Y AND Z!!

Wow! What an adventure it has been going through the alphabet with Jayce over the past year. We are wrapping up his first year of homeschool with letters Y and Z. For the letter Y we made a yo-yo out of paper and yarn. This motor skill exercise was a little bit tricky for Jayce. We worked together on putting the string through one hole, then pulling it back through another. After a while, he got the hang of it.

We also tried cutting a picture of a yo-yo into three pieces, then putting it all back together. Teaching Jayce to look at the picture, see what's missing, then try to piece it all together to make the picture complete.

And since this was our last week of school, I wanted Jayce to be able to do some of his favorite exercises,

like the dot worksheet. Using the yellow dot marker of course.

And painting!

For a fun fieldtrip, we went out on a yucky Wednesday to get some frozen yogurt. Jayce loves looking at all the toppings and picking out which ones he wants. The chocolate chips are his favorite!

This was a fun fieldtrip!

Jayce's Springtime Flowers

Jayce's flowers that we planted at the beginning of spring were getting too big for our little pots, so we needed to transfer them some where that they could grow bigger. Grammie was happy to let us use her garden.

Jayce was very good at watering all of his little plants.

But he was more concerned with watering the rocks. He was very thorough with this, making sure to water every single rock in Grammie's garden.

We planted his sunflower right by the back door and made sure to show Pop Pop where it was so he wouldn't run over it with the lawn mower.

His sunflower is doing really great, it's already twice this size!

AND Z

We made a neat zoo craft. Jayce colored some of the animals, then we glued the gates on the front so we could open them and see all the animals inside the zoo. And of course we made a fieldtrip to the zoo with Aunt Susan and cousin Kristian. Jayce's favorite part is always the farm.

We practiced pulling a zipper up and down. It was neat to see how it worked.

  So, now we are all done with our curriculum for the summer! It has been amazing to watch Jayce learn and grow so much this past year. It's hard to believe that he now knows 27 Bible verses, all of Psalm 91, the pledge to the flag, the 10 Commandments, all of the shapes, colors, numbers, different weather, days of the week, months of the year up to May, the entire alphabet and all the sounds of the letters, and countless facts about all kinds of animals from all over the world! God is so good to give us such wonderful things to learn about.

  This is definitely not the end of the blog for the summer. We plan on taking lots of fun trips and learning more about God's wonderful world and doing lots of fun crafts and projects as well. If you feel led, please pray for us as we attempt to put together some sort of curriculum for next year that focuses on teaching Godly character, something we feel is incredibly important for children to know and understand. We don't know if it will be ready for the next school year or not, but we'll see what God does. This is an exciting time and we are filled with joy as the Lord directs our each step!

We're Getting So Close!

Okay, again, I KNOW I'm late with this one. Some of you may have seen my post on facebook and you know that we are actually done with school for the summer :) HOORAY! But we have been very busy with wonderful things like celebrating Mother's Day and college graduations and looking for houses and even a little mini vacation, so I haven't had the chance to update our blog in a while. So, here we are with W and X.

Letter W

 We made a Walrus puppet. This is Wackford Walrus.

 Jayce did a great job following directions, putting the eyes in just the right place.

 This is Jayce making Wackford say, "Hello Jayce. What are you doing today?"

We also had a little bit of water play. This has been one of Jayce's favorite Tot Tray exercises. We took blue water and yellow water and made GREEN.

 It got kinda messy after a while so we moved it to the bathtub. Jayce got covered with green water, but he had a BLAST!!

Letter X

 Letter X was a bit difficult to find "hands on" activities for. So, we did a treasure hunt. If you're wondering where the connection is in that..."X" marks the spot :) I printed out several pictures of different things throughout our house, as he opened the paper and saw the picture, he would know where to go next.

 Here he is opening up one of his clues.

 The treasure is under the "X"

 HE FOUND IT!

YUM! What a great treasure! Resee Cups!!

Well, I did have a video of Jayce doing his treasure hunt, but for some reason it took the blogger.com site WAY too long to load. So, sorry, perhaps I can share it on facebook soon.

I hope you've enjoyed our activities for W and X. Our final letters are soon to follow!

Doubling up with U and V

This was the first week of doing two letters at a time. We started with U on Monday and Tuesday, took a break on Wednesday and followed up with our new letter V Thursday and Friday. It seemed to work out really nice and though we didn't do as many activities as we did with the other letters, we still had fun discovering lots of exciting things about both letters.

Letter U

We talked about under and umbrella. I called out some toys and asked Jayce to put them under the umbrella.

Now Jayce is under the umbrella.

Can you put Josiah under the umbrella?

We also played other positioning games (sorry I don't have pictures for those.) Putting toys under chairs or covers and also learning about upside down. We would turn toys upside down, and of course, hung upside down on the couch. :)

We learned about the amazing Umbrella Bird and how unique it is. It has a crest on top of it's head that looks like and umbrella and a wattle that hang below it's beak that looks like a pine cone. God is so creative!!

 Letter V

We learned about veterinarians. A very hard word to pronounce, so we just said vet. A vet is a doctor for animals. Jayce practiced being a vet by looking in his doggie's ear,

and giving his fur a nice brush. God has equipped people to be able to help and take care of animals.

We also learned about all kind of vegetables.

God made vegetables when he made plants. God gave us vegetables to keep our bodies healthy.

Again, I didn't get as many pictures as I wanted to this round. I'll try to do better with our other letters. We'll definitely have some updated pictures of Jayce's plants that he planted at the beginning of spring. They were all getting so big that we had to transport them to Grammie's house. Stay tuned for letters W and X!