What do you do all day?

We don’t own a television. Any time this comes up, after whoever is hearing this for the first time picks his or her jaw up off the floor they ask me “What do you do all day long?”

Another shocker to many is that my kids won’t be attending school and that, at least for now,  I am “unschooling” Keagan. *and Eden, learning begins at birth, right?

So I thought I would show what it is we do all day long and how we learn without any sort of formal curriculum or lesson plan.

Our day in words and pictures 🙂

We planted a tree.

We learned that even big things start small.

We planned our garden. We learned that food does not come from the store and that hard work has its benefits.

We played on the playground.

We learned the being flexible comes in handy in life and that patience is a virtue. (It’s hard to wait your turn for the slide!)

We explored.

We learned not all who wander are lost.

We looked at bugs. We learned that ants “go really, really fast.”

We played in the dirt.

Mama learned to let things go.

One of us napped in the sun.

We all got our vitamin d the old fashioned way.

We picked flowers. We made wishes.

We learned the world could use more wonder.

We hugged trees. Literally.

We learned to revere nature.

Keagan cut himself.

We learned a deep breath and a good snack make most problems feel smaller.

We met our neighbors. We talked. We learned that a smile goes a long way in life.

We played. Keagan with a doll. Eden with a truck. We defied gender stereotypes…

and realized how silly they are.

Some seriously window coloring went on…

and we learned that art comes in many mediums…

Sometimes even baby sister’s face.

We relaxed.

We loved one another.

We learned that the little things in life matter the most.

We played. We laughed. We colored. We sang.

We read books.

We learned that fantasy can help us better understand reality.

We played with pom-poms. We counted. We sorted. One of us learned what fuzzy tastes like.

We learned that some items have any uses.

We cooked. Okay. I cooked. Keagan “helped” and Eden snacked.

We counted, measured and timed as we did so.

We learned that sometimes hard work tastes really good.

We ate. We laughed some more. We played and sang some more. We tickled and loved. We lived.

We learned that your family is the people who are there for you at the end of the day.

All in all it was a pretty good day.

I don’t think we’re missing out on anything without the TV. I don’t think we’re missing out on anything without the boxed curriculum or preschool.  I think we’re doing just fine and making the best choices for our family.

What do you think? 🙂

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Our December Plans

So I’m trying to make sure each day between now and Christmas is part of our celebration. Some days we’ll do more exciting things than others, but each day will have some special Christmas activity.  Some days we will probably do more than one thing, some days it may be as simple as coloring a Christmas tree or reading a book. These are all things we’re hoping to do this month.

• Local Tree Lighting Ceremony
• Decorate tree in the front yard
• Set up Nativity Set and read the Christmas story from a childrens’ Bible.
• Get our Christmas tree at a local tree farm
• Decorate the tree
• Decorate the house
• String popcorn
• Zoo Christmas Display
• “Santa” Train
• Read  Christmas books including:  Who is Coming To Our House?, The Animals’ Christmas Eve, On That Christmas Night, The Night Before Christmas, The Christmas Story, Oh Little Town of Bethlehem, The Pirates’ Night Before Christmas and some various other Christmas books that are floating around our home.
• Baking Christmas Cookies
• Bake a Cake for Jesus’ birthday
• Look at local Christmas lights
• Make Ornaments
• Various Christmas crafts (including snowmen)
• Christmas Party
• Make a “snowstorm”
• Make “Sock baby Jesus”
• Make a Gingerbread House
• Visit Santa
• Go to local art museum’s “Gingerbread Village”
• Make wrapping paper
• help make gifts for Grandma and Grandpa

What’s everyone else doing to get ready for Christmas? These Advent activities have been a blast for Keagan so far. I can’t wait until Eden’s old enough to participate.

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Making Ornaments

Our third and fourth day of Advent were spent making salt-dough ornaments.  Keagan really liked the painting portion.

He is so enjoying all of our advent activities! We are (hopefully) getting our tree this weekend so that should make for a lot of Christmas fun!

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Advent Activities

We’re doing a Christmas activity each day until Christmas. We started the 30th of November by making these activity cards:

I found the numbers on some blog and I feel pretty crummy because I just can’t remember where! If anyone sees them and recognizes them, please tell me where they came from!

So we colored, stickered (we were given a large amount of Christmas stickers)  and glued those on the 30th. I’ve been adding the activities to the back here and there. I want to be sure we have one each day, but I also want to be flexible. With a 2 1/2 year old and an 8 month old I have to be!

On the first, we decorated one of our “faerie trees” out front that Keagan insists his friends, the faeries live in.

Keagan was really excited.

Keagan had a blast decorating and now gasps with joy every time we go outside. I love it! He said he made his faeries happy and their tree is pretty. Sounds good to me.

Yesterday, we made snowmen (I cut, he glued) and read “A Pirate’s Night Before Christmas” by Phillip Yates. The book was great! We read it several times and it’s a lot of fun. When you read this book aloud, you can not help but to talk like a pirate. And what kid doesn’t want to combine all the fun of pirates with all the wonder of Christmas? It was the first book he wanted to read when he woke up today as well. It’s a hit. It’s not one that will leave you all warm and fuzzy when it’s done, but it’s great.

Today, we made salt dough ornaments. We baked today and we’ll paint tomorrow. I’ll share photos when we’re done, but Keagan’s loving the process thus far.

I hope everyone’s enjoying the advent season. It’s a lot of fun to lead up to the big celebration with lots of fun activities. Christmas should be more than just a day, I think. Is anyone else celebrating the whole season? Anyone have any fun activities they’d like to share?

