It’s been a while since I posted about what Bear does.  It’s been a while since I posted regularly.  We’ve been traveling, had my mom visit, and I have just been busy rearranging and reorganizing practically every room in the house.  I’ve never had such bad spring cleaning fever in my life!

Mazes.  We use the bags that are in the cereal boxes (washed and pulled apart so they lay flat) over some of her activity books (like mazes and connect the dots) so she can reuse them.  Before the mazes, she had been working on tracing the s in the salt box (you can see it on the table in front of her. 

 Tweezing the “butterfly eggs” onto the butterfly.

 Map of USA.  She chose to do this twice in a row. 

 We played store, but I actually had her figure out the coins to pay for the things she wanted.  I requested mostly denominations of tens with the dimes.

 Doing an addition worksheet with the duplos as counters.  She liked being able to make towers as she added.  The worksheet is from a Silver Burdett Ginn student workbook I picked up at a yard sale last year for a quarter.  It was missing the first unit. I can’t even figure out which grade it’s for (it seems a bit hard for K so it may be first grade), but Bear does well with minimal help as long as she has counters.

 We went to a garden class on worms and composting and got to look at worms close up!

 She dug up her own worms.

 She reads a lot to J-jo.  Really reading.  Not pretend.

 She loves to copy the patterns on the cards for the Rush Hour game.

 Drawing and writing observations of her caterpillars (which are now in the chrysalis stage).

At school, she has been working on the South America map, lots of short bead chains, reading, spelling cvc words, and adding.  

She is back to going mornings only (3 days a week) because although she can keep up with the work at school, she was complaining she didn’t have enough time to play and was tired to the point of multiple melt downs per afternoon on school days.  Wasn’t worth it.

We’re moving away from true Montessori a bit for Bear and going toward the workbox system (putting our Montessori items in the workboxes).  Bear is getting to choose what goes in most of her workboxes so she still has freedom of choice like in Montessori, but the boxes are her accountability.  I get busy with J-jo on homeschool days and I needed a system in which I could tell she was completing her work.  It also allows us to rotate through some things that don’t get used as much otherwise.  We’ve only used our new system for a week so I won’t post too much yet. I want to make sure it is truly functional before sharing!

Linked to the Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations.

J-jo’s favorite food is spinach lasagna.  I just love to hear him say the word in his baby talk and wish he would say it when the video recorder is on!

The other day I let him help me make our lasagna.  

Whisking cottage cheese and egg.

 Laying the noodles.

Spooning in the spinach mixture.

There’s no real recipe. I just made it up, but it tastes delicious.

I cook the lasagna noodles while I prepare the spinach mixture (cottage cheese, 2 eggs, full package of frozen spinach (thawed and cooked).  I start with a layer of tomato sauce, add a layer of noodles, a layer of spinach mix, a layer of tomato sauce, a layer of noodles, a layer of spinach, tomato sauce and one last layer of noodles and tomato sauce before the mozzarella cheese on top.

I keep trying to interest J-jo in artistic pursuits but he just isn’t.  I wistfully remember all the cool projects Bear tried at almost 20 months.  I persuade myself to let it go.  He just isn’t Bear.

Bear on the other hand, loved this messy art experience (which was entirely meant for J-jo).  

The results were quite pretty too (though not so much the green hands!). 

And although this isn’t artist related, you could take a leap and tie it in to any abstract artist that uses a lot of lines in his or her art.  An obvious example would be Wassily Kandinsky.

Art Vocabulary: lines – mostly thin and curvy 🙂

 Bear is really into acting out the books she reads. When we read Happy Birthday, Harvey Hare! she wrote her own invitations and prepared a birthday party just like in the book.

Tonight we read The Big Green Pocketbook.

When I called her for dinner, she didn’t come.  “What are you doing?” I called.  “I’m the girl with the green pocketbook.”  I turned to look and she was drawing a picture (as does the girl in the book near the end).  So I made her a big green pocketbook out of construction paper so she can play out the book tomorrow.