Valentine's Day Party

A really sweet lady at my church who has kids about the same age as ours undertook the huge task of hosting a Valentine's Day party for all the toddler/preschoolers she knew.  They live about 2 blocks from here and we've gone to her house several times.  She's lots of fun.  She was even really smart and decided to throw it 2 days AFTER Valentine's Day so that we could all get Valentines on clearance!

Although Lydia doesn't really understand about Valentine's Day, I figured it would be fun for her, if only to just get her out of the house and around other kids.  She has always struggled with being around other children, so any opportunity for her to get some "socialization" is good.

Lunch was provided and Lydia kept stealing the marshmallow hearts from off the table because she could reach them.  After lunch, which was served outside, she went around to all of the abandoned plates and ate everyone else's left over potato chips.  She's a funny kid and has always struggled with putting on weight, so I don't begrudge her a few potato chips, especially since they are a rare treat.  Luckily no one minded. (She's the kid in the middle of the blanket with all the food while the other kids are off playing.)

We colored bags and exchanged valentines.  Overall it was a fun morning!

Cows

Well, I've decided to refocus my unit studies.  I was having a hard time coming up with themes that Lydia would enjoy.  I've had my eye on the possibility of a Letter of the Week style program with her.  Lydia already knows all her letter sounds and she recognizes many numbers, shapes, and colors, but she's certainly not ready to begin reading yet.  She just doesn't have the vocabulary abilities and understanding to grasp blending.  As a result, my focus is more for fun and to help her develop her speech and fine motor skills.

This brings my to my new plan.  I will do Letter of the Week as done by Brightly Beaming Resources found here.  Specifically, we'll be doing the preparatory curriculum.  Basically, the idea is that every day you do a different shape/ vocab word/ letter /number and you also have a theme for the whole week as well as a small passage or poem to memorize.

Here's our learning board:

I did decide to switch up the memorization a bit.  I hate most nursery rhymes and see no need to make my daughter learn them, so I'm picking out small passages from the scriptures or other resources for her to learn.  I also plan on keeping them up for more than a week as memorizing these will be difficult for her.

Unfortunately, I already returned all our cow books from the library so I don't have a picture of them.  They were a hit, though.  Here's the titles we read:

Click Clack Moo, Cows That Type
The Cow That Laid an Egg
The Cow Loves Cookies
Millie Waits for the Mail

I'd have to say my favorite was Click Clack Moo, but Lydia enjoyed them all. I even found a really cute little animated video of Click Clack Moo on YouTube here.  We read each of these books several times throughout the week.

Oh, and the girls are totally loving our music study.  Today, I asked Lydia if she wanted to listen to Vivaldi or Bob Dylan, and she said, "OK, Bob Dylan!"  That made Daddy proud.  Even Ellie enjoys Dylan.  The other day she was whining until I put it on and didn't make a peep for the entire hour.  As soon as it ended though, she started whining again.  I guess we'll keep doing the music study, then!

Music Study Update- Bob Dylan

So, Tyler finally made a playlist for the girls.  He hesitated for so long because he felt like the task was so overwhelming.  How could he possibly make a one hour playlist for them to represent a single artist?!?  Anyways, after my encouragement, he managed to make their first "modern" music study playlist.  Rather than The Beatles, though, he chose to do Bob Dylan first.  I thought it was an interesting choice, but as I'm trying to use Grooveshark as much as possible for this and The Beatles aren't really on Grooveshark, it made sense.  So here's his first playlist.  You can listen to it here.

Bob Dylan:

Blowin' In the Wind
Tangled Up in Blue
The Times They Are A-changin'
Mr. Tambourine Man 
Subterranean Homesick Blues
Positively 4th Street
Don't Think Twice, It's Alright
It Ain't Me, Babe
Maggie's Farm
If Not for You
Like a Rolling Stone
Lay Lady Lay
You Ain't Goin' Nowhere
I Want You
Ballad of a Thin Man
Knockin' On Heaven's Door

So, my current goal is to listen to each of these (classical and modern) playlists at least once every other day.  If we want to listen to more, that's just fine.

Snowy Day and Potty Training

Sorry I didn't post last week.  Last week I decided to concentrate my efforts and potty train Lydia.  She's two and a half now and has shown all sorts of readiness signs.  However, it was a total disaster and after 4 days of next to no progress, I gave up for now.  I have also decided that potty training is one of my least favorite things about being a parent so far.  Yup, hated it. A lot.

Other than that, though, the last week and a half has been rather uneventful.  Tyler has spent a lot of time studying at home lately, and that always seems to throw me off a bit.  There's something about having your husband at home that makes you not want to work at all.  That, and this week he has been experimenting with not going to class at all and just listening to the recorded lectures at home.  For better or for worse, it seems to be working out much better for him, so I guess I just need to get used to not having free reign of the house all day.

In other news, today is a snow day here in Arkansas!  It is snowing a ton as I speak and we'll probably be home-bound for the next several days.  Lydia likes snow in theory, but she hates playing in it, so we probably won't be going outside.  Because it's so cold and our 70 year old rental house isn't really made for the cold, we are spending the day as a family in only two rooms of the house: our bedroom, and the girl's bedroom.  When the weather gets under 30 degrees, our house's ancient heating system (Basically a gas fire under a large grate in the hallway between our bedrooms.  It's crazy dangerous and Lydia has already burned herself on it a few tiems) has a really hard time keeping up, so we're trying to make it easy on it.  This means that Lydia is currently eating lunch on the floor, I'm sitting on the bed, and Tyler is across the room working on his studies.  I almost feel like a pioneer!

So there you have it!  Oh, I've also changed up my unit studies plan (not for the last time, I'm sure!) and I'll be writing a post on that soon.

