Celebrating Love and Courage

  For our Warrior Wednesday, we are still learning about COURAGE and we chose to focus on an animal that showed courage. This was GREAT because both of our boys LOVE animals! The animal we chose was Togo, a Siberian Husky who played an instrumental role in saving many lives in an Alaskan village. Togo's sled team ran the longest and most dangerous leg of the relay (91 miles) to bring medicine to help a potentially deadly diphtheria epidemic.

 

 

 It was so neat watching Jayce pay such close attention to the story.

 We looked up videos of actual sled dogs racing through the snow to show the boys what it was like for Togo.

 Josiah loved the videos of the "gogs" (dogs).

 Then we colored pictures of sled dogs together.

 

  We enjoyed our time together learning more about courage and what it means to God and for us. Warrior time is still very much a work in progress as we learn what works best, the best time frame, and how we can get the MOST out of every time we have it. It can be hard sometimes after you put so much effort into something because you're not really sure how much they're actually retaining. We trust that the Lord will take these moments and sow them into the hearts of our little warriors and it will some day bring forth a harvest!

 

A Little Valentine's Fun







 Jayce LOVES to bake! So, we made cookies for all of our family and friends for Valentine's Day to let them know how much we love them and God loves them.

For our Valentine's breakfast, we had heart-shaped pancakes, Jayce mixed up the batter for us!

Josiah's Cat in the Hat Valentine, his favorite!

 

And here's Jayce's little Calliou Valentine, it's a paper doll, or as Daddy prefers, a paper friend.

 

We're spending today learning about God's love for us and how He demonstrates it EVERYDAY and how we can show our love for others as well. We hope you all have a Valentine's Day full of the love of Christ, it's the best kind of Valentine to have!!



Warrior Wednesday

  For a while we have tried to focus on one Godly character trait a month so that the boys are not just learning their ABCs and 123s, but learning the importance of having Godly character through all stages of life. For God's Word says "Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it." Proverbs 22:6
  It has proved to be a challenge as we've tried to find the "right" way to approach this time. It is something that's very important to us, but we just couldn't seem to find the right time or be consistent with our approach. So, we've started a new experiment called "Warrior Wednesdays". Every Wednesday we spend focused time after dinner, as a family, learning about the character of the month in creative ways.

 We start off our warrior nights by reciting the warrior way. Just a little spoken reminder of how we should be living everyday. Pray. Read the Bible. Obey our parents. Put others first. Just a few simple statements that they can be reminded of during the day while playing, cleaning up, eating dinner, and so on.


 

Here's Daddy and Mike the Knight reading the Warrior Way

 

 

  We decided this Wednesday to "act out" the story of Joshua and the Wall of Jericho using Little People. (We really thought David and Goliath would have been a little more appropriate but Jayce is a little scared of the giant in the story and tends to freak out whenever we even mention it, so we decided this story would work too.)

 

 

We used blocks to make the "wall" of Jericho.

Jayce and Daddy making Joshua and the Israelites march around the wall.



After the wall fell down, Josiah thought it looked like fun so he got down out of my lap to help.

 

Then we colored pictures of Jericho from www.whatsinthebible.com

 

 

  The definition of COURAGE that we chose from Character Sketches is "following difficult instructions in the face of danger." We talked about how Joshua did that and how God honored and rewarded his courage and obedience. We finished up our night with an ice cream treat and look forward to next Wednesday. We know there is so much more to learn and hope that this just becomes an exciting routine to look forward to and build upon. 

Adding Another One

So throughout the holidays we did very little actual planned out "school" time. Between being incredibly sick with our third baby and all the Christmas festivities, I figured we had enough going on. I found it very exciting to start the new year with school and new ideas for BOTH of my little warriors.

All this time Jayce has been doing school while Josiah naps, but Josiah is moving closer and closer to not needing a morning nap. Some days he does, some days he doesn't. So, I was challenged to see how school time would go with little Josiah joining us! LOL it was not easy to say the least but it was definitely entertaining!

I also realized how easy the K-3 curriculum from A beka was for Jayce so I decided to try a little of the K-4 curriculum which focuses a little more on tracing letters and writing and reading. I wasn't sure how he would do, but I was pleasantly surprised :)

This is Jayce stamping his name. I also had him trace his name everyday of the week and then try to write it on his own.

Daddy got a little time to do some learning time with Josiah. They focused on the letter A and the color red. We got these pages from http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/

As we started learning how to write letters, we learned that letters live in houses. Here's Jayce doing the "upstairs" motion.

LOL, downstairs...

And basement! He loved doing the motions everyday before we started our writing time.

I wondered how Jayce would do learning to hold his pencil correctly as we started to learn writing, but he has done VERY well learning this.

Here's little Bug doing his school time all by himself in his high chair.

 Whatever activity I gave Siah to do, Jayce was eager to watch and help him.

Especially when it came to putting stickers on a piece of paper, one of Jayce's favorite things to do.

Jayce has learned LOTS of sight words and we pulled out his TAG reader and I had him tap on any of his sight words that he could find on each page. He did GREAT!

