Our Adventures with Before Five in a Row - Play with Me

 

We have been busy lately, a fun busy, but busy!  This week especially with one of our bathrooms being gutted and remodeled and getting ready for a 10 day vacation away from home it had been kind of crazy.  All of this with 3 child 5 years and under while in my third trimester is enough to exhaust me, exhaust all of us!  So, I decided to purposely try to pick a "simple" book to row this week.  I had no idea though how perfect this book really would be for all of us this week!

We rowed the story Play With Me by Marie Hall Ets.  This is a simple story of a young girl exploring things and playing in nature.  We read this book a few times and learned a lot by exploring the beautiful illustrations.  We talked about the Creation story this week in Genesis and about how God made everything on Earth out of love and the beauty that our Earth has. 

Most importantly though, at the end of a very busy week we arrived to our vacation location and we learned our most important lesson.  In the book when the little girl is running around outside after all of the animals she scares them away, but when she is quiet and patient, all of the animals come to HER to play!  We all learned that sometimes slowing down and being patient brings us the true gifts of God. 

It was so nice to slow down, enjoy nature and the beauty that God has created and most importantly see the smiles and laughter from our family choosing to slow down together!  It was truly a perfect end to a busy week and a fantastic reminder to all of us to take the time to slow down, be patient and enjoy God's creations and each other.

 

 

See more books that we have "Rowed" on our Homeschool Page!

Happy Birthday Mary!

On September 8th, we celebrate the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, also known as Mary's birthday!  To celebrate today we lit the candle that we made for the Queenship of Mary in August and prayed a decade of the Rosary together. 

We also made a fun birthday cake to sing "Happy Birthday" to Mary, because what is a birthday without cake!

Seton's Art 1 book's craft for today was making Birthday Cards for Mary and spoke about how we could give a gift to Mary by saying something good that we would do (pray the rosary, being nice, doing something special for someone, etc).  Our 3 year old thought that Mary probably really wants a train for her birthday (or maybe that is just what HE wants!)

In our Explore the Continents book we are learning this week about how different cultures celebrate Mary and we read Our Lady of Guadalupe by Tomie dePaula.  This is such a wonderful book to learn more about the amazing story of Our Lady of Guadalupe and St. Juan Diego! 

To continue exploring how different cultures learn about and pray to Mary we also brought out our new special Shining Light Mary dolls!  We have Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of Knock, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Our Lady of Fatima.  They also now have this adorable book about The Virgin Mary Around the World!! 

The Virgin Mary Around the World

We had a great time celebrating the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin! 

Feast Day of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta

 

"Not all of us can do great things.  But we can do small things with great love"
- Mother Teresa

 

We love learning about all Saints, but there is something special learning about modern day Saints and religious people!  Because of this, we were so excited to learn about Blessed Mother Teresa this week for her feast day on September 5th.

"Yesterday is gone.  Tomorrow has not yet come.  We have only today.  Let us begin"

 - Mother Teresa

To learn about Mother Teresa we used our wonderful resource of Catholic Mosaic which includes activities with the book Mother Teresa by Demi.  The illustrations in this book are simply beautiful and it tells such a nice story of Mother Teresa's life. 

"Love begins at home, and is not how much we do, but how much love we put in that action."

-Mother Teresa

 

"Never let anyone come to you without coming away better and happier.  Everyone should see goodness in your face, in your eyes, in your smile" - Mother Teresa

We then were able to have a wonderful talk about Geography, where Mother Teresa worked and lived and about helping those in needs.  We have started learning about the corporal and spiritual works of mercy and this was a wonderful opportunity to tie these into the works of Mother Teresa.  We ended up talking about God is calling each of us to be Saints and how we can listen to his calling of what He wants to use each of our individual love and talents for. 

 

People are often unreasonable and self centered.

Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives.

Be kind anyway.

If you are honest, people may cheat on you.

Be honest anyway.

If you find happiness, people may be jealous.

Be happy anyway.

The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.

Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough.

Give your best anyway.

For you see, in the end, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway.

-Mother Teresa

Our Adventures with Before Five in a Row - Blueberries for Sal

This week we are rowing the classic story Blueberries for Sal.  This story has so many great lessons and things to learn, from staying with your parent, to making food from what we grow, learning all about bears, etc. 