Dinosaurs

Ever since Lydia got a plastic t-rex from the dollar section at Walmart, Tyler has hoped that she would love dinosaurs.  And she does.  She enjoys her little toy dinosaurs (we have since added to her collection), but she's more likely to make them kiss than she is to have them destroy things.  In hopes that she would become more educated on all things dinosaur, Tyler requested I do our next unit on dinosaurs.  I happily agreed.

This one didn't go as smoothly as the Penguin week, though.  For one thing, she didn't recognize any dinosaur except T-rex as a dinosaur. I got several books from the library about dinosaurs, but because I got them without looking through them first (you try bringing two kids two and under to the library past naptime), only two ended up being at Lydia's level.  And even then, she only liked the one that was more about butterflies than dinosaurs.  Oh well, she did enjoy our dinosaur craft, though!  Anyways, here's what we did this week.

We read the book, Dinosaurs Roar, Butterflies Soar as well as Dinosaurs Big and Small.  As I mentioned, the former was certainly her favorite.  And I have to say that I enjoyed it as well.  The illustrations were bright and fun.  We read both of these books several times.  With Dinosaurs Big and Small, we learned some new vocabulary such as "carnivore," "herbivore," as well as several dinosaur names.  If you ever want to have fun, try to get a two and a half year old to say dinosaur names.

We also watched the movie, The Land Before Time.  This was a mistake.  It is crazy violent for a G-rated movie.  I don't mind the violence, but Lydia has always been very sensitive to tense scenes in movies.  I let her watch it while I was doing some chores and she kept coming to me and saying, "Scared dinosaur movie."  I'd tell her that's ok, we can watch something else, and she would say, "Go finish dinosaur movie."  So I said ok, and she'd go back.  I think in the end she enjoyed it well enough, but I don't think I'll be having her watch it again any time soon.

We also did a few dinosaur coloring sheets as well as a dinosaur craft.  I bet you can't tell which is mine and which is Lydia's.

For a sidenote, Ellie learned how to roll over this week!  What a big girl.  This is a picture I took of her today.

For fun, I've been reading Lydia Edith Nesbit's Beautiful Stories from Shakespeare.  I got it for free on my Kindle, and now Lydia asks me several times a day to "read Shakespit!"  It makes a mama proud, and I'm learning a few new things too.

This week had a few beautiful days, so we spent a lot of time in the backyard.  I let Lydia bring her dinosaurs outside.  Even after all her education this week, she still made them kiss goodbye.

Music Study

If you know my husband you know that music is a very important part of our lives, especially his.  He has a very strong passion for music, especially rock and roll music.  As a result, we both want our daughters to grow up being exposed to lots of different kinds of music.  I'm interested in our daughters being familiar with the great composers and their works.  My husband wants our daughters to be familiar with the great artists of the last 50 years.  So what I did was to create a playlist on Grooveshark.com for the Ambleside composer study recommendations.  We listen to this every other day.  It's about an hour long and I just put it on when the girls are playing.  Here's the link to Ambleside's composer schedule.

Right now that means we're listen to Vivaldi.  Specifically (and I don't know if I'm writing these correctly, but there you have it):

Gloria
The Four Seasons
Trio Sonata in C major
Concerto in D for Guitar
Concerto for Oboe, Violin, and Strings in B-flat major.
Concerto Senza Cantin in re minore

My husband thought it would be a good idea for the girls to start with The Beatles, so he's working on a playlist for them.  I have will have them listen to this on the days we don't listen to Vivaldi.  My plan is to do two new artists (one classical, one modern) every four months.  In this way I'm hoping they will gain familiarity with them all.  I'll update this post with my husband's Beatles playlist when he gives it to me.

Today, Lydia fell asleep while listening to Vivaldi.  I guess that's a good side-effect of a classical music education!

Penguins

My first Unit Study ever!  Now, in theory I'm not really a unit study kind of gal.  I am actually pretty hard-core classical.  But for preschool and for fun, unit studies are great.  So for my first attempt at "organized" preschool, I decided to do a unit on my husband's favorite animal, penguins.

This week has been ALL penguins.  The four books pictured I got from the library.  And can I just say, I love our library system?  It has several libraries in it, and I can request a book from any of them and they will be at my library, waiting for me to pick them up!  I love it.  Anyways, we really enjoyed all these books, but Lydia especially enjoyed A Penguin Story, while my husband's favorite was Pierre the Penguin.  He actually called it "charming."  We have read each of these books at least once a day this week.

We also did a heart penguin craft.  Lydia loves hearts because there are some on her shoes and we call them her "pretty heart shoes," so I knew she'd love this one.  Here's the link to the template.  We colored the hearts black and red and talked about the colors.  Then I cut them out and we counted the hearts (several times.  Lydia loves counting).  Then Lydia wanted to talk about which ones were big and which ones were little.

After that discussion, I glued them together and we each had our very own heart penguin.  I named mine Snowflake, after the pink penguin in Scamper the Penguin, which we're watching later this week and I'm ashamed to say I actually own on DVD.

Other Penguiny things we've done or are going to do: We watched this short interactive story, we have a number of coloring sheets and a few more crafts to do.  I did find an adorable Oreo penguin snack, but that would require having lots of leftover Oreos, and as we have recently renewed our efforts to eat healthily, that wouldn't be a good idea.

We also play with Starfall everyday and Lydia's getting closer to being able to recognize that reading is just putting letters together.  Before this week she knew all her letter sounds if you asked her, "what does B say?" or "what sound does L make?," but she didn't know how to reverse it.  So if you said, "what letter says sssss?" she wouldn't have a clue.  After the last three or four days of working on it, though, she had a breakthrough and now recognizes what I call the Transitive Property of Letter Sounds.

I would say, overall, that this has been a very successful first attempt, and now I'm just faced with the question of what unit study to do next?