Now that Thanksgiving is over (several days ago), I think I can get back to a normal sort of schedule. December is always a pretty crazy month though! Added to the usual busyness of this month is that we are moving into the new sanctuary at church and having our first Sunday service there on the 5th! We attend a church that has a congregation of over 3000 people attending every Sunday. The logistics of that kind of move is pretty crazy, but I know that we have some really great organized people in charge of it. I had the opportunity to go over Tuesday evening to help move some of the stuff around for the new classrooms and the two new nurseries in the new building. I helped assemble a couple cribs. Most of all the older stuff had to stay where it was for one last Wednesday night service.
Randy works with the production team doing stuff with the sound equipment. Sorry, I can't give detail about that because I really have no clue how to do any of that stuff. Last night at the Wednesday service, in the old sanctuary, we didn't have all the equipment because some of it had been moved to the new building. Randy was there until almost midnight with the worship team, helping set and hook everything up. Tonight they have a training with the professionals to make sure they all know how to run it.
We are also going from having 5 children's classrooms to having 10! Sunday morning is going to be interesting getting all the kids in the right places. We are also going from having 3 services to having 2! Every other Sunday I volunteer in the toddler class but since we are changing all the classes around, I'll be switching to the one year old class. The room I was in before will be used by the 2-3 year olds now and Chloe will be moving back into that class. I really want her to have some independence from me and church is pretty much the only time that happens. It just happens that all this change is taking place on my Sunday off so I will only be part of the 9:30 am service. Maybe things will be more settled by the second Sunday when I volunteer again! :-)
On another note, Dad and Janet are here for the week. They are staying down at the Island (South Padre Island) and we will be going down to see them Friday night. Chloe and I got to see them at the Flea Market yesterday when we went to visit Mom at her fried pie booth. But it will be nice to just sit down and visit tomorrow night.
Ok, well since I typed that last sentence, Chloe woke up, we made waffles and ate them, I unloaded the dishwasher and reloaded it, and Chloe is watching an episode of The Little Einsteins. I guess we need to get on with our day. I'll probably play at least one round of Flylady Bingo (The Flylady on Facebook) and do some homeschooling with Chloe. Later today I'll make a grapefruit pie to take with us when we go see Dad and Janet tomorrow...
Thursday, December 2, 2010
Wednesday, November 24, 2010
Not as productive.
Well, I didn't get much done today as far as housecleaning goes. I'm still motivated to get the house less cluttered though because I still want to decorate for Christmas starting Friday. What I did get done, though, was an almost complete lapbook for The Runaway Bunny which is the book we've been reading for the last few days.
For those of you who don't know, I'm planning on homeschooling Chloe. Okay, allow me a moment to brag about my kid. (All of us parents like to do that every now and then!) Chloe just turned 3 a little over a month ago and she loves the alphabet. Pretty much anything to do with words, she loves. Ever since she was a newborn, one of the songs I would sing to her (I'm sure off-key) was the ABC song. She could sing it all the way through including pronouncing clearly "LMNOP" by the time she was 2 1/2. Actually, I've noticed her singing it when she needs to comfort herself, lol. Just before she turned 3 we noticed that she could identify about 3/4 of the upper-case and a few lower-case letters. I hadn't planned on really starting any serious schooling until she turned 4, but I quickly realized she was going to leave me behind if I didn't get started!
I started researching online and asking other homeschool parents for advice. (I'm planning on joining a homeschool co-op after the first of the year.) During my online searching, I discovered File Folder Games. There are a lot of free resources online! These games are on several different sites and you can print out the graphics. The idea is to store them inside file folders. For example, one of the ones I made had some pictures of scarecrows, each in a different color. There are two of each color and one also has the name of the color printed on it. I pasted them to parts of a cereal box for more stability and then covered them with clear contact paper. I pasted the ones without words inside the folder then put one side of a velcro button on their bellies. The ones with the words, I put the opposite side of the velcro button on their backs. Chloe has to match up the the two scarecrows. Well, wouldn't you know, it's too easy for her, so she gets this sly smile on her face and pretends to guess all the wrong ones!
