Totschool Snow in Spring

Totschool was a lot of fun this week. As far as shelves, it was a short week, because we had a couple of other things going on, but the kids got plenty of fun learning in.

Abbie chose books. I have had a couple of our more "educational" books out since I set up the shelves, but I guess they just now noticed them. Abbie liked this one about oceans.




And Dr Seuss's ABCs.

She sorted puffballs. She worked hard to use the tweezers.

And made rainbows out of shapes. Well, actually, she dumped out the shapes then spent the rest of the day picking them up again.

She played with the dressing bear.

And of course, chose the new activity on the shelf... Easter eggs. I found the egg tray at Dollar Tree and dug out a dozen plastic eggs from the food and dishes bin. I hid letters in the eggs, put them in an old Easter basket, and put it all on the shelf. Abbie opened the eggs and scattered the letters around.

Daniel chose the Easter eggs also. He sorted them from the basket into the tray, then "cracked" them open and either named or attempted to name each letter. Then he re-stuffed each egg and played with them awhile before putting them back into the basket.

He chose, making rainbows with shapes. I love how he is concentrating so hard!

Dressing the bear.

Cutting with scissors. He actually picked this twice this week, after ignoring it for so long.

And reading. First he sang the ABC song a couple of times.

Then he looked for all of his favorite pages in the book.

Daniel's un-pictured choices were:

blocks and farm animals

flower arranging

Abbie's un-pictured choices were:

flower arranging

They also played a couple of games together. It was incredibly cute when they decided to play Roll- a - Color together. They played the entire game completely on their own without even any fighting! It was awesome!

Another day, they all four decided to play Alphabet Bingo without me. It started off great, but before the game was over a disagreement between Kaytie and Daniel ended in Daniel being ejected from the game. It was fun while it lasted though. And gave me visions of a future independence.

We went over to the cousin's house for our monthly get-together. She talked to them about plants, and showed them a real plant, roots and all, that they got to touch and talk about. She read them the cute story, Tops and Bottoms.

And then they got to plant bean seeds. (Abbie's is already sprouting as I type this)

They made some cute tulips from chenille stems, beads, and a cut-apart egg carton. They were very cute, but somehow I didn't manage to get a picture of a completed one. She just cut the carton into little cups, poked a hole in the bottom of the cup, then they slipped their stem through the hole in the cup and then through the bead. How cool that Abbie could do hers entirely on her own thanks to our beading in Totschool!!!

And then, at the very end of the week, we had our first real snowfall of the winter. Because we live in a very weird part of the United States where it doesn't bother to snow in December or January, but gifts us with a blizzard in late March. So, naturally, we spent two days playing in it!

On the second day, our cousin came over to play! They built a snowman, and a rather smallish snow fort. They had a snowball fight, swam in the snow, made snow angels and generally had a wonderful time!

Daniel, supervising the building of the snowman.

Abbie, throwing a snowball.

For more Totschool posts, go to Carisa's blog.

Big Girl Bed

Daddy set up her Big Girl Bed this week and she gave up her crib without a backward look. She is as proud of herself as she can be. But I am so sad, because, for the first time in nearly six and half years, we have no crib in our house. :( It's one more step away from my happy world of Babyland. No more bottles, no more pacis, no more cribs. Soon there will be no more diapers, no more baby snuggles, no more spontaneous singing of ABC and Twinkle Twinkle.

But even though I am very sad at this milestone, Miss Abbie still makes me smile, because she is the only two year old I know of that reads herself to sleep! She sneaks out of her bed to grab a handful of board books and looks at them quietly until she falls asleep -- just like her favorite big sister.
Doesn't she look so little in that great big bed?

Totschool with shelves

We had another full and busy week. I have re-arranged my school system and we have shelves! I won't go into all of the furniture shifting that we went through to get three empty shelves, but we are really enjoying not having to get everything out every time we do school. The kids have the same stuff all the time, now, and I up-date their shelves every weekend. I am so thrilled to have this set-up, but I am also grateful that this was a gradual process, because I have had NO issues with them getting into the shelves when we aren't doing school. Anyway, this week, Daniel chose...

The mystery bag.

Flower arranging. I bought two more bunches of flowers, and dug out this old basket to store them in. The vase fits in the basket, too, so they just carry it back and forth all in one piece. We started with the tall, thin vase, but it was too tall and too narrow for our short stemmed flowers, so I got the bubble vase instead. Both vases came from Dollar Tree.

He chose this puzzle almost every day. I found it at the Dollar Tree and snatched it up because you don't often find things that feature lower case letters, although they are more important than upper case. I am not a true Montessorian because I don't teach lower case first. I teach them at the same time. And Daniel is also learning sounds along with the letters. I have to keep reminding myself that he is learning three things at once, because he is learning much more slowly than Kaytie and Nate did. It's so hard to keep in mind not to compare my kids because they are so close in age and I can still remember what Kaytie and Nate were like at this age!

