Cultivating Knowledge in Mommy's Garden

Following the adventures of two little girls and their mommy, as they learn and create together!

Tuesday, February 15, 2011

Workboxes/Homeschooling Day 1

Today, Tuesday, is a normal "Home" day in our hectic part-time Montessori/part-time stay at home family.  For the past 5 weeks, we've been doing the homeschool family ice skating lessons at Riverfront Park.  The girls have been begging to do a homeschool day, and I've been wanting to do the same.  So this morning, after the last few days doing reading about workboxes, we did it.  We did a morning of homeschooling using workboxes.
We found this shelf at Costco, it cost more than I wanted to spend, but it isn't made out of pressed particle board, it's semi-adjustable, matches the other furniture, and I like it.  I was hoping to get by with one, but I'll explain in a bit why we'll be needing another one. The boxes need a little work, as they still need labels, but for a trial run it worked okay to explain to go in order.
Box 1 was rhyming dominos, this was the first time we've played this game (just got it at the Dollar Spot at Target).  The girls liked playing it, I thought is was a bit frustrating as it just goes in a long line and we ended up having to draw almost the whole deck before having enough matches to play all the way around.

 Box 2 was the book "Planting a Rainbow,"  I played this one a little spontaneously, I threw some d'nelian paper in there, with purple, blue, green, yellow, orange, and red crayons.  On the first page of the book, rainbow is written out in a rainbow of colors, so we copied it.  Then when we got to the planting page, we read the different flower names and Selena chose one of each color and wrote out the names in their colors.


Box 3 was make cards for Great Grandma Pat (she came and babysat them this afternoon while I took Grandpa Don to the doctor).

Box 4 was rhyming pictures folder game that I made.

Box 5 was reading and writing 10 sight words; find, away, a, and, big, blue, can, funny, for, down, come.  Selena wanted to do little, since we did big.  So we threw that one in at the end.  

Box 6 was a puzzle.

Box 7 was Memory


The boxes worked great.  The drawback was that Selena was able to stay more on task, while Abby wasn't able to do the same things for nearly as long.  For the games, Abby was able to play along with us just fine, but for the writing exercises, she either drew pictures or wanted to have her own task to do.  We sorted and matched the memory cards while Selena wrote out her sight words.  She wanted to move on to the next box... So, we need to do different boxes for each of the girls.  We got a second shelf, and we may need a few more empty boxes.  It was a lot of fun, and we can't wait to do this everyday!


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