Ok... I know everyone out there has times when homeschooling is kind of at the backburner. Well the past two weeks have kind of been that way around here. It is not that we have not been schooling, it has just been unschooling. Today we got back to the scheduled school. I have tried to start on some new things. My first picture is a new schedule that I made. I have always been having a hard time making sure that the boys get the subjects taken care of as much as they need it. So this schedule helps out, well at least so far.

The first lesson today was life skills. I had a tea party with the boys. Gabe worked on his pouring skills while both of the boys worked on their table manners. That is definetly something that we are going to have to keep working on.

For math Sam had a worksheet that took him a while. He hates doing math so he fights it. Today was actually focused on subtraction. We are going to focus on a different thing for math each day to try and keep his interest. Gabe worked on sequence cards for his math. I got this great idea from another blog. I took stickers and made my own sequence cards. He loved these because I used the stickers from the movie cars.

Gabe has sensory issues that I have mentioned in the past. Today we worked on the oral issues and did blow paint. He had so much fun. The bottom picture is the ones he made for his dad and brother.

Science class today was fun for them. Gabe played a game about animal habitats. He had fun and tried to make the animals fight. Silly boy. LOL. Sam read the book pictured below. I included a picture of him hiding in his bed reading. We are actually going to take him to the nature trail and see what he learned tomorrow.

This was Gabe working on his english. I had him doing three part cards for word recognation. Sam worked on his spelling.
All in all it was a very productive day. The kids enjoyed the school day. I will have some pictures tomorrow about the art projects we did tonight. The boys made some ocean drums. whew, now that was a lot of info for you. I am really tired reading what we did. Hopefully tomorrow will be a little easier, I do not think so though. Oh well .

Here is a couple of shots of the boys from yesterday. The first one is actually a couple of days ago. Sammy is really enjoys making peg boards. Well the pegboards have a lot of little beads. So when he started making them we bought a container to sort them into. I sorted all of them by colors, Then the boys dumped them. Needless to say the bin has sat emptyfor a long time because I did not want to spend days sorting them again. Sam came to me the other day and asked if he could sort them. I felt that this would be a good lesson on focus and determination. (there is about 5000 beads) He finally finished it after 4 days. (dh and of course did pitch in and help some) He is so proud of himself for finishing them.

My little Gabe, he loves helping me in the kitchen. I was making strawberries and bananas for dessert. Gabe cut all of the bananas up for me it was a great lesson for practical life skills. A yummy lesson to of course.

Laundry time--
Ok I know that some of you might think that I am being mean to my boys, but I made them do their own laundry today. The thing is I was trying to teach them a lesson. It started yesterday, I was trying to get caught up on laundry (Ihad 7 loads ugh!) The kids had been putting their dirty clothes in our room, so when I checked in their room for clothes I only looked on the floor for them. Much to my surprise there was none on the floor. So when I brought the last of the laundry into the boys room Sam comes out with a different basket filled with dirty clothes. he says "sorry I should have given this to you sooner". I wanted to scream, but I did not. Instead I thought quick and decided to teach him some lessons. First I wanted him to learn how much work we do around here and make sure that he appreciated it. Second I wanted him to learn some life skills. He is almost eight I think it is time that he learned how to do some laundry. I captured some shots of him today doing it that I thought I would share.

This is the boys carrying the Laundry Basket down to the laundry room. Sam felt it was to heavy to carry by himself so he got Gabe to help. I thought that it was very cute.
This is one of the boys trying to put the quarters in, so I even got a nice math lesson in. I told him that we needed 1.25 to do a wash and he needed to get the right amount.
I thought that was a funny shot. He had to dig way down in and get out all of the laundry.
This is a funny shot. When the wash finished he had to get the laundry out of the wash to put in the dryer. Well he could not reach the bottom so He brought the step stool along.
He is such a little mom in this picture. he is watching his "shows" while folding laundry on the couch and the kids are playing on the floor.
He demonstrated his skills on how to fold shorts. I did have him go through the whole routine, wash, dry, fold, put away. He did learn his lesson on this. From now on when he sees us doing laundry he plans on making sure to get his in with ours. I do plan on having him help me more from now on because I do think that it is a skill he should learn. So to finish up I hope that none of you feel like I was being to mean to him.

O.k. so I just posted a bunch of new entries. This week we have been a little crazy starting with Daddy being home for the first couple of days, to today ending with a boil water alert for the whole weekend. An interesting week to say the least. I tried to include different ways of him learning, to show him that he can learn anywhere. Things such as the mall, I gave him a map and he had to lead us around to different stores. Then seeing how leaves in a puddle can move with a different current. Wow where did the time go. I believe that I am all caught up for now. There should be more by the end of the weekend. I included some pictures of Sam working on his landform cards. I found these here. He loves the cards and had a great time actually making the Landforms. Of course being the amazing mother that I am (Now that is a funny statement) I did give him the blue water for it. There is a picture below that shows one of his completed forms.