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Monsters!

Keagan had a blast with this activity. I cut out four head shapes, several sets of eyes, noses, random shapes, mouths, hair etc in multiple colors and had Keagan create “monsters.” It was a great Halloween craft for him because in addition to being fun, it reinforced his knowledge of shapes (circle nose, oval head etc) and colors and also spatial reasoning. I was surprised how accurately he placed the pieces on the faces.(Excluding one upside down eyebrow, of which he was quite proud.)
I think we’ll repeat it again later… we could make silly turkeys, snowmen, etc.

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Fun Halloween Activities

For the next two weeks Keagan’s homeschool theme is Halloween. We started today and we’re both already having a lot of fun!

Since we’re still going to do some letter work the next two weeks, we started with an “h” collage this morning.  Then we read three books to fit our letter theme, “Harry Hungry!” by Stephen Salerno, “Hippos Go Berserk” by Sandra Boynton (one of our favorite authors around here!) and “Halloween Kitten” by Mary Packard. The latter we found at the thrift shop for only a quarter- and it still had two sheets of stickers in it. I used it  as an into our Halloween activities.  After we finished the book, I wrote “Happy Halloween” on orange construction paper and Keagan used the stickers from the book to make a collage.  He loves sticker collages, but we don’t do them often as I think stickers are pretty wasteful. But hey, they came with the book, so we went for it. 🙂

After that, I cut some ghost shapes out. Keagan glued them on to black construction paper and then drew faces on them. I think they came out pretty cute. I’m also really happy that he’s stopped being afraid of ghosts. I contribute this to another thrift store find, a copy of “Gus was a Friendly Ghost” by Jane Thayer.  He’s insisted that I read it to him every day, several times a day since we picked it up last week.

After that, we made a paper chain as a countdown to Halloween. Keagan loves to use gluesticks, so this was great for him.We talked about how we’d rip one link off every night from now until Halloween and then he’d go trick or treating. I explained to him that he’d dress up and get candy for the faeries and he’d get a gift the next day. He said “that’s right, Mama,” so I guess he’s on board with the idea of swapping candy for whatever a faerie might bring him.

He’s napping now, but later on I am sure we’ll be back at it. I’d like to come up with a baking/cooking project he can help with that actually looks Halloween-y. I am not sure if we’ll come by it. We recently had dairy added to the list of things he can’t eat (a food already avoided for the household, but not strictly restricted previously for Keagan) and it seems that so many of the cutesy Halloween foods use cream cheese or sour cream etc. Maybe I can make goat’s cheese work.

Homeschooling has become so much fun with a holiday theme. I can’t wait for Christmastime. I am thinking all of December will be devoted to Christmas. There’s just so many possibilities and since we get to make our own timeline at home, I think we should embrace the joy of the season.

Well off to enjoy what’s left of naptime with my very awake six month old. I’ll leave you with Keagan’s art wall, something of which he’s oh so very proud.

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Fall Fun

We went to the park to collect leaves for “L” week. I forgot to bring the “real” camera, but I did have my cell phone. I captured some of the fun that ensued.

Pretty leaves!

He got distracted… he found some faeries in the tree. 🙂

And where was Miss Eden during all of this fun? She was riding along happily in her sling.

Keagan had a blast and it was great to enjoy a sunny fall day with two great kids.  We’ll do a few crafts with our leaves this afternoon and then we’ll move on to “P.”  Tomorrow, we we’re going to the pumpkin patch. 🙂

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L… llll… Leaf

This week is “L” week for Keagan. Our main theme the week is leaves. I don’t schedule a ton of activities for Keagan, as I believe in child-led learning, especially at a young age, however, I plan a simple activity each day.

This week’s plans:

Today Leaf Rubbings (already done, he loved it!)
Wed: Leaf Walk, collect leaves for the rest of the week and talk about them, their colors, the autumn, etc
Thurs: Leaf collage
Fri: Tree activity, I’ll cut the base of a tree out and let him glue leaves on the top.

I skipped Monday, we had playgroup and afterward he ended up at the hospital (that’s my next post!) so we took the day off.

At some point, we’ll make a collage for L, we do one for each letter (cut things out of magazines that start with our letter for the week and Keagan glues them…. he doesn’t want to cut yet)

We may also make a Lion mask, depending on his interest, and we will read some lion books and talk about them a bit.

As we go through our days, I make an extra point to read books that fit with out theme, write the letter of the week on paper before he colors on it, find coloring sheets in his books that fit the theme, etc as well as talk about anything he finds interest in related to the theme. When there’s a good opportunity, we take a “field trip” like the leaf walk. We went to the pet store and bought a fish on “F” week and went to an apple orchard on “A” week etc. I don’t do the letters in order to make all of this easier. I am saving “C” for Christmastime and we’ll do “H” the week of Halloween, “T” the week of Thanksgiving. We’re going to do “Z” soon since I can’t think of any field trip other than the zoo for it and it’s going to be too nasty to go to the zoo soon, but we’ll run out of letters before the weather is nice again. I am saving “S” for when there is snow, but that will have to come without plan, since snow is hit or miss around here most years. If nothing else, I’ll save it for a planned trip to the mountains.

Anyway, there’s the rough idea of how we do “preschool.” Keagan likes these activities and the theme really helps to motivate me as much as teach him. We have a lot of fun together doing these things and because it’s flexible, it is very easy to work around Eden.

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