"mini" Pre School

So, Carson is still only two this fall, which means I didn't want to do a full-on pre-school with him yet. But I knew he would enjoy a few more organized activities in our days, so a friend and I are doing a little "mini" preschool together, just once a week. We are using the Letter of the Week curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler. He and his friend Olive love it so far! It's mostly review, since they are already familiar with the letters and their sounds, but they really enjoy the activities. So, here is my report on the first day: letter A!


The happy students! My favorite part was teaching them the Pledge of Allegiance at the start of the "school day."

First up: one kid traced the A's with a dry erase marker while the other completed the letter A shapes in Cheerios. Then they switched. Olive sure is good at writing! Between each activity, we sang, "The A says Ah, the A says Ah, every letter makes a sound; the A says Ah."



Then we did some number recognition practice. They had to run to the number that I called out and stomp on the ants. This was a little too easy, so I started having them spell out the number that they were on.


Can you make the letter "A" shape with your body??



Next up: sorting ants by size, and then some shapes puzzles. Again, I was surprised how easy this was for them.


For snack, we had Apples, and made them  into Ants on a log. We talked about what  else starts with A while we ate.


Quick break to watch the trash truck pick up our garbage: an exciting part of every Wednesday!








This graphing activity was the one they had a hard time understanding. You're supposed to graph the number of ants you have on your card, but they both just wanted to fill all the squares. With a little guidance though, they got it.

To finish the day, we read an Aurthur book and found the words in it that started with "A." Then we went on a scavenger hunt to find the "A" things I had hidden around the room. It was a fun morning!

Is summer really over?

Because I am seriously going to miss times like this. The boys are finally old enough that they can play outside for a long period of time and let me work on some projects while watching them out the window. Just in time for summer to be over! Oh well, they can still play outside in jackets for a while; just not showing this much skin, Carson!

We've always been really proud of the size of his mouth.

I have several other things to blog about, but I just couldn't ignore this picture.

 Ok, I have to put this one up real quick, too. Sometimes I think we have kids just to make us laugh all the time.

Scenes from Yellowstone: Post 2.

Our three children sleeping on the airplane. Carson is the best travel buddy ever, thrilled to be on a plane the whole time, and napping when he's told to nap. Everett is the worst travel buddy ever, and he only slept for 10 minutes the entire journey.


The boys enjoyed sooo much attention from adoring cousins. And it was so nice to have helpers all the time! I actually really felt like I was on vacation!



I keep cracking up at Carson's faces in these bubble pictures, taken in front of the cabin in Island Park.


Going out on a boat ride was our first adventure. Carson loved being on the boat and watching daddy water ski. He still sometimes plays "Uncle Greg's boat" on our bed and likes it when I pretend to ski behind him driving the pretend boat.


Two good-looking boys.


Watching Rick.


What a pretty place.


Rick with sister Jeanel and Xander.

Scenes from Yellowstone: post 1.

You'd think I would post pictures of the actual national park, or at least some deer or elk or something. But some of my favorite pictures from this vacation are of the two sweetest boys in West Yellowstone that week.




Besides, our kids liked the gift shops way more than the actual park.




Growling like a bear.




If the wind would have left my hair alone, we could have had a nice family picture.


Next time I'll post evidence of all the fun family activities we did and neat sites we saw, instead of crazy pictures like this.

I'm very behind.

There is too much to blog about and not enough time. Well, actually, there is plenty of time when I wake up with Rick at 4 a.m. and can't get back to sleep! The real excuse is that there's not enough space on my computer to upload any more pictures. I'm working on backing up all the pictures on discs and online, since our external hard drive broke. But I'm wondering, what does everyone else do to keep all your pictures and not bog down your computer??? Advice, please?

Since I have no pictures to show, I had better make this post exciting by announcing that I'm 20 weeks pregnant! That's better than a picture, right?