for review we will try to do a craft/project of some sort and do more worksheets.  Our bulletin board probably won’t be used much this week except with what we learned in week 5.  And here is an example of one of the pages I did for her to go over the letters, numbers and shapes.  I would point to one and she would have to tell me what it was I was pointing at.

Okay well, this question is asked in our house a lot!  lol  Between owning two businesses and then when we go grocery shopping or whatever, my daughter probably can’t help but to want to play store.  Well, I thought of a fun way to play store AND do school fun!  Ya gotta be creative!  So, what I did was I made money with the numbers we have learned and the shapes we learned.

After I did that, I made up price tags for her toys she wanted to play store with

As she “bought” stuff, she would tell me what number and shape was on her price tags and would pay with the money and tell me what number and shape was on her money.  it was fun. If you noticed I just took some of another piece of paper and made a circle around the toy and attached the extra piece to the price tag with tape so it didn’t fall out.  She thought it was more like a store this way too.  So you might end up doing this more often then you think.

Wow can you believe that week four is here already!  Where does the time go.  This week we are introducing the letter D, number 4.  This week in honor of the letter D, I am making our theme about Dogs with our vocabulary work being canine.  Emmi decided she wanted to learn about Louisiana this week (because on our “fun” map of the U.S. there is a mask for Mardi Gras..lol).  We are doing a song for the theme this week, “How Much Is That Doggie In The Window”.  Also, the shape of the week is Triangles.

We started off the week by going over the previous 3 weeks letters and numbers to refresh the work in her mind and then as we posted the new work on the bulletin board we went over the new letter and number.  After posting those, Emmi wanted to learn about Louisiana so we talked about where it was located and what the mask was there for.  We also pointed out where the other 3 states we learned before were again (Florida, Tennessee, and New York).  And finally ending the day with doing worksheets with Triangles.  I found a great worksheet with a mish-mosh of shapes and Emmi put a circle in the Triangles and an X in the shapes that were not triangles (and we named each shape that wasn’t a triangle too since we have already been learning those shapes – rectangles, squares and circles).

Today we moved on to doing school a little different than we usually do, we worked on the computer.  :-D  I usually try and stay hands-on with crafts, projects, worksheets and coloring, cutting/pasting, etc.  But, since Emmi loves playing games and stuff on the computer (I’m sure most kids do..lol), I went on a couple of websites and played games with numbers and then we played some letters games.  There are lots of fun sites out there you can find with an easy google search for preschool games.  If there is some games that you like to do in particular, like we wanted to do letters and numbers games, you can search that or even better we like searching for preschool games.  :-D

We enjoyed doing a few worksheets this week.  Again, we kept it light due to everyone here being sick all week.  there were a couple of days we didn’t get to do much at all but go over things.  We grabbed a worksheet for the letter B to learn to recognize not only the capital letter B but also the lower case.  she traced it inside and we went over finding the letter B in the words at the bottom of the sheet.

We moved on to the number 2 worksheet.  What I did, I went into my purse and pulled out some pennies and grabbed Emmi’s change jar too.  Then as we did the worksheet, tracing the number two and then she practiced writing it herself.  Afterwards, she drew two circles in the jar.  I asked her to take two pennies and put them into her own jar.  It helped make the worksheet come to life.

We took a few minutes break from worksheets and talked about Tennessee.  She pointed it out a map we have of the United States, since that is where Grandma lives..lol.  We talked about a guitar since the map shows a guitar to help kids remember and I mentioned how Tennessee has mountains and valleys.  It was a great way to talk about our vocabulary word and how it relates to things today instead of just dinosaurs.

Finally, we worked on circles.  I really enjoyed this worksheet and how it helped to bring numbers in with the circles.  Kind of two lessons in one deal.  :-D  I asked her to find the number 1, the number 2, 3 and 4 and then I told her to find what colors needed to be used and she colored the numbers that were in the circles.

Luckily this week was a breeze for us since we were sick and we did mostly worksheets.  Emmi knew about all the stuff we did this week, it was just a matter of getting involved.