Josiah didn't always stay nicely in his high chair. He threw his "learning" toys all over the floor and climbed on the table while Bubba was writing. But Jayce did very well and kept working :)

 

 

It has definitely been a challenge trying to teach two at once, especially when Josiah is SO wiggly and still needs so much help and Jayce is not big enough to do all his work without supervision and help as well. But it is such a delight to watch both of them learn and grow! I think my favorite thing is watching Jayce teach Josiah, he is very eager to help and wants Josiah to know all kinds of things. He is also very patient with him. A scene from one of our school days...Josiah throws his shape sorting cupcakes all over the floor. Me:"Josiah, why did you do that?" Jayce:"Because he's a baby Mommy, that's what babies do." LOL, a good reminder that we're ALL still learning! Thank you Lord for my sweet boys and all the things you are teaching us everyday!

Catching up



   Okay, so obviously I'm just not that good at keeping up on a week to week basis on this blog thing. I'd really like to, but chasing after two little boys doesn't always give me the extra time I need to sit on the computer. (I know some of you mommys know what I'm talking about.) So, here's my attempt to catch up on all the highlights. Currently we are on letter G, so I'm posting about letters "C" through "F" and a few Bible Stories. Here we go...

 

 

Letter C



 

Of course, we made sugar cookies for the letter "C"

 

They both thoroughly enjoyed them! :)

 Auntie Googie brought over a belated birthday gift, camping sticks with hot dogs and marshmallows. How fun! And appropriate for "C" week!

 

Letter D

We put lots of different things inside his Snoopy house that start with the letter D. He pulls each one out and then tries to guess what our letter of the week is.

 Tracing letter D. He thought it was so fun because we'd say "Big letter D has a stick and then a BIG belly." He loved drawing the BIG belly.

 One of their favorite D books from the library was "How does a Dinosaur Get Well Soon". We read that book so many times we all had it memorized.

 Here's his Letter D writing. He did these all on his own (except the first one on each line). I found that he did MUCH better trying to write the letters on a paper rather than on a white board. He also enjoyed it much more. Thanks Kara for the writing pad! Jayce LOVES it!

 

My sister found these folder games at a yard sale and we gave them a try. Jayce did AWESOME! The first one, we would look at the picture, say it, and then figure out which letter it started with.

This one was matching the Capital Letter with the little letter, again, he did GREAT!

 

 

Letter E

Jayce learned about England, and Big Ben, and soccer!

 We made Ellie Elephant

 We circled the pictures that started with the same sounds.

 Here's his "E" tracing! (We get these practice sheets from http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.net/ They have them for every letter, and after we print them off, we laminate them so we can use them over and over again.)

 We found this really neat Leap Imagination Desk that talks, sings, makes animal noises, and lots of other stuff when you color. Jayce really enjoyed this. It also has games that helps with counting and letter sounds and stuff. Very fun!

 

 

Letter F

We made a fish aquarium!

With little Jayce fingerprint fish!

 

 We talked about all kind of different forest animals.

 And we made a squirrel headband!

 And daddy made a fire!

 Enjoying the fire together.

 And we decorated the school room for fall and Thanksgiving!

 

 

Bible Time

I just wanted to share something new that has really put a lot of excitement into Bible time for us. We act out the Bible stories with toys and little people characters. Jayce remembers so much more when we do it this way. I think it helps him to visualize what happened. Here's a picture of us talking about the tower of Babel.

And, I know you can't see this one that well, but we learned about David being chosen as King and how all his other brothers were NOT chosen. Jayce remembered SO much about this story, simply because we pulled out characters and acted it out. We also use the Jesus Storybook Bible which is easy to understand and repeatedly points EVERYTHING to Jesus.

 

Sorry it took me so long to get this up, hopefully it won't be this long again between my next posts! ANOTHER UPDATE...I almost forgot, Jayce received Lumpy in the mail yesterday afternoon. He had been working on not throwing fits, saying Yes Ma'am and Yes Sir and obeying right away, and after he earned enough stickers, we ordered Lumpy from the Internet. You should have seen his face when he opened the package. It was priceless! I asked him, "Did Jesus answer your prayers?" And he said "Yes He did!" Hopefully Darby will be on her way soon! ;)

 

 



"B" is Brilliant

This post is going to be pretty short because I'm several weeks behind with my blogging. We've been learning so many new things and Jayce has really done well with learning all kinds of new skills. And, frankly, I need to catch up!

 

Here's all the worksheets Jayce did for our letter B week and the number 2. There was finger painting and counting, and he did an AMAZING job with recognizing his sight word "they."

I printed out a paper with lots of different words on it and then asked him to only color the word "they" where ever he found it, and to my surprise, he did GREAT!

 We talked about all kind of different birds that God has created. From the smallest hummingbird, to the largest ostrich!

 Jayce was anxious to pull out the counting bears again. I introduced him to a little math. Putting four bears on the table and telling him to take two away, what was left? 2!

 

 Jayce really likes his new find and circle worksheets.

Here are the different books we read for the letter B. Jayce really liked "Buzz Buzz Buzz went Bumblebee" and "I'm a Caterpillar". I'm aware Caterpillar starts with C, but he turns into a butterfly which clearly starts with our special letter :) "Leo the Lightning Bug" was a really cute book, but would even better for the letter L.

 And here he is working on his number puzzle, another one of his favorite things to do!

 We did a lot for the letter C and I'm looking forward to telling you all about everything. We also celebrated the first day of fall with lots of baking with Auntie Googie! This is going to be an exciting season!