 

Although we did not have any blueberries in season to pick we did find raspberries and decided that it was just as good!  We were lucky to have extended family in town as well this past week so we were able to include them on our fun as well!  Plus, our children's Grama graciously made some yummy jam with all of the raspberries that we picked!

 

We also have continued our kind of on-going theme, learning about Bears from our book last week (We're Going on a Bear Hunt) and also the study we are doing on North America with Explore the Continents and two of the books we are reading with that program The Biggest Bear and The Three Snow Bears.  This week we talked all about hibernation, what bears like to eat and all of the different types of bears.  We even went to the zoo to look at some of the bears!

 

We continued with some fun learning activities from Homeschool Creations this week!  The boys worked together to match up the numerical numbers and written numbers for how many blueberries were in the pails and put them in order!

 

 

We made fun directional books of "Where Is Little Bear?" using glue sticks to paste little bear in different directions (near, under, above, next to, going up, etc) on each page.

 

 

We then continued with the rhyming pages, what is different pages, what letter different words begin with and tracing words and lines!

 

 

From the Before Five in a Row manual this week our Bible lesson was from Ruth 1:16 "Entreat me not to leave you or to return from following you; For where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay."  This was a great way to talk about how in Blueberries for Sal the little girl Sal and the Little Bear both got lost from their mothers and how dangerous it is to be separated from a parent.  We also discussed how God will always be with us and never leave!

 

We also did an activity for math where we put small objects in a pail and counted them as we added them or took them away.  We then did math games such as "If you pick three berries, and eat two of them, how many do you have left?"  Again, we had such a fun week of learning!  I am so blessed to be with these young men to watch them learn about and explore the world!

 

 

 

 

See more books that we have "Rowed" on our Homeschool Page!

Explore the Continents - Geography and History

 

If you read my original 2015-2016 Curriculum post you would know that our oldest son flew through Seton's 1st grade History book in about a month and I was looking at something else to use to teach History.  I looked significantly at RC History and really loved it.  I love that it has a literature based approach to learning History that you re-examine each time period on a 4 year rotation.  BUT, it is a very intense program and almost can be used as a core itself, which is way to much for me and my children right now.  So, we may come back to it in later years, but I knew I still had to search for something else.

 

 

We have loved everything that Seton provides, but also have really been loving so many of the resources from Catholic Heritage Curricula as well!  Looking around I finally saw a curriculum that CHC has called Explore the Continents listed in their 2nd grade curriculum (by the way I am learning not to look to much at grade levels).  I decided to take the plunge and get it and I am so thrilled that we did!  It is a fantastic combination of geography, history, religion and great literature! 

 

 

What you do with Explore the Continents is you go through each different continent and learn about different geographical landmarks such as oceans, rivers, mountains, etc.  You then learn about the animals and different habitats in the continent.  You learn about famous landmarks and places in history and then end with learning about famous saints from each area!  Plus, one of the indexes in the book includes fantastic book lists for each continent to explore and learn more!

The Extra Book List for Studying North America

The first thing that I bought after getting the curriculum was a set of bright and vibrate poster maps of each separate continent.  The book suggests drawing on poster board each continent, but this helped take a little work out of the process.  I also got some fun extras for our little guys to help their learning as well like the Teach My Continents and Animals set for Toddlers which includes animal flashcards, a great puzzle and board book! 

 

 

We got to work and started with North America and we are simply loving it!  We learned about lots of the big geographic landmarks and then also famous monuments like Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, The Golden Gate Bridge and more!  We are so lucky to live in a time and place where we have the world at our finger tips.  When we were learning about Mount Rushmore we were able to get on the History Channel app using our IPad and watch a great video about building Mount Rushmore!  We are also using a few of our new Usborne books including Look Inside Our World and Usborne's Children's Picture Atlas to help us learn and explore!

 

 

Since we have PLENTLY of time we will just slowly move our way through each continent and explore and learn as we go.  We are blessed with one of the world's best zoo's in our town,so we will take lots of zoo trips to explore the animals from different regions throughout the year.  We will also continue to relate our learning here with our Saint of the Day learning, Saint Mail and Catholic Mosaic activities (about where the Saints are from)!  Beyond the fantastic book lists for each continent they also include ideas for making food from each continent and exploring the history of the people!  I know that this curriculum will provide us with a lot of fantastic learning opportunities within the next year or so!