Everyone got sick

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get many pictures this week. First of all, we only just located a decent camera that we could borrow partway through this week. Then, everyone got sick with a lovely little fever. However, we did get outside in the sunlight a little yesterday, and I had a little energy to do some fun things with the girls.


The girls playing with a truck. The greenery in the lower right is the Christmas tree that we are letting dry out for firewood. We'll get it cut up one of these days, now that the weather is warming.

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This is our garden. The girls helped me plant a pea seed (and then I planted a few more - the sticks mark where they were planted), and I gave them a toddler-sized lecture on how the seed would become a plant. Apparently, they absorbed it because they offered a prayer for the pea plant last night. And, uh, those balls are dumped all over because I don't have anything growing there and I need to clean out the ball pit container. It's been sitting out in the weather all winter.

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The water in the picture below is being pumped out of a pond. See, we have these three ponds that were hooked up in this beautiful water garden with koi and goldfish when we moved in last March. Then the pump broke. Then we had this big snow that knocked down the nets protecting the ponds - and before we got them back up, a heron ate all of the fish. Since we didn't really want a drowning hazard to begin with, we're pumping all of the water out of the ponds and turning them into sandboxes (maybe a gravel pit for one). Hopefully we'll finish this up today.

This is MonkeyGirl listening to me explain what I just told you. She then spent the next hour telling me that she saw meanie crows eating goldfishes. I finally explained to her that the bird eating the fishes wasn't a crow, it was a heron. We'll have to Google for pictures of herons tomorrow so she gets a better grasp and quits accusing those innocent crows.

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This was my last attempt at being educational yesterday. I laid the girls' food out in interesting ways to give us something to talk about at dinner. Shapes, colors, and so on.

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Next week should be more interesting, between finishing the sandbox, gardening, getting the ABCs posted inside, and picking up bunk bed materials. Wow, that's going to be busy!

3/2/09 ETA:

Forgot to add this post to Tot School!

Lesson plans, 3/2 - 3/8/09: Gardening, alphabet decorations, and bunk-bed shopping

For the next couple of weeks I think we're going to keep things rather light and unstructured while we focus on setting up for a more structured environment. For now, I'm just going to work on some projects with the girls to help us build a fun homeschooling environment. Eventually, we'll probably move to something more structured.

First of all, I'm dying to start a garden. I don't want all of it to be part of homeschooling, but I definitely would like to involve the girls at least in planting the small kitchen garden right outside the window. Gardening seems like an appropriate preschool science and home economics exercise that we can do all summer. That will be our plan for any days with good weather.

Secondly, I want to get the ABC's posted somewhere in our house, and have the girls help us make them. Maybe we'll color and cut out letters from coloring sheets from the Internet and paste them on bright construction paper. Ideally, I'd like to have the ABC's lining the wall in our future "homeschool room" and also on magnets on our fridge. And the crafty side of me wants to make our own magnets.

Finally, I want to take the girls shopping with me for what will hopefully be the next week's big project: Building bunk beds in their closet. Toddlers with tools, Oh My! I'd like them to get a feel for how you go about organizing and planning a big project like this, then next week they can see what is involved in actually doing the project. Plus a Home Depot will be full of all kinds of learning opportunities - house parts, how things are made, shapes, tools, and listening when Mom and Dad tell you to stop climbing all over the lumber.

Check back on March 7th, when I will post on how this week's plan actually went. This is a lot to do with preschoolers in one week, and I'm not sure how much we will really get done.

Edit, 3/6/2009: Fixed the date in the title. Wow, it took me a whole week to notice I had the date a month off!