We Enjoy Playing in the Ice and Snow
• when it is very cold, water freezes (gets hard), making ice, snow, sleet, and icicles.
• A blizzard is when a strong wind blows for a long time during a heavy snowstorm.
• Days are shorter, and nights are longer.
• Most plants stop growing for a while.
• Some plants and trees grow all year round, and are called “evergreens”.
• Some trees lose their leaves in the winter.
• Some animals hibernate.
• Many birds fly south (migrate) for the winter.
• We wear warmer clothing in the winter.
• We enjoy playing in the ice and snow – we build snow forts, throw snow balls, skate on ice, ski on snow.

Feeding the Birds and Squirrels Will Give Your Child Many Hours of Enjoyment

In the winter, we dress warmly. It’s better for the environment to put on a layer of long underwear rather than crank up the heat on your thermostat. It may be healthier, too. It’s less of a shock going out to the cold, when you have that extra layer of insulation next to your skin. Thermal (long) underwear comes in so many attractive colors and prints! Get a dozen pair for your child and yourself, as well. Hard-to-find flannel-lined overalls fit nicely over the thermal underwear. A long-sleeved tee-shirt,then a sweatshirt completes the layers. Don’t forget wool socks for the family. Never buy synthetic socks in the winter. Synthetics do nothing to insulate, or wick away moisture. Cotton socks are okay inside, but when you are outside, if you want your feet to stay toasty warm and dry, you must go with pure wool. They can be expensive, but if you take care of your wool socks, they will last a lot longer than cotton. I’ve heard so many people complain that they just don’t like winter – but nearly everyone of them isn’t dressed appropriately for the weather. If you dress warmly, you won’t begrudge the chilly temperatures.

Dog Sledding Can Be a Great Family Sport

For answers to all your mushing questions, you can either email me, or contact: Sled Dog Central. I’ve been mushing for about ten years, so while I don’t know all the answers, I do know several places I can go to get the answers.

The worksheets for this week were all taken from First_School.
Worksheet 1
Worksheet 2
Worksheet 3
Worksheet 4
Worksheet 5
Alphabet

All of the books that are recommended for this week can be found here, if you don’t find anything suitable at your library. When I select books, they are either ones that I have read and loved, or they have a five-star rating from parents. The music and a few seasonally appropriate toys are also found here .

Lesson Plans for Winter Week

Related Reading:
Beginning Writing
Play Areas for Encouraging Creativity
Working With the Lesson Plans

Photo Credits:
Snowy Day by Mark Evans
Chubby Squirrel by Jeremy Noble
Running Sled Dogs by Lorelei Sieja

• May is the month that comes after April
• there are many changes in nature in the spring
• Plants that sprouted in April may be blossoming now
• Bees gather pollen from flowers to make honey
• Hummingbirds drink nectar (sugar water) from flowers
• Some birds prefer to eat the seeds flowers produce
• Flowers come in many colors, shapes and sizes
• We can enjoy potted flowers, cut flowers, or dried flowers
• Some flowers smell very nice

Your house should be quite lovely by the end of the week, with all the flowers and butterflies and cloud mobiles your youngster will make for you. You’ll visit a greenhouse, and purchase a flowering plant for your backyard or home. Your child will decorate a flowerpot, and you can plant some seeds in it.

Mud is an Inexpensive, Imaginative Toy

My personal favorite activity is on Friday afternoon, when you and your child will build monsters out of mud! Mud is a wonderful toy. It is free, plentiful, and will amuse your child for long hours. It makes neat squishy sounds between your toes. It doesn’t hurt (much) when you throw it. It dries out and becomes hard, but all you have to do is add water and it becomes mud again – like magic! Please don’t be the kind of parent who dresses her little child in designer clothes, and then scolds if their clothes get dirty. Children are messy creatures. They spill milk and ketchup. They pull their shoes and socks off and lose them in the middle of the mall when you aren’t looking. They stretch out the necks of their shirts as they learn how to dress themselves. It is much better to buy cheap, used clothing for every-day, and let your child have fun.

Kids Need to Get Dirty. That’s Why God Made Them Washable.
Play in the dirt a little bit every day. It’s cheaper than therapy, and works wonders on your stress level.

