Author Archives: Deanna

Adam and Eve eat the fruit

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I’m still trying to catch up to what we’re actually learning about, but I do want to put up at least basic posts for the Bible stories we’ve already covered.  A family crisis last week has kept me from writing, but I’d like to be caught up by the end of the day today (which will be a little easier since we ended up taking about a week off of any “school”.)

Ian was already familiar with the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, but it’s a favorite so he didn’t mind spending a week on it.  This was the first week we incorporated a “letter of the week.”  Ian really liked writting the letter in a rice tray, and he enjoys the pictures in Big Thoughts for Little People so much, he always wants more than just the page for our letter.  I let him look through the rest of the book, but I tell him he’ll have to wait until “K” week (or whatever) to read about the pages that catch his interest.

For our memory verse, I strayed from the ABC Jesus Loves Me Week 3 lesson.  As I was looking at the activities in the lesson plan I came across this verse and it seemed more appropriate.  I want verses that Ian can really internalize, words that will express the feelings in his heart as he grows in his relationship with the Lord.  Psalm 119:10 seemed more “personal,” so I set it to the tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star”:

“I will seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.  Psalm one-nineteen, verse ten.  Psalm one-nineteen, verse ten.  I will seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.”

I did go with her suggestion of teaching “Oh Be Careful, Little Eyes, What You See.”  Ian loved this song and asked me sing it over and over.  I love the message and know we’ll refer to these lyrics many times in years to come.  Here was our iPod playlist for the week:

Our Bible Notebook was a big hit this week.  I saw this idea for a fingerprint tree and used the “alternate paint idea” of pudding.  Since I’m always battling with Elijah not to smear food all over his high chair tray, I thought he’d love being a part of this project.  Not so much!  He screamed and refused to touch the pudding, even after I smeared a little on his lips.  Ian, on the other hand, had a blast!

I mixed up a batch of chocolate pudding to use for the trunk (and for us to eat for dessert that night), plus a batch of vanilla to dye with food coloring for play and our notebook page.  Here’s the finished product!


Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Bible lessons, Preschool

Creation

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Here we go!  I’ve been a little slow getting this blog up and running, so I wanted to look back over the last few weeks since we started “officially” doing some school work.  As I’ve said, the most important element of school to me is studying God’s Word and helping my kids hide it (“treasure” it) in their hearts.  So while we are touching on a few other things, the main priority is our Bible lesson each week.  If for whatever reason we don’t have time to get to anything else, that’s fine.

We actually spent two weeks talking about Creation.  Our memory verse was Genesis 1:1 “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.”  Ian loved holding up a 1 on each hand, and had it memorized in minutes!  We sang it to the tune of “Are You Sleeping?” as suggested in the ABC Jesus Loves Me Week 1 lesson plan, as well as the Scripture Rock version on our iPod playlist (see below).

Although I purchased a Betty Lukens Small Deluxe Set (flannelboard and felt pieces) on eBay to use with our Bible lessons, I borrowed these felt circles from our children’s ministry at church to help talk about what was created each day because I liked the way each day was visually distinctive.

There is a seventh circle in the set, but I didn’t think it clearly communicated the message “God rested” to my three-year old, so we didn’t use it.

I want to keep a record of the stories we study, so we started a Bible notebook.  It’s just a 3-ring binder that provides a place for our memory verses and some sort of craft to remind Ian of the story.  For Creation, I’d already been thinking I wanted to do something for each day, so I started brainstorming and looking for inspiration.  I got some good ideas from this Creation book, raided my sticker stash and some magazines for pictures, and to label each day, I printed out these flash cards and just cut out the text and numbers.  Here’s what we ended up with:

Pretty simple: just yellow chalk on black paper.

Ian got a fingerpainting set for Christmas, and everytime he makes a masterpiece, I save it to use for collages.  So we cut the water for each of these days out of one of his blue paintings.  He loved spreading the cottonball clouds on Day 2, and collecting the leaves for the plants on Day 3.  (The flash makes it hard to see, but that was a magazine picture of a pink flower as well!)

For Day 4 we found several “suns” in magazines, so Ian chose his favorite.  No luck with a moon, so I just cut a crescent out of a fun print I found, and Ian loved the star stickers.  He found some feathers on one of our walks that week, so we figured they could represent birds and added them to our collection of stickers and magazine pictures. (My favorite was the whale’s tail.)

Animals for Day 6 were easy to find, but I couldn’t figure out what I was going to do for Day 7.  The best I thought I’d find was pictures of babies sleeping.  Then I came across this picture advertising a spa around Christmas time, and while it may be a little stereotypical with the white beard and all, I figured a resting Santa was more appropriate than babies.

Here was our iPod playlist for the week, which Ian just listens to as he plays:

We also worked a bit on recognizing the numerals 1-7 since Ian doesn’t know any of those yet and it tied in well with this story.  And that was our week!

