A Month in Review

We've been busy with school, but life's been too busy to write about school.  Here's a taste of what we've been up to learning, mostly in pictures; there's just so much to share that I figured I'd let the pictures tell the story.

Colors, shapes, fine motor skills, counting, we can do so much with construction paper and glue!

Tearing paper to make a blue and purple kite

Happy to tear paper! (he just doesn't know it's also good for strengthening those hands!)

Gluing the kite together

Stickers are really popular with these two

Both the kids can count to four, sometimes independently, sometimes needing a little assistance.  It's lots of fun to hear their little voices.  

We've been able to add some gross motor, walking with Isaiah!

Isaiah is really into the color yellow lately.  Sometimes his color recognition kind of comes and goes, but it's definitely expanding.  When he's "on" he can get red, blue, green, yellow and even orange!  In this picture you can see the "stop light" that I made for the kids to practice matching, identifying and counting colors.  Nadia really enjoyed it and played with it several times.  Isaiah matched the colors just right!  He can match his colors almost 100% of the time.  

"The Wheels on the Bus" was a book one week, but we have the real thing!  This bus "sings" the fun song

Once, while painting, Nadia fell out of her chair.  (she was fine, don't panic)  She started crying more when I tried to comfort her because she thought I was going to make her stop painting!  As soon as she got back to work, she immediately calmed down.

Painting, painting, painting.  We've been doing lots and lots of projects with painting.

Shh, it's a surprise!

And lots of play-doh!  

We've enjoyed some great play dates with our new friends, too!  We are so thankful for the new friends God has brought into our lives.

There's so much more I could tell you, but that's all for now.  We're officially on break, and I'm looking forward to planning more fun learning for next year.  Maybe I'll even make the time to share our learning, but don't hold your breath.  Just know we're having fun!

Merry Christmas!

Review Week (with videos - Grandparents, you're welcome)

playdough, squares, blue, red, clothes to laundry room

This week was a scheduled review week, so I'm not going to list off all the things that we were reviewing because it was a lot!  Basically what I tried to do was get all the fun activities in that we weren't able to do during the other "regular" weeks (as if there is such a thing as a regular week).

We had some nice weather this week, so we enjoyed some outside play time, even if it was confined to the back porch.

We reviewed our animals:

Nadia was very excited about coloring this duck

Isaiah was all about Gonzo and the chickens

 To review colors we played our Candyland "bingo" game.  I've never noticed this, but Isaiah was able to match the colors!  He didn't always name them correctly, but he could match them about 90% of the time.  Hooray!

We worked on shapes and colors with playdough on the back porch.

More animal and circle review and fine motor development with stickers.  These were really hard to get off the sticker paper, so I finally realized I could stick them around the edges of his tray, which worked really well.

And what week would be complete without glue?  We not only played with glue inside the square, but we also glued popsicle sticks together to make squares.  We'll save them for later to paint.  Both the kids really liked this activity.

And if a picture is worth 1000 words, then I thought perhaps some videos would be worth even more.  Or at least the grandparents should enjoy them.

So, here's a video of Isaiah helping with his memory verse:  I Thessalonians 2:13 "Give thanks to God."



Nadia knows her verse, too; though you can see that her attention span is definitely that of a two-year-old.  This makes me laugh.



I realize not everyone can understand two-year-old speak, but I don't have time to make a transcript.  Just take my word for it, she really did say the verse on that very first line.

One of our songs was Jesus Loves Me.  Isaiah's been working on this for a while with his grandpa with a slight variation to the traditional wording.  Besides getting a little distracted by his sister (who can only stay out of the camera for so long), he does a great job!



We've been working on first and last names.  Isaiah knows this really well, but Nadia just can't seem to get past the fact that she's "Sister".  Every once in a while she'll say that sister's name is Nadia, but we can't quite capture the moment.  Anyway, this one has a sweet ending that I can't resist sharing.