Five-Star Picture Books for May Flowers week:

• Flower Garden by Eve Bunting
• Henry and Mudge in Puddle Trouble by Cynthia Rylant
• Our Walk in the Woods by Charity Nebbe
• Mud by Mary Lyn Ray
• It’s Spring by Linda Glaser
• Spring by Gerda Muller
• Cinco De Mayo by Mary Dodson Wade
• The Curious Garden by Peter Brown
• The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss

Quality Toys and Products for May Flowers Week (optional)

• Little Farmer Garden Tote
• Child’s Wheelbarrow
• Melissa & Doug Watering Can
• Toysmith’s Big Tool Set
• Melissa & Doug Garden Set
• Bernstein Century – Appalachian Spring CD

Enjoy your May Flowers!

May Flowers Lesson Plan

Photo Credits:
top: photo by Abigail Batchelder

Hammering Nails Can Be a Great Stress Reliever

I scooped Danny into my arms to comfort him, but as I knelt down to investigate the problem, I discovered that all the wing nuts on the crib had been removed. And I knew Danny had done it again. I’d been pulling wing nuts out of his mouth all week. I don’t know why the crib was assembled with wing nuts instead of locking hex nuts, but it did make it easier to take the crib apart on moving day – of which we’d had quite a few. Unfortunately, it also made it easier for my nine-month-old baby to remove them as well.

Teach Your Child to Hold the Nail with a Comb

Young Children Can Learn to Use Most Hand Tools Safely with Supervision

This center should ONLY be used under adult supervision. Therefore, you might put it in the basement or garage. If you have an outdoor shed near the playground, you could locate it there, too, and unlock it only when you’re prepared to supervise (at LEAST once a week!). Introduce the tools only one or two at a time, and teach appropriate rules for use and care. Breaking the rule means losing the opportunity to play in the woodworking center for the rest of the day.

Begin With a Simple Pounding Bench

For toddlers and young twos, a toy pounding bench may be all that is needed. This common toy is a series of pegs in a board with a hammer. The child pounds the pegs through one side, turns the board over, and pounds them all back again. Look in a good toy catalog for a decent pounding bench. The kind you can buy for a few dollars is not worth it. The pegs fall out too easily, so the child can’t pound them at all.

Next, a two year old might enjoy pounding golf tees into styrofoam. I’ve read about this from other centers, but it was a step I never tried. I don’t like styrofoam, and try not to have any around. Then I read on another blog about pounding nails into raw squash and pumpkins. Could be fun. Another woman said she taped a large sheet of bubble wrap to her wall, and gave the children wooden mallets to pound the bubbles. Besides wood blocks, toddlers will use giant cardboard boxes to build their playspaces. But somewhere around two and a half or three, most children are ready to use a real hammer.

Your Child’s First Hammer

Buy a real hammer, not a toy. Try a lightweight hammer with a ball-peen end instead of the claw. Hammers are sold by pounds. I don’t remember if the one I bought for my son was five or seven pounds. Buy nails with large heads, and not too long. Roofing nails work fine. Then you can get a large tree stump, and simply let your youngster pound in nails. At first you may need to start the nail for her. Later, teach her to hold the nail with a plastic comb, so she doesn’t pound her fingers.

Pounding nails can be a great way to release anger and frustration – far more satisfying than kicking feet and throwing a tantrum. Instead of sending a screaming tot to a “cry rug” or “time out”, what about sending him to the pounding table to pound a few nails? That could be a great form of release for him to use for the rest of his life.

Introduce Sand Paper

The next tool introduced could be sand paper. Pick up a large supply of scrap wood – often for free, if you know who to ask. Do you have a friend in construction? Visit a saw mill or lumber yard. Get wood scraps in a variety of shapes and sizes – small enough for your youngster to use whole, for now. Save bigger scraps for when you introduce a saw. Glue or staple some sand paper around block scrap wood, rough side out, to give your child something to hold on to while sanding, and demonstrate how sanding a project will take away the rough edges.

Your child can then nail and glue wood scraps together, sand them, and paint them to use them in his play. Collect round plastic shapes like milk bottle caps that he might nail onto the wood to use for tires or steering wheels. Metal lids from empty food containers can be used too, like from pickle jars or frozen juice. Nothing with a sharp edge to it.