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Bible lessons, Preschool

A typical week’s plan for us

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I thought I’d take a few minutes to share how I usually go about planning a week of “school.”  The first place I go to is my ABC Jesus Loves Me 3-Year Old Curriculum book.  All the lesson plans are available on the website, but I like the ease of flipping through actual pages to find what I need.  I printed out the 36 week table that gives a quick overview of what’s being taught week by week, followed all 36 weekly lesson plans.  You DO NOT have to print all this out to use the curriculum.  It just works best for my brain.  (You can also order a spiral bound book from the website with everything already printed if that option works better for your family.)

As I’ve said before, I don’t use every part of the curriculum.  Here are the key components I take note of:

  • Bible story
  • Memory verse (although I sometimes choose my own that I feel is more appropriate for the story or that I particularly want Ian to learn)
  • Letter
  • (Book of the week)

I usually use a book from my booklist (which I talked about in this post) rather than the one listed in the curriculum.  Once I know those components, I put together my weekly plan.  I don’t schedule each day, though we do have a typical pattern we fall into.  I usually just put together a sort of list of what elements I want to include in our week, and then I try to get to them whenever I want to have some focused learning time.  It might look something like this:

Bible story: Adam & Eve

Memory verse: (Psalm 119:10) “I will seek you with all my heart; do not let me stray from your commands.” (This isn’t the verse from ABCJLM for that story, but I came across it in one of the activities she had listed, and it seemed more appropriate to me.)

Concept Focus: colors, shapes, numbers, or a letter of the week, anything I think Ian could benefit from being exposed to.  (I’m going ahead and reviewing letters with Ian, mostly because he’s starting to be interested in writing.  I don’t want him learning poor habits so I’m teaching him correct letter formation using various activities other than actually writing.)

Songs to sing (we do these throughout the week as we’re getting dressed, making meals, in the car, etc.):

  • Memory song: Tune of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”, saying “Psalm 119 verse 10,” then repeating the words of the verse.
  • “Oh Be Careful, Little Eyes”

iPod playlist (I’ll put these on in the background as Ian is playing).  This usually contains things pertaining to the Bible story from various sources:

Books:

  • Bibles (we read from the NIV at night, but I also use several different children’s Bible storybooks, which I’ll have to talk about in another post)
  • Big Thoughts for Little People (just the page for the letter of the week)
  • My First Steps book (recommended in the ABC Jesus Loves Me curriculum)
  • Book of the week

Activities:

  • Tell Bible story using flannelboard
  • Trace upper- and lowercase letter of the week using sandpaper letters
  • Writing letter of the week in rice
  • Bible Notebook (We do some sort of 2-dimensional craft to represent that week’s Bible story and put the memory verse on the page.  I go to the weekly lesson plan online and look through all the activity links for inspiration, usually coming up with my own idea based on something I see).  After we’ve made our page we go through our entire Bible Notebook from beginning to end, reading the verses, briefly mentioning each story, etc. to help get the verses and stories more deeply rooted in our hearts.)
  • Ideas from the Before Five in a Row Manual our Homeschool Share to go along with our book of the week.

My teacher training comes out a bit, as I also feel the need to write down weekly learning objectives:

Objectives: By the end of this week, Ian will be able to:

  • Retell the Bible story using flannel board
  • Recite (or sing) the Bible verse
  • Write the letter of the week with his finger in rice/sand/finger-paint

And that’s a pretty typical week for us.  If there’s a video that goes with our Bible story (I usually check the library for the Beginner’s Bible videos, Nest Entertainment’s Animated Stories from the Old/New Testament, Greatest Heroes and Legends of the Bible, and VeggieTales), I usually let the boys watch that sometime during the week.  I also try to expose them to some Spanish through Salsa videos at least once a week (more on those another time), and they love watching Signing Time videos as well.

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, Our Vision

Other things floating around in my brain

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After I finished that last post about the different curricula I checked out (I really don’t like that word “curricula”, but “curriculums” just sounds wrong, so I’ll stick with it for now), I realized I’d left out a whole other side of my thought process in landing where we are.  I was all prepared to start describing what we’re currently doing, but the picture would be incomplete if I didn’t share some of the other ideas floating around in my brain.  Hence the title of this post.

I guess I can really boil the rest of it all down to this: Charlotte Mason.  How I ever got through a Master of Education program and a teaching credential without hearing her name, I just can’t understand.  Charlotte Mason is pretty much a hero in the homeschool world, but since she actually taught in schools, it seems to me like “traditional” schoolteachers could learn a lot from her writings as well.  If you want to find out more about her, here is a good place to start.