He also frequently chose this new work. I put a handful of Skittles in one of their toy pitchers to practice "real pouring". I don't know if it's the pitcher or the Skittles, but they are drawn to this like they never were drawn to bean pouring.

He played Roll a Color with anyone who would play with him. I love this game, because I don't have to supervise if I'm not playing. It is so easy that they play it entirely on their own.

He also chose Alphabet Bingo and spent an entire school morning playing with the blocks and animals. But I didn't take pictures of those choices. Daniel's preferred method of doing school is to find a few things that he likes and do them over and over and over again.

Abbie chose:

Color matching. A lot. She really loves it when I am willing and able to talk her through it. She will wave a stick at me and ask, "What color this?" So I'll ask her what color it is and she will chose the matching card and I will say "That is yellow!" or whatever color it happens to be. She can match them entirely on her own, but she is still learning the names.

Skittle pouring. I could not get her to pour correctly, but she had a blast pouring them back and forth, transferring them with her fingers, and enjoying the texture.

Sound match. This is really too hard for her, I have it out for Daniel, but she loves to choose it and almost always gets one correct. Lucky guess, probably. Then she will miss two and get the last one right because it is fairly obvious.

She loves these little puzzles, and has finally gotten to where she can do them independently. I have about six letters and five numbers out right now.

And she had to try her hand at the new puzzle as well. She did much better with this one than with our wooden uppercase puzzle. It surprised me actually, how far she got before she needed my help. ABC puzzles are her favorite things because she gets to sing the song.

She chose this several times, and counted with me to ten each time. I was so pleased that these little bath mats had exactly ten suction cups on them! It worked out just perfectly for our purposes.

And she chose flower arranging as well.

Her un-pictured choices were, mystery bag, books, Alphabet Bingo whenever anyone was playing, and the blocks and farm animals.

We also had St. Patrick's Day fun. We played outside with balls. We examined bugs, and played at the park a couple of times. Oh, and drew with sidewalk chalk before school one morning. That is what is all over Daniel's pants in a few of the pictures.

For more Totschool fun, check out the Linky here.

Circle Time

I was asked about our Circle Time, so I'm going to try to describe what we do.
First, I have to say that what we do is not entirely what I want to do. I have a cool poster board thingee that I made up with tons of different things attractively glued to it in order to give us the ultimate in learning fun. But it doesn't matter how or what I tried, I just could not get through it without the majority of us losing patience and weeping. If you like, I could do a lovely post on that, because, it was the kind of thing that worked really well when I only had two students and they could take turns and it went quickly and flowed quite well. Add in a couple more attention-hungry, action-driven (polite people always call my kids "busy") loud and crazy toddlers and it quit working.
Now, our Circle Time goes more like this:
Prayer (sometimes I pray, but the big kids enjoy having a turn as well, their participation is always voluntary)

The Pledge of Allegiance (I know this seems a little "school-at-homish", but we do this for three reasons:

1. I want them to know the Pledge because I believe patriotism is important.


2. Good Citizenship is one of the few things we are required to teach in our state.


3. it is incredibly cute to see my tiny children place their hands somewhat close to their hearts and seriously pledge their allegiance to their native country

We read library books on our current theme. We also read a story from a Bible Story book.

We work on our current Scripture verses that we are memorizing.

And we sing songs. I've given up singing the ABC song, because all of the kids know it, but we sing fun songs, Scripture songs, and hymns as the mood strikes us. Occasionally, we will sing some of the big kids' Geography songs.

Other than praying first, we have no particular order and I like to bounce back and forth between singing and reading to keep interest high and boredom low.

St Patrick's Day

Our St Patrick's Day fun started with green milk and green sprinkles on our cinnamon toast.

We had a parade. The kids brought in their bikes as a very special treat.

We colored pictures.

And made Irish flags.

The big kids did a bunch of worksheets from learning page, my favorite place for worksheets. And the little kids colored a rainbow.

We danced to Irish music, using an old CD I have had for years and years. I don't exactly recommend it, because it isn't exactly for kids, but it worked for us since the kids weren't listening to the words. :D

We hunted for gold coins. I gave out a handful of skittles as prizes... one for who found the most; one for who looked the hardest; one for who found the "special" coin (thankfully, they did not ask which coin was special) and one for the shortest kid. :)

After lunch and nap, we had cookies. Because a holiday isn't a holiday around here without a sweet treat.

And we finished up our fun and busy day with a trip to the park, a dinner out to eat (since the kids got a free meal at our Red Robin) and an evening of shopping with Dad.