The Crosscut Saw and a Vise

Eventually your child will want to cut the wood to make it more suitable to his project. You’ll want to get a crosscut saw and a vise. The vise is mounted to a solid table at a good height for your child. That way he can hold the saw with two hands, and keep his hands away from the sharp edge of the blade. Do NOT allow the child to hold his wood project with his other hand. Goggles should be worn. It would be a good idea to wear goggles whenever working with wood. Splinters are nasty, and little children don’t mind wearing the safety gear as much as their fathers. It’s all part of “dressing up”. And if the man in your child’s life doesn’t like to wear goggles, remind him that his child will imitate his actions, not his advice.

As your child grows, so can the woodworking center. You could get a brace and bit or a hand-held drill, both for boring holes into wood without electricity. Screws work better for some projects than nails. Show your youngster how to use a screw driver, and have her go around tightening the loose door pulls in your house. (Don’t allow preschoolers to play with screwdrivers unsupervised. You do not want your child sticking the screwdriver into an outlet.)

Woodworking Uses Math Concepts, Critical Thinking Skills and More

Woodworking is such a great activity for preschoolers! They learn measuring, counting, and problem-solving. They develop eye-hand coordination, fine and gross motor skills, logical thinking, sequencing, spacial awareness, completion and independence. If you add some photographs of people using tools, read picture books about wood working, or set out pictures and directions for projects, you help your child’s language skills, as well.

So what are you waiting for? Maybe your budding Frank Lloyd Wright will want to design houses, not build them for a living, but you will have laid the groundwork to develop your child’s creativity and help him reach his full potential.

Related Reading:
Sand Play
Water Play
The Craft Box

Photo credits:
Top: photo by un-sung
Middle: photo by Janet Dancer
Bottom: photo byHoyasmeg

Other suggestions this week include making rhythm band instruments, a wind chimes, pounding nails into wood with a small hammer, and finally, a field trip to the zoo where your child can listen to all the different sounds the animals make.

I hope you’ll have as much fun with this as my granddaughter and I did!

Sound Lesson Plans for Preschool

Suggested reading, Five-Star Picture Books for Sound Week
Silent Night: A Light and Sound Book by David Mead
Noisy Zoo (Busy Sounds Board Book) by Usborne Books
This is My Puppy (Usborne Noisy-Feeling Book) by Felicity Brooks
Rain Drop Splash by Alvin Tresselt
Tiki Tiki Tembo from Square Fish
I Like Noisy Mom Likes Quiet by Eileen Spinelli
Noisy Nora by Rosemary Wells
Buzzy the Bumblebee by Denise Brennan-Nelson

Good Toys for Sound Week Lesson Plans

Video Games Do Not Help a Child to Relax

• Do not allow your child to play video games. These games tend to get children wired, not relaxed! I don’t believe children should ever play video games, but that’s a subject for another post.
• Do not play a story tape or music. It is okay to read your child a story – it is wonderful, in fact! Go ahead and sing your child a lullaby. But do not make the CD or cassette tape part of the routine. If you do, how will your child get to sleep when that is not available? It is okay, especially if you live on a noisy street or have older children, to play some white music in the background. You are not teaching a child to fall asleep listening to something, but rather, to try to let your child stay asleep by not being disturbed by noise.
• Do not rock your child to sleep. Rock your child! Love him, cuddle him. But put him to bed before he’s actually asleep. He needs to learn how to let himself fall asleep. Otherwise, if you rock a child to sleep, and he wakes up in the middle of the night, you will have to rock him to sleep again. And again. Children need to learn how to comfort themselves back to sleep. Also, children who fall asleep in swings or car seats or other movement, usually do not fall into deep sleep.

