Still Waiting For Ants

We are STILL waiting for our ants. Each day the trip to the mailbox is eagerly anticipated and met with great disappointment.

In the meantime, Mr. Smackdown captured a fine looking caterpillar with a ferocious appetite. The green caterpillar was enjoying Mr. Smackdown's tasty garden lettuce. Instead of being upset, at what I would deem an unwanted intruder, he saw God's creation, beauty, and wonder.

"Can we keep him?"

Sadly, we have killed our first outdoor pet. I thought we left him with plenty of lettuce while we were gone on vacation. Unfortunately, the caterpillar pooped too much and couldn't crawl away.

I know. It is a sad story. But I figured it would provide interesting reading material.

Stay tuned for . . .

• a giveaway from Organic Baby
• highlights from Father's Day
• a review of the new planner from The Old Schoolhouse
• tips for camping with kids that I learned this past weekend

Tot School 6--How Do You Exercise Your Kids?

Tot School ended up being an experiment in photo editing for me. I am loving my new discovery of Picassa 3 photo editing software. So if anything looks funny, it is because I am experimenting.

We have regressed to the letter "A" again. It is hard to move on, as we are STILL waiting for the ants to arrive. I pulled out some of my kindergarten folders from the old teaching days, specifically the Letter A folder that contains all things "A."
Mr. Smackdown learned a lesson in gluing. Sometimes a lot of glue isn't a good thing. I made an outline of an ant body. Mr. Smackdown was to spread glue within the pre-drawn shape. Except, he got a significant amount of glue outside of the lines. When he saw my ant, he wanted to start over.
We colored apples. We were supposed to cut them out and make an apple necklace, but sadly not everyone had happy hearts about this task and our necklace was never completed.

With a little coaxing later in the day, Mr. Smackdown worked on writing the letter "A." It was way more fun to use a dry-erase marker than write with a pencil.

We also incorporated some of our daily life into school, after listening to God tell me to lighten up. I was getting cereal boxes ready for VBS at our church. We had over 100 individual cereal boxes to take the contents out and carefully open the lid. I wanted to do it all by myself, but apparently this task looked like too much fun for the boys. So . . . after letting go of my Type A personality, I had them pull the cereal out of the boxes, stack the cereal and then line the boxes up. It became a lot of fun creating a domino line. So, without knowing it, the boys learned about motion and inertia (thanks Hottie Hubby).

The experiment with boxes continued and Mr. Smackdown wanted to be traced with boxes to see how big he was and what his body looked like. I thought that was clever.

A pop-up rain storm presented a wonderful opportunity to run around outside experiencing the weather. But what intrigued them the most was collecting rainwater, tasting the raindrops, and listening to the sounds water made when it fell into the watering can.


And because my kids were feeling a little cramped in our house, and I a little crabby, we are taking our exercise to the gym. Wow! Mr. Smackdown loves gymnastics as much as he loves ice cream. That is saying a lot!




How do you exercise your kids?

Tot School 4 1/2

For starters, I really want to know when our ants are going to arrive. I'm ready to learn about the letter "B." Our life is stuck. We talk about "A" ants all the time. Enough is enough! Please bring our ants, Mrs. Mailman!

Time to focus. Crazy. School is done for the summer for most children and teachers and I am convicted for the need to be more regular in our Tot School, which explains the absence of my weekly Tot School post--we had our summer break before summer break.

School has been a random splicing of activities. I am going to have to find a new groove with the addition of regular exercise and gardening now added to my list of granola activities. My focus for Tot Time has been and will be learning from our life experiences, scripture memory, recognizing letters and sounds, creating a corresponding lapbook with the letter of the week, basic counting, and fine motor skills such as coloring and cutting. (And moving tadpoles to the frog pond.)

The boys learned to set the table. Their future wives will thank me. I taught them how to set the table. Next, we took turns making a mess of our mock table and then correctly placing the dinnerware in its designated spot.

Here are a few highlights:

Mr. Smackdown has delighted in showing off his newly acquired skill of setting the table. I wonder how long it will be "fun" and not a chore? It is amazing how little helpful hands by growing children can become tremendous time-savers. When can he start cleaning the bathrooms and vacuuming?

As if we didn't already know the letter "A," we made "A's" with rubber bands on our geoboards, along with other designs to improve fine motor skills, which is necessary if your hand gets slapped by a taught rubber band!

Childhood just wouldn't be complete without using Ed Emberley's Thumbprint Art guidebook.

And to wrap it up, today we confiscated Mr. Smiley's bath time alphabet toys and put the letters in alphabetical order.

(Can you tell which letter is missing?)

We had some leftover numbers, and used our Connectagons and corresponded the correct number of pieces below each foam number.

After all that fun . . . I stopped at the library so that we could begin learning about the letter "B." The ants will have to move into our home under a different letter whether they like it or not.

Tot School 3: "A" Ant Week

Even though God is my Rock and Firm Foundation, I must admit that Tot Time has been an anchor this week to keep my kiddos stable through the turbulence of my emotions.

Who would have ever thought that the study of Ants would bring great joy to this Granola Mom? (Especially as I presently sit on my couch hearing the precious said Tot opening and shutting his door when he is supposed to be napping.) The idea behind posting Tot School is to provide an overview of your entire week, but I just got too excited and want to share what we have done thus far. I need a bit of validation and encouragement, too.

Things have been a bit turbulent, to put it lightly, between the resident Tot and myself. In any and every attempt to try and rectify this explosive interaction between our personalities, I have sought to create some peace.

One idea I had was for us to do Tot School more than just once or twice a week and to have a consecutive theme the entire week. So, we are going to go through the alphabet. Once again, I am thankful for Carisa's site, Mr. Linky, and the chance to be held accountable to my goal of a regularly scheduled Tot School. I really hope and pray that it will help Mr. Easy (who will be getting a new name soon) feel valued, loved, special, important, and unique.

Welcome, to "A" Ant Week. Much to my utter amazement, we are going to become ant farmers. Why on earth would I pay to own ants, when they come into my pantry for free? The instruction booklet said that you can provide your own ants--but two warnings brought fear for my organic food.

1) Make sure the ants come from the same colony or they will fight and eat
each other.
2) Make sure the ants are large enough that they can't fit through the air
hole and escape.

Sold. I am purchasing your ants! I also got suckered in to purchasing the kit which comes with a full color poster, membership card, magnifying glass, activity booklet, etc.-- all for one low, low price! Sucker.

After looking at our new ant farm, the boys practiced cutting straight lines from a Kumon Let's Cut Paper! workbook while I filled out the misleading "coupon" for our ants. The box stated that there was a "coupon" inside to redeem your ants. What does that say to you? Send the coupon in, and get your free ants. Nope. You have to pay money for these annoying insects.

We also read (because Mr. Smiley was still sleeping) "Boys and Toys" in our Storytime with the Millers, by Mildred A. Martin, about two boys who missed their chance to go with their mom to get eggs, because they took too long to clean up their toys (which has been a huge issue recently). The boys decorated a toy box and cut out pictures of toys and glued them onto their wood toy box. (And yes, I know he his holding his picture upside down.)

While I got Mr. Smiley ready to walk to the post office to mail our "coupon" to habitat our farm, the boys watched this GREAT video on the alphabet! I was way excited! Go TV--it does have some redeeming value!

Which leads me to today, Tuesday . . . thanks to http://www.homeschoolshare.com/ and http://www.lapbooklessons.com/ we created an ant hill from a printable and I had the boys glue sandpaper to mimic an anthill. We finished the morning by traveling to the library to pick up the rest of our ant books!