Category: The Peaceful Preschool

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance: against such there is no law.
Matthew 5:22-23

Spring means strawberries here in Michigan… and it’s a good thing too since we read the Giant Jam Sandwich! Strawberries were dirt cheap this week, so I picked up a TON of strawberries at the store to make homemade strawberry jelly. The kids had a blast helping me cut the berries and squeeze the juice of out them. I tend to not be a fan of chunky jam (it’s a texture thing!), so we opted to make jelly instead.

I have never made strawberry jelly, but I have canned grape jelly in the past. It never ceases to amaze me how much sugar is called for in the recipe! We always half the sugar in the recipe (and it’s a good thing we do because I didn’t realize we were almost out of sugar! Poor planning on my part!). I love the low/no sugar Sure-Jel… I’ve never had a problem with jellies not setting up because of a lack of sugar when I use this for canning.

If you have never read The Giant Jam Sandwich, I’d recommend it for a good laugh. My kids thoroughly enjoyed it!

We also read Sheep in a Jeep this week. It’s a very simple book and quick to read, but my kids thought it was hilarious seeing these silly sheep try to drive a Jeep. We talked about being responsible and paying attention to what is around you… otherwise you might get stuck in the mud! haha

To work on our math skills this week, we got all of my sons cars/trucks out and put them in piles of five. We then skip counted by 5’s until we had counted all of his cars. We then sorted all the cars by color to see which ones we had the most of… red won!

I recently found a book called Jesse Builds a Road at a used book story, and while it isn’t a “planned” book from The Peaceful Preschool curriculum, it’s one I’m glad we added! It’s a cute book about a boy who uses his imagination and trucks to build a road in his back yard, so I invited my son so go build his own road. Anything that involves using his trucks, he’s a gamer for! He dug and paved and removed a ton of dirt. My garden had a handy road weaving through it by the time he was done!

With the beautiful weather, we spent a lot of time outside this week. Target always has the best dollar bin finds! I recently found these archeological digging blocks, so we got out our hammers and chisels and dug for J-ewels. We may or may not have eventually taken a hammer to them to get the block broken open. HAHA! But it was a fun half hour!

We also used our imaginations and chalk paint that Nana got for the kiddos in their Easter baskets. My slightly OCD mind has a hard time mixing colors, but I love how kids don’t have any boundaries or preconceived ideas of what colors should do! They end up making the most brilliant artwork. I recently stumbled across this quote, “Who told you that one paints with colors? One makes use of colors, but one paints with emotions.” (Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin) This is what children do! They use emotion to make glorious “messes.”

I am very thankful for our beautiful back yard! We have nature at our fingertips and it’s something I don’t take for granted. I’m also very thankful for the lack of mosquitoes! YAY for mosquito control! We’ve been splashing in streams. Picking up snakes. Looking at fungus. And getting downright dirty. This is what science should look like. Hands on and pure joy.

Of course we ended our Letter J unit with another handprint artwork! J is for Jellyfish! These squiggly handprints might be my favorite handprint art yet.

Are you ready for a sappy post about why I love homeschooling so much? If not, you might want to skip the next few paragraphs.

We started the Letter I, and then two days later I went into labor. Needless to say, homeschooling got put onto the back burner. We spent the next week enjoying the new baby and learning our new normal. We snuggled. We connected. We cried. We played. We fought. New babies bring on so many new emotions… for everyone in the family!

While we did take some time to regroup as a family, we also jumped right back into homeschooling! You might think that it was a little soon to continue working through the Peaceful Preschool, but honestly, Jennifer took the work out of lesson planning when she created this beautiful curriculum. Honestly, I felt like returning to a feeling of “normal” would be good for my kiddos.

I took my expectations and lowered them immensely… and then I lowered them again. I continued reading the recommended books and implemented whatever corresponding activities I wanted! No pressure. It’s summer. Kids need to be outside, but I also want them to feel a sense of normalcy. And so we continued with the Letter I.

Before going into labor we read the book Inch by Inch. My toddler had fun pointing out the worm in each picture, and my son had fun walking around the house with a ruler and measuring everything. We talked about how many inches were in a foot (again) and also introduced 1/2 inches (This concept was beyond him, but it never hurts to just show him and move on. He’s now been introduced to the concept!).

I then took a pencil and traced pictures from the book. My son and daughter had fun water coloring the pictures, and then my son practiced his fine motor skills by cutting out the paintings. We then used mod-podge to glue the pictures down and create a scene. We talked about depth of field. Which images should be in the front and which ones should be in the back. “If you put the bird down first, it’s going to be hidden by the grass.” “Things that are farther away appear smaller. Things that are closer appear larger.” This might have been one of my MOST favorite activities yet!

