M is for Mummy

We're starting our new week today, and since it's Halloween, we're doing M is for Mummy.

First we made our "M" page that will go into the alphabet book we're building. We gathered stickers of anything we could find that starts with "M". Then he did the M page in his workbook.

Mater, monkey, mitt (it looks like a brain, but it's a mitt), milkshake, McQueen, Minnie, marshmallow, Mickey, and moose

Clothespin mummies

I've had these clothespins for at least five years. I used to crochet angels for them. I haven't used them in ages but they were perfect for making mummies! Some of the heads are dipped in glow-in-the-dark paint which makes them extra fun.

Mummy lacing cards

We made these lacing cards out of a cut up cereal box with construction paper pasted on top. Peyton helped me glue the paper on top, then we laced them up with yarn any which way.

Clearance goodies

We had to run some errands at Target and this was marked way way down. It's a dry erase book, which I love because we can do it again and again, and Jack can use it someday. As soon as we got home, he sat down for about half an hour and diligently worked on writing numbers. Two dollars well spent.

Story time!

We had a Halloween book today that he was able to help me read, and "The Scarab's Secret" which was a bit more complex, but great for answering questions with the story cube.

Wilderness Adventures

The Wilderness Lodge is hands down our favorite Disney resort. this is our go-to any time we have a free morning and want to take a long walk. It's about three miles from the Wilderness Lodge to Fort Wilderness, which is our usual trek. It takes us through the woods and we usually spot deer and other wildlife. We needed to collect leaves for some of our fall crafts, so we took a nature walk to pick them up.

At the Wilderness Lodge, beginning our journey.

The trail hits Fort Wilderness at the Settlement. We've always walked past the stables but on this visit we decided to pop in and explore.

In the exhibit room at the front of the stables

Checking out some seriously huge horses.

I mean really.. I'm 5'10". This horse is GIGANTIC.

Tools and Tricks

I tried to take Sunday off to get some things together for the coming week, but Peyton was way too excited to let any of it wait.

Playing with my Kindle Fire

I got a handwriting app for my Kindle that guides him through writing uppercase and lowercase letters, which is great because he's not a fan of following the arrows on paper. On the app, he doesn't get the stars if he doesn't follow the path.

Reading with our story cube.

I put together a paper cube with different story comprehension questions on each side. After we read a story, he rolls the cube three times and answers the questions that pop up.

The word machine.

Peyton calls this the "word machine." It's really just three strips of paper fed through a piece of cardboard. By adjusting the letters, he can make different words. Since they're all three letters, we haven't come up with anything that he can't easily read yet, so he loves this one. Naturally, Monday morning also started with "Can we play some more with your word machine?"

Felt, Slime, and Other Things Pumpkin

Another busy day to close out our week! I'm hoping to take a day off tomorrow, but I tried that last week and Peyton still pressed me for "learning activities," so we'll see. Here's how we closed out our "P is for Pumpkin" week.

Pumpkin slime

I've seen lots of Pinterest recipes for slime but never tried it before. Today we made orange pumpkin-scented slime. It turned out perfect and was tons of fun to play with.

Popsicle stick construction

I got these Popsicle sticks with all kinds of shape and counting activities in mind but of course Peyton had his own awesome ideas. He snagged them right away and started building houses out of them.

Felt pumpkins

I made a pumpkin and black shapes out of felt and gave them to Peyton to make different faces. We talked about different emotions and he made faces to match them. He also practiced making pumpkins following my instructions for shapes.

I Spy City

Peyton's absolute favorite game is I Spy. He devours the books. We got two from the library today (along with about 20 other books. I love the library.) One of the pictures had blocks in it so we were inspired to build our own I Spy City. We made this together and then spent at least an hour spying different shapes, colors, and letters in it. When I couldn't think of new things to spy anymore, I had him count the different shapes (there are, by the way, 8 arches, though you can't see them all in this picture.)

Legos, and Monsters, and Pumpkins Oh My!

Every day Peyton goes through about twice as many activities as I thought he would accomplish, so I haven't had much time to get ahead of him and plan things. Fortunately, going with the flow always seems to end in some great lessons, too.

The greater-than-less-than monster.

We made this monster together with me giving him the shapes and Peyton gluing them together. Then we played with piles of candy and Peyton turned the monster toward the bigger pile. We don't usually have this much candy on hand, but we went to Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween Party a few weeks ago and came home with more than we will ever figure out what to do with.

Pumpkin matching game

I cut out all the pieces for this, then drew the three little square cards. Peyton made pumpkin face to match what was on the cards.

Practicing our numbers

Worksheet time!

Peyton loves these worksheets so we do three or four a day. While he was practicing his blue squares, Jack was making some blue doodles as well.

Jack is fascinated with these lacing shapes.

Lego counting

This was really simple to make and kept us busy for quite awhile. First he built towers that matched the numbers written on the sheet (we had to do one row at a time because we didn't have enough Legos otherwise.) Then I built little towers and had him place them in the right square. 

Peeking through the "P"

Since we had the Duplos out, naturally Peyton got creative. He came up with this all on his own, then we spent some time seeing what other letters we could make with the Duplos. He asked me to take this picture and was thrilled that his eye was showing through the P just like he wanted.

P is for Pumpkin and Tent Adventures

I had a few activities planned for today, but the best part of our day was just going with the flow to see where things would take us. We had a great time improvising, and were always learning something along the way.