There is so much I like about Charlotte Mason’s methods.  I love the idea of including artist and composer studies in our school work.  Nature study seems like such a wonderful thing to include as well, especially with boys.  (I’m very prone to just wanting to stay inside and do desk work.) I’ve never been much on poetry, but reading Charlotte Mason’s books encouraged me to give it a try, and Ian LOVES reading poems together. I’ve also started thinking about how to incorporate foreign language study into our preschool learning time.  Finally, Iknow I did my best learning growing up through the many “living books” I found at the library, and this is one of the key parts of a Charlotte Mason education.

I have a feeling that when Ian’s ready to start first grade, I’ll probably be using Ambleside Online, a Charlotte Mason based curriculum, as my main source for inspiration, much like I’m using ABC Jesus Loves Me for preschool.  I looked through their booklists for the first few years and fell in LOVE.  So many of my old favorites were on there, and I love the idea that those can BE our schoolwork, rather than trying to squeeze them in on top of schoolwork!  But as I’ve said before, I’m a tweaker, and I doubt I’ll do everything quite as laid out.

The one thing I did do was compile a massive list of books I want to be sure to read with my children while they’re young.  I took all the books used in Five in a Row (including B4FIAR and volumes 1-4), the Ambleside Year 0/Kindergarten list, the Simply Charlotte Mason Early Years Booklist, and the Kindergarten list from An Old Fashioned Education and looked to see which books were on more than one of these lists.  Those were the books I decided I really wanted to make sure we got to.  Then I picked the ones that seemed best for younger kids and pencilled them onto our school calendar for the next year.  I’m not going to share that list, because to be honest, it’s just too much evidence of how obsessive I am about books.  (As if describing the process I went through didn’t already reveal that!)

Can you see how I’m having a hard time not centering our school around books?  That’s why I’m so thankful for ABC Jesus Loves Me .  I make the Bible story the first thing I plan, the first thing I teach, and the center of all we do throughout the week.  Then instead of using the “book of the week” in the curriculum, I take one from my own list (many of them are actually on both).  That way I’m still touching on the literature I want to share, but I don’t spend a lot of time each week thinking about it.

Okay, so I think that’s all the background stuff.  Next time I’ll start sharing a little about what we are actually doing.

Posted in Ambleside Online, Charlotte Mason, Our Vision

where to start?

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I started searching for the “right” preschool curriculum for us when Ian was still a baby.  I didn’t even consider paying for a full preschool curriculum for a number of reason.  First of all, it’s preschool.  I just feel like it needs to be low-key and flexible.  Second, I know myself too well.  I’m a tweaker.  I can’t seem to follow a recipe to save my life.  I knew I would take anything handed to me and adjust it to make it fit well for us, and it seemed like a waste to spend money on something I was going to mess with anyway.  Plus, I’m just kind of cheap.  I’d rather spend money on my own selection of books and good educational toys/activities than on a boxed curriculum.  Still, I needed some help getting started, I wanted at least a little structure to provide a framework for us.  I didn’t know a whole lot about what was out there, nor did I have a very solid idea of what I wanted to do.  So I just tried to sample as wide a spread as I could, and in the end I felt pretty comfortable piecing together a little bit of this and that.  I thought I’d share some of the great resources I found out there, because I realize every family is different.  Depending on what my other kids need, I may come back to some of these.

Brightly Beaming Resources (also known as Letter of the Week curriculum).  A wealth of resources here!  If you feel completely at a loss as to what (or how) to teach your young children, this is a great place to start.  Katrina Lybbert has put together “curriculum” to use from infants on up.  It was a little too structured for our family, but I know some people thrive on that.  Since Ian had learned his letters on his own, I decided not to go this route, but I might come back for ideas if other my other kids need some help in that department, or if we need some ideas once he gets older.

Before Five in a Row (B4FIAR).  This was the one exception I made as far as paying for something.  I forget how I first heard of Five in a Row, but from the first time I visited the old FIAR website (which I thought gave a better introduction), I was intrigued.  Being a life-long bibliophile, I wanted to introduce  my children to as much good literature I could.  Between Paperback Swap, eBay, and the Amazon Marketplace, I managed to collect the B4FIAR stories for a pretty reasonable price.  (I also collected most of the stories for FIAR volumes 1-4 while I was at it.)  In hindsight, I don’t know that I would have paid for the B4FIAR manual.  It has some great ideas, but as I started exploring literature-based homeschooling I found a lot of equally good resources available for free online.  Still, I probably wouldn’t have found those if I hadn’t jumped into B4FIAR, and it introduced me to some older books I might never have discovered which have become favorites around here.  I started going through B4FIAR books with Ian as soon as he turned 2.  We took our time, just getting a new book out every couple weeks and rereading it many times.  I didn’t do any extras the first time around, but we’ll start “re-rowing” books in a couple months, and then I plan on doing more.

