T is for train - week 2 homeschooling

We have some days that are very good... others that completely leave me frazzled and questioning why I'm doing this.  I have seen progress with the boys... so it's worth the effort.

Some things we did this week:
For our religious study we read from the Old Testament Reader about Abaham & Isaac, ad Jacob & Esau. 

To change things up one day we watched one of The Living Scriptures videos on youtube.  All 3 kids actually sat together in 1 chair and watched the whole thing with no problems. 

(FHE ended up being the lesson the missionaries gave when they came over for dinner.)

I've also sensed some self-esteem issues so we read:

We've been focusing on thinking we CAN instead of CAN'T.  It's funny because I don't think the boys took much away from the story, but I keep telling my self, "I can do hard things."  Maybe it was just for me.

Since T is for TRAIN we did a few "train" activities:

...cutting and glueing shapes to make a train. Template from here.  Then making tracks out of the letter T.

The boys love their computer time each day so I found some educational games involving trains here:
http://www.learningplanet.com/act/abcorder.asp
http://www.tvokids.com/games/choochoochoices

I had ambitions of us sorting trains in the playroom by color... but the boys' behavior did not warrant such a "fun" activity that day.

Speaking of behavior, I used stickers as a bribe for good behavior.  For every workbox they boys' completed doing their "best" with good behavior, they earned a sticker to put on their paper.  After 2 days they looked like this:


During the week we talked about weather. Each day we notated on a chart what the weather was. We also had some computer weather time:
http://pbskids.org/sid/print/print8.html
http://pbskids.org/sid/videoplayer.html
More with our weather charts next week.

We also talked about the water cycle a bit which meant freezing juice and making popsicles. The boys liked the activity!

Every day we focused on the letter T with different activities. Here are a few:

Letter T bodies


Lots and lots of printable activities.

We looked up the letter T in the First Dictionary and learned about things starting with the letter T.



In math we worked on sorting. Here are some activities we did:

Mrs. McNosh hangs up her Wash sorting game.


Apple sorting game.

We also sorted manipulatives in various ways using our Scholastic workbook as a guide. Instead of having them circle things on a worksheet, we did the activities in real life.

We made monster bags one day

The idea came from Oriental Trading Company. I found a story about monster listening from this blog. We reviewed the story and then made the bags.

We also read a chapter a day from


We've been identifying ABC's and putting them in order. We're also working on sight words. This week's new words were "a" and "am." Here is a video of the boys working together(!) on this activity.


We also use little sight word books that I've found online so the kids can "read" all by themselves. Here's JJ "reading" this book:




As an update from last week... look what's growing!  (Seriously, I'm shocked that these grew.)


And finally, we can't forget our precious princess VV.  Here she is working on some fine motor skills.  She LOVED this.  I found the little tongs on clearance at the PX.