Then baby came.

With the responsibilities of a new little one, I had fun asking my two year old to be mommy’s helper. She practiced sorting by putting away the silverware from the dishwasher into the drawer.

When I was back on my feet (this was MUCH faster than my previous two deliveries), we had fun reading Ice Cream Summer. This book sure does have a lot to discuss!! It encompasses history, cultures, math and reading. We had fun making ice cream cones and practicing our addition and subtraction. “If mommy gave you 4 scoops of ice cream and 2 fell on the floor, how many are left?” “If I had 2 scoops of ice cream and you had 3 scoops of ice cream, how many scoops do we have?”

While my son was busy helping me cut out scoops of ice cream, his sister was busy burying her hands in grain. She loves squeezing it and scooping it. Her fine motor skills continue to amaze me… she’s a master at small legos and she just turned two!

The weather was beautiful so we took advantage of it and used the chalk paint their Nana got them as a big brother/big sister present. I just love how kids have no concept of what is “right” and “wrong” in art. Their use of color is amazing!

We finished up our unit with a little handprint art. Of course we had to carry on the ice cream theme!! I drew the cones with markers and then layered their handprints on top of it… you can’t just have ONE scoop of ice cream!

A little over 3 weeks ago, our sweet little new addition joined the family. She has just been the sweetest baby and such a JOY (as her middle name indicates!). We’ve toned down our schooling a bit, but we are still plugging away through the Peaceful Preschool. I would be napping right now, but nap times just didn’t line up today for all three kids. Instead, I thought I’d catch up on a bit of blogging.

The past few weeks we’ve been trying to figure out our new routine… mostly we are just reading books and doing a couple of the activities. It’s too nice outside these days to not be running around barefoot without a care in the world, so we’ve been outside exploring and burning off as much energy as possible. When you live in Michigan, you learn to soak up as much sunshine as possible while you can!

This week we started the Letter J… so as you can see, I’m a bit behind in my blogging, but here is a recap from our Letter H unit!

I think I say this with every new unit that we do, but we really enjoyed our books this week! The Little Red Hen, Harold and the Purple Crayon and The Little House all quickly became new favorites. My kids especially loved Harold and the Purple Crayon. Something about the imagination and simplicity of the story really captivated them!

One morning I handed each of the kiddos a purple crayon and asked them to replicate a picture from the book. The drawings are very simplistic (think “drawn by a kid”), so my 5 year old, messy drawing loving son enjoyed copying a couple of the pictures. It was a really fast craft, but I took few minutes to point out details in each drawing. I think it was a good activity to teach him to look at details… because there weren’t many, it wasn’t overwhelming.

“Who wants to help me bake the bread?!” I yelled from the kitchen… and both kids came running yelling, “I do!!”

The Little Red Hen sparked some great conversation with my 5 year old. At the end of the story, the Little Red Hen decides NOT to share her bread with the other lazy animals. My son asked me if that was the kind thing to do? Ooooohhh… now we get to have a great discussion about doing the right thing! Should she have shared? Yes… God commands us to be loving even with those that try to take advantage of us. God’s Word says if someone asks for our robe, we should give him our coat as well. BUT the Bible also teaches not to be lazy! As a door turns upon its hinges, so does a slothful man upon his bed. We definitely used this story to build our character. We are supposed to work hard like the Little Red Hen, but we also need to be giving to those who do not “deserve” it because God gives to us what we do not deserve… eternal life!

The Little House had so many great things in it that we parked on this book for a while. We watched a time-lapse video of a house being constructed and talked about what it takes to build a quality house. We then took a couple days designing our own houses using differing materials/media. Hobby Lobby has awesome paper houses for a very reasonable price by the way!! The kids enjoyed making these houses, which later turned into houses for my son’s Lego men.

The Little House also discusses moon phases! So we took some time to go on a tangent and discussed moon phases. I’m pretty sure the kids just really liked using Oreos to construct different phases of the moon. It made a lasting impression that’s for sure! I found the moon phase printable from Free Homeschool Deals.

For math, we used screws to count and add with the number cards provided by our Peaceful Preschool curriculum and we discussed how building a home uses MANY screws and also talked about what other materials are used during construction.

Of course we had to do our handprint art. Since spring was quickly approaching, we made a H-ive. My son kept asking me when the bees would be back… and now they are here!

SaveSave

SaveSave