A Naptime Routine Can Make Falling Asleep Easier
• Do not wait until your child is falling asleep before putting him to bed. Young children want to stay awake. They do not want to miss out on anything. They will spin around in circles, babble incoherently, wave their arms and jump – they will do anything to keep themselves awake. If you wait for a child to appear sleepy, then he is probably over-tired already.
• Do not put your child to bed with a cup or a bottle. This is hard on their teeth. They have the opportunity to eat at dinner, and if you chose to have an evening snack as part of your routine, then they can eat again. They can have a cup of water after brushing their teeth. They simply do not need more fluids at bedtime. Potty training may be more successful when the time comes if your child does not drink right before bedtime.
• Do not put a lot of toys, books, pillows, or blankies in your child’s bed. He may have one toy to cuddle, one book, and one special blankie. That is enough. More than that, and you encourage your child to stay awake.
• Do not move your young child out of the crib before you establish a solid bedtime routine. The cribs are called a six-year crib for a reason. Your child could stay in the crib until kindergarten. The toddler bed may not offer the same sense of security and comfort that the familiar crib does.
• Do not allow your child’s bedroom to become a war zone. Teach him or her to pick up toys daily. That should definitely be part of the bedtime routine! A messy room may be over stimulating, prolonging the time it takes your child to fall asleep. A clutter-free bedroom painted in muted tones can have a calming effect on even the most stubborn children.
• Do not allow your child to consume sugary foods in the evening. This should be obvious. Sugar gives us energy. You want your child to unwind, calm down, and sleep through the night. Giving him a cookie is like adding more logs to the fire. If you find it necessary to give your young child anything at all, it should be milk – warmed is even better. Milk contains tryptophan, an essential amino acid also found in meat and turkey, which is known to cause drowsiness. Some doctors are even prescribing tryptophan to treat insomnia.

All Tucked In
• Do not send your child to bed. Take him there. These are your child’s last moments before sleep. Make them pleasant. Help him into bed, and cover him up. Fold his hands in yours and teach him to say a simple prayer of gratitude. Have him recall special events from the day, or whisper loving words in his ear. It is only a few moments of your time, but it is forever in his memory.

Related Articles:
Hassle-Free Bedtime
Mastering The Nap

Photo Credits:
Top: photo by Tom Rafferty
Middle: photo by Dan Garner
Bottom: photo by Melissa Ross

Number four came along in 1988. I was twenty-eight, almost twenty-nine. We figured Krysta would be our last. She was a beautiful baby, but my only one with colic. I remember sitting up at nights in the rocking chair with her in my arms. She could sleep for a little while in her crib, but then she’d wake up screaming, and would only sleep in a vertical position. I didn’t mind. I had a profound sense of peace. I was exactly where I was meant to be, doing exactly what I was meant to do. If I couldn’t sleep at night, I could certainly catch a nap sometime the next day. I had learned not to sweat the small stuff, and in the grand scheme of things, all of this was small stuff.

I had one peaceful year with Krysta and Annika, but my older two were not doing well in school. (Remember I graduated from college summa cum laude, was in the National Deans’ List, and Who’s who in American Universities, with a degree in Education! How could my kids not be brilliant?) Tamara, who had learned to read by her second birthday, was stuck in the slow-readers group in third grade. She was in remedial math, and seeing the school psychologist twice a week for depression. When I went in to question the school about holding her back (she came home from school to read illustrated children’s novels like Heidi, or Black Beauty, she was NOT a poor reader!), the psychologist told me that I had a below-average child and to stop expecting too much from her.

My son Daniel was in second grade. He hated school. He was on the younger end, short, but stocky. He had bright red curly hair and a face full of freckles. He made friends easily, and tried charming his teachers. But his grades were sporadic. He’d get A, A, F, A, F, A, F, F, F…. I don’t think he ever had a C in his life. It all depended on whether he felt like trying or not. And he didn’t feel like it very often. He was diagnosed as “gifted” and tracked into special “enrichment” classes.

The classroom teachers didn’t feel like teaching while their smarter students were absent, so they would show the class a video, and serve popcorn, while Danny had to go to a closet-sized classroom with a few dorks and get extra homework. He thought he was being punished and tried harder to fail so he could stay behind and eat popcorn.

Annika had to go through kindergarten screening when she was three and a half, to see if she would be ready for school by five. The day was chaotic. There were about two hundred three- and four- year- olds, just as many moms, many of them with younger ones in tow, and a few dozen teachers and nurses who obviously didn’t want to be there. They were cross and impatient. They took Annika by the shoulder and kind of yanked her around. I already suspected Annika didn’t hear well, as she’d had so many ear infections as a baby, and had some scar tissue. So she did a typical three- or four-year-old thing when she was someplace she didn’t want to be. She folded her arms across her chest, lowered her head, and scowled. She refused to cooperate. I wasn’t embarrassed. I felt like kissing her! The nerve of those supposed professionals. They conducted a preschool screening every year, couldn’t they have figured out a less stressful way to do it?