So I moved on to something more challenging. I found a File Folder Game that has her matching the lower case letters to the upper case ones. That is still a bit of a challenge for her, but I was surprised that she can match about half of them without my help. In the meantime, I also ordered a book called Before Five In A Row which is a preschool version of the Five in a Row curriculum. This is a literature based curriculum that takes a children's story book and you use it for five days in a row to discuss different things. For example, the type of art used in the illustrations. The Runaway Bunny uses both pen and ink sketching and water paints. This story is about a baby bunny who tells his mommy bunny he wants to run away. She has an answer for all the places he says he's going to run to and she will always be there for him. That brings up a mother's love for her child, etc. The book uses the word "Crocus" which is a flower Chloe had never heard of before. There are so many things to talk about when you read a book slowly and look closely at the pictures.
That brings us back to the lapbooks. As I was searching for more File Folder Games, I kept coming across references to lapbooks so I did a search for those. Wow! So many great, quality, free resources out there. The lapbooks round out the discussions that we have verbally. I will give examples. First you use file folders as well, but you can fold them differently and add more parts to them so they have extra flaps and such. They all fold back down to the original size so you can just file them away. The things included in our The Runaway Bunny lapbook are - the letter R and r and the word "rabbit", some story cards in a little pocket that tell "if/then" of all the situations in the story (the baby bunny says he'll turn into a bird and fly away, the mommy says she'll become a tree so he has a place to fly home to; so the pictures are of a bird and a tree and Chloe has to match them), a mini-book with a poem about a rabbit, examples of the two types of art used (I also added some of Chloe's art work), etc. We found different shapes on some of the pages so we talked about those, especially round (sphere, disc and circle). We went to Lowe's today and pick up some paint chips in different shades of green because the final colored picture in the book has several shades of green in it. I'm planning on helping Chloe make a collage to put in our lapbook. Can you tell I'm excited? As she gets older, she can help more with the cutting and pasting parts of the project. Eventually, the plan is for her to put her own lapbooks together.
I will eventually figure out how to add photos to this blog. Then I can just show you what I'm talking about!
For those of you who don't know, I'm planning on homeschooling Chloe. Okay, allow me a moment to brag about my kid. (All of us parents like to do that every now and then!) Chloe just turned 3 a little over a month ago and she loves the alphabet. Pretty much anything to do with words, she loves. Ever since she was a newborn, one of the songs I would sing to her (I'm sure off-key) was the ABC song. She could sing it all the way through including pronouncing clearly "LMNOP" by the time she was 2 1/2. Actually, I've noticed her singing it when she needs to comfort herself, lol. Just before she turned 3 we noticed that she could identify about 3/4 of the upper-case and a few lower-case letters. I hadn't planned on really starting any serious schooling until she turned 4, but I quickly realized she was going to leave me behind if I didn't get started!
I started researching online and asking other homeschool parents for advice. (I'm planning on joining a homeschool co-op after the first of the year.) During my online searching, I discovered File Folder Games. There are a lot of free resources online! These games are on several different sites and you can print out the graphics. The idea is to store them inside file folders. For example, one of the ones I made had some pictures of scarecrows, each in a different color. There are two of each color and one also has the name of the color printed on it. I pasted them to parts of a cereal box for more stability and then covered them with clear contact paper. I pasted the ones without words inside the folder then put one side of a velcro button on their bellies. The ones with the words, I put the opposite side of the velcro button on their backs. Chloe has to match up the the two scarecrows. Well, wouldn't you know, it's too easy for her, so she gets this sly smile on her face and pretends to guess all the wrong ones!
So I moved on to something more challenging. I found a File Folder Game that has her matching the lower case letters to the upper case ones. That is still a bit of a challenge for her, but I was surprised that she can match about half of them without my help. In the meantime, I also ordered a book called Before Five In A Row which is a preschool version of the Five in a Row curriculum. This is a literature based curriculum that takes a children's story book and you use it for five days in a row to discuss different things. For example, the type of art used in the illustrations. The Runaway Bunny uses both pen and ink sketching and water paints. This story is about a baby bunny who tells his mommy bunny he wants to run away. She has an answer for all the places he says he's going to run to and she will always be there for him. That brings up a mother's love for her child, etc. The book uses the word "Crocus" which is a flower Chloe had never heard of before. There are so many things to talk about when you read a book slowly and look closely at the pictures.
