Okay, okay a new post already!

Well, I have taken a little (okay, LONG) break from my blog. I have been hunkered down at home doing school with Sam.

(Because of our busy school schedule. I will begin updating my blog every Friday, starting next week.)

He is doing really well this year! We started the year reading "Brown Bear, Brown Bear What do you See?" by Eric Carle. We did a lot of fun things with this story. Sam learned all his color words and the names of all the animals in the book. We made a "baggie book" called "I see a Brown Bear." I used pictures of the animals from the book that I found online. I pasted them to cards and I wrote "I see a brown bear (or whatever animal and color.)" under the pictures. I then slid the completed cards into quart sized baggies back to back (2 per baggie.) Stapled the baggies together and made a cover out of construction paper. If you would like to see pictures of this idea, you can check it out at www.thevirtualvine.com under her Brown Bear unit. Sam really liked reading his story.

We are now on our apple unit. Sam has been reading his own personal book about apples that I made using clip art that I found online. I found a simple poem, "How Many Apples Do You See?" with lots of great sight words and some other simple words related to apples. I used Microsoft Publisher to make the book. We did a "cold probe" of this book and I realized that he needed help with discriminating between words like "how" and "now." We are also learning number words. I made a file folder game where you match leaves with the number on them to apples with the number word. We did it without any prior instruction and he picked it up really fast! I think he already knew some of the number words and so this was a great expansion. We are also focusing on the short a sound during this unit. Learning about ants and alligators and other things that start with a.

Anway, as you can see, we have been super busy in the Marshall house with homeschool fun. Check back next week and I will have some pictures up of some of the activities we have been doing.