Those professionals got even, though. They labeled my perfectly normal child ‘Emotionally Disturbed’ and recommended enrolling her in special education classes immediately. (Yeah, not a chance!) I had very normal children, but that school district had all of them tracked into some form of specialized education, and I realized that it was all about the dollar. It had nothing to do with the needs of the child.

Annika would turn five in May, 1990. She was a quiet, shy child, and I knew that going to school was going to be hard for her. She must have sensed that I was very dissatisfied with the school already. She became quieter and more withdrawn. I tried to talk it up for her. I made going to kindergarten sound like a privilege. I arranged for her to ride the school bus into town with her big sister, and I would meet her there. Then we’d tour the kindergarten, and eat in the cafeteria, and I’d drive her back home. That day seemed to go well for her. I remember it as a special memory, spending the whole morning with Annika. I don’t remember if Krysta came along or went to a babysitter, but Annika did seem to shine under the attention.

All summer we talked about how exciting it would be to go to school. But as summer wore on, she seemed to get quieter and quieter. She was wilting right before my eyes. She started to wet the bed at night. She started sleepwalking. A lot. I never knew where I’d find her. One morning she was on the couch, but confused and scared, she didn’t remember getting there. One morning she was outside in the sandbox, sound asleep. I was worried, we had a backyard pool, and I’d already fished her out of it once.

Then I met someone who changed my life completely. Julie homeschooled her two children. The boy was Tammy’s age, and the girl was a year younger than Danny. Julie was eager to have me join her, as we might try doing some unit studies together, go on field trips, plan picnics – she didn’t push me into it, she didn’t have to. I felt like everything I had ever learned in my whole life had led me up to that moment. The reason I had dropped out, and gone to that weird alternative high school. The reason I worked dozens of odd jobs and factory shifts to realize that I really had to go back to college. The reason I discovered my passion working in the day care, and the reason I didn’t just get a degree in early childhood, but went ahead and took a double major, getting one in elementary education as well. This was my calling!

My husband wasn’t easy to convince. I didn’t get up the courage to talk to him about it until two days before the start of school. The poor man, I didn’t give him much of a chance to think. We had been talking about our kids and their poor performance in school for some time, but we’d never come up with a good solution. Alan, the former Prom King and football star, didn’t want his kids to miss out on something he had so thoroughly enjoyed. I had hated school, and didn’t understand how anyone would prefer to be in school! We both prayed, and I guess God had a big hand in our final decision, because my husband does not have a reputation for making a quick decision.

The day school was supposed to start, he came down to breakfast and told me we could try homeschooling for a year. Period. And then, bless him again! He stepped back and gave me a year! He didn’t lean over my shoulder, watching me constantly, criticizing me or asking me when I was going to get around to fractions. He gave me complete control, and he trusted me. I can hardly think of a time when I loved him more.
The kids screamed with joy. Annika never wet the bed again; she never walked in her sleep again. Krysta didn’t understand what all the excitement was about, but she surely enjoyed having the older playmates around.

I called the school to give them my decision. The superintendant was NOT happy. There were six or seven other homeschooling families in town, but they were all weird (his opinion, not mine.) They were Pentecostal, and that was something religious people did so they could indoctrinate their children. But he knew I was Catholic because we went to the same parish. That I would chose to homeschool my kids rather than send them to his school was an insult. He gave me a bit of a hard time, including conducting a home inspection that he never did to the other families. But we passed, and when my kids took their standardized tests in the spring and placed THREE GRADES ABOVE where they had been the year before, he realized he had lost the argument.

We loved homeschooling. My children blossomed, just as though they were in a well-tended garden and had been given a boost of fertilizer. (Did I just compare my teaching to a pile of cow dung?) That first year we did Konos, which is a unit study curriculum. One unit was “Obedience”. The children read library books on kings and queens. We studied castles, knights, jousting. My kindergartner memorized “The King of Hearts” nursery rhyme. My oldest wrote a report about Mary Queen of Scots. And the final activity after a month of hard work, we put on a medieval feast. Alan was the lord of the castle, I the lady. My mom happened to be visiting, and she was an honored guest, receiving the “top crust” of the bread bowl. (Now you know where the expression “upper crust” comes from). One child was the court jester and recited poems. Another was a minstrel, playing Suzuki songs on his violin. We had a blast!

And there was never a discussion about sending them back to public school.