If you’re interested in using children’s literature as a basis for preschool unit study but aren’t sure you want to spend any money, there are two places I would go.  If you like some structure, check out the Read to Me & ABC program put together by a blogger mom.  She goes through the alphabet using a children’s book for each letter.  Many of the books are also used in B4FIAR, though not the out-of-print, harder to find ones, which is kind of nice.  In fact, you can probably find all of the books in this curriculum at the library.

The other literature site I LOVE is Homeschool Share.  I come here all the time for extra ideas to go along with our B4FIAR books (thinking ahead for our next time through!), but they have LOTS of other books as well. I’ve printed off a number of games and activities that we use over and over (love my Scotch thermal laminator!)   We’re not quite ready for lapbooking around our house, but they have lots of great lapbook ideas here as well.

However, as wonderful as good children’s literature is, I knew that I didn’t want that to be the focus of our family’s schooling experience.  We’re readers, and our kids are going to be exposed to great books no matter what.  The most important thing to me is to teach my children about the Bible and to get as much Truth hidden away in their hearts as possible.  And that’s how I ended up at ABC Jesus Loves Me.  What a FABULOUS resource for Christian parents homeschooling their preschoolers!  Not only has “Momma C” written a curriculum that covers all your academic basics like letters, numbers, colors, shapes, etc., but she also includes wonderful children’s literature and solid Bible teaching!  I am using her Three-Year Old Curriculum as the basis for what we’re doing this year.  She has a weekly plan that is designed to start in August and run through the beginning of May (though we started mid-year because as soon as Ian turned 3 I was rearing to go).  I don’t do every part of the weekly plan, but I am SO thankful for all the work that has gone into this program.  I’ll talk more about how I use ABCJLM in a later post.

So if you’re just getting started on your homeschool journey, I hope that gives you a few ideas a places to go as you plan what path to take!

Posted in ABCJesusLovesMe, B4FIAR

Hello world!

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… because I needed one more thing to do, right?  Okay, not so much.  Still, I wanted to chronicle our homeschooling journey, and what better time to start then now, when we’re just beginning?

I first heard of homeschooling as I was going into 6th grade, when friend of mine who had been struggling at school told me her mom was going to teach her at home that coming schoolyear.  What a novel idea, I thought!  But it seemed like it was just a solution for helping my friend catch up.  Then when I started going to church in high school, I met many families who had always homeschooled their kids.  I was immediately sold.  I knew that when I had kids of my own, that was what I wanted to do.

I come from a family full of teachers, and ended up going that route myself for a few years before I got married.  I love teaching (though I hate jumping through the bureaucratic hoops that come with it), and I looked forward to the day I could see my own children’s faces lighting up with the joy of discovering new things.

When Ian was born in 2008, I started counting down the days until we could start “homeschooling.”  Of course teaching and learning is a part of every day with a child, so we’ve had a lot of fun over the last three years.  By the time he reached his third birthday, however, he was soaking up so much that I knew I wanted to be more intentional in what I was feeding his hungry little mind.  He already recognizes all his letters, knows his colors and most of his shapes, etc., and I know he’ll pick up the rest of that basic “Kindergarten” knowledge along the way as easily has he’s learned so much so far.  So what I really want to focus on is the Bible.  After all, our number one job is to “make disciples,” right?  If I were discipling a new believer I would start by helping them become familiar with God’s Word.  It only makes sense to start there with our children as well.

I’ve always heard Psalm 119:11 as “I have hidden your word in my heart, that I might not sin against you.”  Then I was reading it in the NASB and the translation jumped out at me: “Your word I have treasured in my heart…” That’s my hope for all my children, that they would treasure God’s word in their hearts.  I want the Scriptures to be the core of our homeschooling experience.  Yes, we read lots of books (dozens each day, it seems sometimes), and literature will definitely be a large part of what we do over the years.  But what’s the point of reading great books if they don’t point us toward the ultimate Truth of God’s Word?

And so we began.  At first we started working during little brother’s morning nap time, but almost immediately, Elijah had made it clear that at 17 months he was ready to give up two naps.  So now we just plunge in with Elijah looking on.  I’m sure he’ll start picking things up long before I would start teaching him on his own.  And we’ve just learned that Blessing#3 is going to be arriving by the end of the year, which encourages me to keep things simple (for my sake, not the children’s)!

For now, “school” consists of a weekly Bible story (with a memory verse, songs and activities that tie in), along with a little bit of letter review and a “book of the week” (more on that in a later post).  I also try to get the boys outside several times a week to explore nature.  Even in the month since we’ve started, I’ve been amazed at how much Ian is learning.  And so it is with great joy that our family starts out on this journey, seeking out the riches of the Scriptures so we can treasure them in our hearts.

Posted in Our Vision
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