First Week

Parker was more than happy than to begin homeschool this week and his "only" request was that we study legos and volcanoes. I do aim to please, so that's where we started. I found a fantastic website that had several lego worksheets, game boards, cutouts, and all kinds of ideas. Most of the games were math - so we spent all of math time playing with legos. The objective for math this week was to see if he could recognize numbers 0-40 by the end - we had so much fun playing the games that he can recognize 0-100 so I'm pleased!

For this game, I wrote numbers 0-30 on index cards and put them on a table leaf. I was Darth Vader (lego) and he was Luke Skywalker. We rolled a dice, moved along the board and if we knew the number that we landed on, our character got to chose another star wars lego guy to be in our "army". Parker won and after the game was over we had a battle.

I dumped serval legos on the table and he graphed them. He enjoyed this one - I was trying to guess which one was going to have the most and the least (guessing obviously wrong) and he got a kick out of proving me incorrect.

This was a printed lego chart to 100. For this game, we rolled a dice and moved along the board. If you knew the number, you got to stay on the space - the first to 100 wins. I hoped to get through 40 and we played this so many times that he knows them all now. He loved this game. We used Star Wars Lego guys for this too.

This is lego word building. I wrote some words on a board and he built them - I had to guess which word he would choose to do last and write it on a piece of paper and see if I was right (surprise - I wasn't) He is competitive though so I've learned that he'll do anything if there is a winner in the end.

This was a measuring activity. We used Duplos to measure the items on the worksheet. He enjoyed this one too. We're still working on handwriting - so I wrote the numbers and he traced.

Finally - we got to the volcanoes! We watched eruptions on youtube, checked on cool books at the library and finally made one in the kitchen! Nothing makes a mom feel like a confident homeschooler than building a volcano in the kitchen - it's total validation that I can find something fun that he'll like to do.

It was really cool - and they even cleaned it all up!

It was a really fun first week! Lots of playing, lots of reading, lots of hanging out with friends - Parker said he forgot how fun I was to hang out with...I think that was a compliment?