That brings us back to the lapbooks. As I was searching for more File Folder Games, I kept coming across references to lapbooks so I did a search for those. Wow! So many great, quality, free resources out there. The lapbooks round out the discussions that we have verbally. I will give examples. First you use file folders as well, but you can fold them differently and add more parts to them so they have extra flaps and such. They all fold back down to the original size so you can just file them away. The things included in our The Runaway Bunny lapbook are - the letter R and r and the word "rabbit", some story cards in a little pocket that tell "if/then" of all the situations in the story (the baby bunny says he'll turn into a bird and fly away, the mommy says she'll become a tree so he has a place to fly home to; so the pictures are of a bird and a tree and Chloe has to match them), a mini-book with a poem about a rabbit, examples of the two types of art used (I also added some of Chloe's art work), etc. We found different shapes on some of the pages so we talked about those, especially round (sphere, disc and circle). We went to Lowe's today and pick up some paint chips in different shades of green because the final colored picture in the book has several shades of green in it. I'm planning on helping Chloe make a collage to put in our lapbook. Can you tell I'm excited? As she gets older, she can help more with the cutting and pasting parts of the project. Eventually, the plan is for her to put her own lapbooks together.
I will eventually figure out how to add photos to this blog. Then I can just show you what I'm talking about!
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Cleaning the house! Who, me?
Have you ever heard of The Flylady? If not, you can check her out at Flylady.com. She also has a Facebook page. One of the biggest parts of following her advice on organizing and cleaning is to do things in 15 minutes chunks of time. You can do anything for 15 minutes. I used to try to follow her advice about making a Control Journal for keeping routines but I found I focused more on creating the journal than using it to help me clean the house!
So years have gone by since I tried any of her suggestions. Recently, I've been having the urge to purge junk out of the house and get it more organized. Sort of like "Spring Cleaning" except in the Fall. The timing is perfect because we like to decorate for Christmas on the week-end after Thanksgiving. Well when I went to The Flylady on Facebook, I saw people playing a Flylady Bingo game. The idea is to make a list of 6 things you want to do in your house, laundry, dishes, etc. Then one person on the site volunteers to call a number. What ever number they call, you do the corresponding chore on your list for 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, you go check the site and see what number gets called next. Three numbers are called for the first 45 minutes. Then next next 15 minutes is a break. Then the last three numbers are called. I joined in a few days ago and it's really motivating and a lot of fun. I've been really seeing a difference in my house.
Sometimes I put a chore on my list more than one time. I learned after the first time I played that I finished the game with a lot of unfinished jobs. The next game I played I listed laundry three times because I had a lot of clean clothes to put away. I'm planning on playing another round this afternoon. Then nice thing is, you can jump into the game anytime you want. You don't have to wait for a new game to start. I figure 15 minutes worth of cleaning, organizing and purging junk is better than none!
If you struggle with being motivated to clean, this is a great way to make it fun! Even Chloe gets into it and wants to help me!
So years have gone by since I tried any of her suggestions. Recently, I've been having the urge to purge junk out of the house and get it more organized. Sort of like "Spring Cleaning" except in the Fall. The timing is perfect because we like to decorate for Christmas on the week-end after Thanksgiving. Well when I went to The Flylady on Facebook, I saw people playing a Flylady Bingo game. The idea is to make a list of 6 things you want to do in your house, laundry, dishes, etc. Then one person on the site volunteers to call a number. What ever number they call, you do the corresponding chore on your list for 15 minutes. When the timer goes off, you go check the site and see what number gets called next. Three numbers are called for the first 45 minutes. Then next next 15 minutes is a break. Then the last three numbers are called. I joined in a few days ago and it's really motivating and a lot of fun. I've been really seeing a difference in my house.
Sometimes I put a chore on my list more than one time. I learned after the first time I played that I finished the game with a lot of unfinished jobs. The next game I played I listed laundry three times because I had a lot of clean clothes to put away. I'm planning on playing another round this afternoon. Then nice thing is, you can jump into the game anytime you want. You don't have to wait for a new game to start. I figure 15 minutes worth of cleaning, organizing and purging junk is better than none!
If you struggle with being motivated to clean, this is a great way to make it fun! Even Chloe gets into it and wants to help me!
Monday, November 22, 2010
New to blogging
I decided to give blogging a try and see if I like it. So far, I'm having trouble changing the template on my page. My brain will probably be more clear in the morning so I guess I try to make changes tomorrow. I'm planning on blogging about anything I'm interested in at the time. Some things that are holding my attention right now are Preschool Homeschooling my 3 year old daughter Chloe, baking (especially cupcakes), looking for great coupons, and crafts (which include knitting, loom knitting and crocheting). We are also remodeling our home so there may be blogs about that too. I'll probably write about stuff like things we did or places we visited too. I guess we'll just have to see.
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