We practiced cutting with scissors and tracing along the ruler to make these paper pumpkins. When they were done, Peyton wanted to add vines to make a pumpkin patch, so we got some green pipe cleaners and twirled them around pencils (not pictured.)

I never push worksheets because I know how active Peyton is and I didn't bring him home just to make him sit still all day. But he really loves the workbooks we have and often asks to get them out. He always specifies what he wants to work on. Today is was colors and shapes. I was happy to oblige.

Conveniently enough, purple starts with "P".

Our devotional for the day was "God is my fortress." So we built our own fortress and crawled inside to talk about how it protects us. This massive tent has two big rooms and two hallways. I would have loved something like this when I was a kid. Obviously it was a huge hit. We even put our glowing "The Lord is my light" lantern from yesterday in one of the darker corners.

Crawling down one of the tent "hallways" into the big pop-up tent room at the end of the corridor.

This last picture was one of my favorite projects of the day. I didn't plan it at all, but Peyton asked if he could make a man out of shapes. So I cut out a bunch of shapes from construction paper and gave him a plank piece of paper and a glue stick. 

After he made the shape man, we decided to put him in a pumpkin patch. The pumpkins are made with a dot marker, and he decided the extra rectangles would make good stems. Peyton wanted the pumpkins to get plenty of water, so he started drawing an umbrella and said it was raining. I grabbed the glitter paints so we could add rain to the picture. He finished it up with a glittery sun at the top. 

We also made paper planes that we raced around the house, practiced name writing and writing the letter p, and made pizza for lunch. Though it didn't have anything to do with our letter for the week, we played three rounds of memory, too, and Peyton won two out of three.

P is for Pumpkin Day One

Our first day of trying to be somewhat kind of organized. We had a ball! We ended up doing twice what I had planned for us because Peyton just couldn't get enough. I only got pics of the highlights.

Our letter page. We'll make one for every letter of the alphabet. We searched through our stickers for anything that started with "P". He was particularly excited about the Pink Pearl.

This is just one of our P worksheets. Peyton really got into them and did several "P" pages, plus one on ovals, the color orange, and the number 0. 

We added a daily devotional to our routine and did "The Lord is my shepherd." So this is the boys "shepherding" their stuffed animals. Putting the boxes on strings was so much fun we eventually tied several together into a train. Peyton called it the "Toy Express" and used it to go through the house picking things up.

My first experience making homemade Play dough. It smells like pumpkin pie spice. It was supposed to be orange as well, but I didn't have any orange, red, or yellow food coloring. So we made pink, purple, blue, and green instead.

Of course the pretty colors eventually ended up grey, but that just made it better for building roads from, which took up several hours. This sculpture was part of our "guess which "P" animal I'm making" game.

This was going to go with a separate devotional later in the week, but once we got the supplies we were all too excited to wait. The stars in the gel and the white part at the bottom both glow in the dark. It's hard to see here, but the gel is also filled with glitter.

Our dinner after we read "If You Give a Pig a Pancake"

Animal Kingdom Wilderness Explorer Adventures

We're so lucky to have Animal Kingdom right in our backyard. This is still our weekend but we're so excited to start adding as many educational activities as we can to our days that we stopped and picked up a Wilderness Explorer handbook for Peyton to work on during our visit to DAK.

Throughout the park we got to collect stickers for completing different activities. We only made a dent in what's available, but we still got to learn what spiders eat, hear tigers growl, learn about Asia from two natives, see Peyton's name written in Thai, and learn all about conservation. 

Let the Journey Begin

For myriad reasons that I won't bother going into here, we've finally decided to pull Peyton out of his Pre-K program. It simply wasn't the right fit for us and ultimately was causing far more stress than good. I've always been interested in homeschooling, so in light of recent issues with our public school here, we've decided to give it a go for the rest of the preschool year.

Since I figured my friends would get bored with our exploits pretty quickly and I didn't want to flood their feeds with pictures of our projects on Facebook, I staked out this little blog so we can share our adventures with family and interested friends.

This is just our homeschool experiment right now. I don't pretend to be an expert, and I don't know what we will ultimately decide for next year. Right now we're just enjoying the journey.

We've already had an outrageously fun time just making up activities as we go along. Peyton's constantly asking to do "learning activities" with me. Here's a little peek at what we've been up to in our days off  of school the last few weeks. Since hubby is off work Monday and Tuesday, this is our "weekend." We have a big adventure planned today, then we'll start doing slightly more organized work on our "Monday" (otherwise known as Wednesday).

We can't wait to share the fun!

Color by number - I circled the numbers at the bottom in the correct color and he finished the rest.

Trains are his favorite, so when I told him we were going to make a book about his favorite word, he instantly picked this.

Our tree word book and a pipe cleaner tree with hole-punched leaves that he colored in fall colors. Since we live in Florida he insisted that a large number of leaves remain green.

He LOVES this sorting pie. After colors, we did numbers where he counted out the right number of pieces to match what the pie said in each space. 100% on all activities.

He loves making patterns and brought me the step stool to be the "stage" for his pattern making.

Friday night we had homemade pizza followed by family movie night. Peyton made the pizza almost entirely by himself. (You can see Jack helping to pat the dough.)

We watched a PBS show about unique animal friendships, then drew a picture about it. This is the cheetah and dog that were friends, with their zookeeper. Jack grabbed a blue crayon and colored the sky for us. I asked Peyton if he wanted to learn to spell "DOG" and he did it himself before I could help him.

Working on his letters with this handy dry erase LeapFrog board.