We Have Been Busy Lately!

We have been having so much fun at our house lately. We implemented a new bible/preschool cirriculum, Raising Rock Stars. I also became a member of her blog and can get the powerpoint shows and other extras that she has put together for members only. It has been so much fun to let Braedon and Kaley *play* on the computer and be learning at the same time. For each letter, number, shape we are doing in Raising Rock Stars I am finding as many other free printables of the same to have plenty of worksheets. Some of our favorites are:
Letter cut and paste from Homeschool Creations
Letter hunt, do a dots, and many more from Confessions of a Homeschooler
Color by numbers and many more from Preschool Palace
Letter and numbers worksheets from Beginner Reading
We are using Starfall, which the kids have been loving.
We also have been using You Tube a lot lately. I find videos of nursery rhymes, kids worship songs w/motions, and videos of the song we learn in whichever Raising Rock Stars unit we are doing.
We have completed the lessons on Let Your Light Shine (1,yellow,see,circle) and Ten Commandments (2,green,the,square). Braedon has both of the verses memorized and knows 4 or 5 other verses from church (we try to review these daily).
I also started teaching them nursery rhymes. I discovered DLTK and found the lyrics and printable word cards for the nursery rhymes. We started by learning Hey Diddle Diddle. It is a silly little rhyme that is fun to say. We say it, sing it, watch videos of it and point to the words and pictures whenever possible so they can make those connections. We have also learned In The Beginning and Seven Days both to the tune of Tom Thumbkin.
We are doing Before Five In A Row too. We finished The Little Rabbit a while back (before I had Garrett). That one is probably worth re-doing because it was so long ago. Recently, we have completed Goodnight Moon and almost finished with If Jesus Came to My House. This has been SOOO fun. I love her ideas of how to go beyond the pages of a book and create real life learning experiences. Just in doing this several weeks with Braedon he has really started to *get* some things and have much more of an imagination. Her ideas really made the books come alive, especially to me. I wasn't taught this way and never really had a love for books but now for the first time ever I am developing one and see the importance for our children to have a love of books. I have no doubt that we are going to fall in love with each book we read using BFIAR. The neatest idea that came with If Jesus Came To My House is that she suggests having fun with your shadows. That led to all of us laying down in a dark room watching daddy make shadow puppets on the wall. It was so much fun.

I have started rotating our puzzles weekly because we have quite a few and the peices just get thrown around and lost if I have too many out at once. Only having 2 or 3 out that they can choose from seems to make them want to focus on actually doing them. I have been reminded of how much my kids LOVE puzzles lately. We spend a LOT of time doing puzzles.
Braedon and I have been working on counting. There is a neat counting/number recognition game from Confessions of a Homeschooler that he has been liking to play. We are on Tt this week and I found a turtle graphing download from Confessions of a Homeschooler too.
We talk about the weather and the days of the week on most days. We talk about names, spelling of names, birthdays, ages (going to add address and phone number soon). We work on cutting/pasting and tracing almost everyday. We also have prayer time and bible reading almost everyday.
A new thing I am going to implement is Tots on a Mission from Totally Tots. I want to start learning and praying for other countries and show my kids where they are on our blow up, plastic globe.
This really has been a post summing up our past month. I took two weeks for each RRSP lesson and two weeks for each different book we have done in BFIAR.
In addition we have been doing lots of fun Valentine's themed stuff (separate post).