Here is a picture of Gabe doing some of his pratical life skills. He folded up some wash clothes today. He had a lot of fun with it. When he finished he kept out one of the wash clothes as a picnic blanket for his little people.
His big brother even took a little break from his lessons to join in on the lesson.

This weekend we are finishing up with organizing our apartment. The boys still had to do some school work though. Gabe worked on some tracing in Kumon books with his daddy. Then he finished up with hanging clothes. This was more practical life skills. He was supposed to be using his hands to clip it but he found it better to use his mouth. Since he does need to strengthen the muscles in his mouth and we let it go. When he finished with it we made him use his hands ( he did not like that).
Sammy was continuing on with his states work. He also has started to keep a weather log for different regions this month. He finished of his day playing a new game that Our online buddy Amber told us about. He was doing multiplication on it and doing so well. He was excited to finish because the boys got their beds bunked up again. That is the best to sammy because he can keep his brother from bothering him during sleep.
Well the Dh and I were in our room cleaning and Sam told me that I should check on Gabe. Sam took the picture for me. Gabe was wearing the drain stopper as a hat.

Random shots of our day...
Today was a pretty simple day, just really busy. DH got out of work early today so we ran a bunch of errands. We took the boys to the library (so check back soon for my next list), plus many more things. I got the boys working on their lessons this morning and started on my to do list for the day. Sammy worked on his states assignment and started learning about the water cycle. He loved watching the water cycle episode of the "Magic School Bus" (I love the magic school bus, so full of information) Gabe was working on some practical life skills. He started this morning with transfering beads from one bowl to another. After that I could tell he was not going to work well so I let him go play. I went to there room to check on him and I found this....

He thought elmo wanted to read, sometimes he is just to cute for words.
After supper we decided to finish off their school work. Here is Sammy setting payday to have a math lesson with daddy. So I had the fun of doing Gabes lesson with him. We had a .....
Tea party. This was more practical life work for him. He was doing all the work and pouring the tea for us. He is so funny. We had OJ for our tea so we pretended it was citrus tea. He told me that he grew the oranges for it in our bathroom, thankfully he said in the tub. Ok going to finish up my work real quick and then enjoy a movie with my DH. Good night.

These are a couple of Photos of my latest attempt at making schooling supplies for my children. The top one is of lacing beads. I made them out of salt dough and painted them up. I got the idea to make my own from the teaching pages of childcare land. You can use your favorite salt dough recipe to make them but if you do not have a recipe for it she list one on there. The one below is of the pattern blocks that I made, also out of salt dough. The kids have been using these to try and build with to.

I wanted to share this with everyone. I have been trying to make some Montessori type lessons up for gabe. Here is my start of the moveable letters for him. He has been having so much playing with these. I made them out of salt dough. Then I painted them up in the red and blue.

Tea anyone??

Well another one of the Montessori activities is letting the child do pouring activities. We thought that this was a wonderful idea so we bought him his first tea set. Besides being able to pour his own drinks now, this project can teach him some woderful table manners (which he needs so much). Here are a couple of shot of him having his first tea party with his dad. As you can see from the first one he was loving it.

Some of our school day.....

The picture above I thought was very cute. Sammy was supposed to be doing his writting work. Well he decided that it would be fun to help Gabe learn to write some. They were so sad when I had to seperate them. The picture below is another one of Gabe's Montessori activities. He had to take the clothes pins and attach them to the tray edge. He thought that this was so much fun because he taught himself how to open and close the clothes pins with his mouth. That is my talented little one. LOL..

I wanted to add this picture in real quick. It is another one of Gabes new Montessori activities. It is a sand tray. He can practice writing in it. Gabe absolutly loves this box, unfortunetly he wants to drive his cars thru it more.

I have been working with Gabe on a few new activities. We are trying to incorporate more Montessori activities for him. So in the top picture is Gabe working on his math skills. I took beads and put them on colored pipe cleaners so he can visualize amounts. He loves working with these. Eventually I am going to move him on to using them for math problems. Such as adding and subtracting. Below I started to practice transfering with him. He is having a good time, but he gets bored of the activity really quick. I have to say that I have been going to a couple of different blogs to get some great stuff on montessori, check them out.

http://happyheartsmom.typepad.com/

http://lapazfarm.homeschooljournal.net/
I will update more on our montessori activities soon.

This is an idea that I got off from another blog

(http://lapazfarm.homeschooljournal.net/some-montessori-activities/)

The idea is to take tongue depressors put color coded stickers on the ends and the kids just match them up. Also you can write the name of each shape on the tongue depressor to help match up. Sammy and Gabe are enjoying geometry with this new project.