Making Memories…

Last week was our “M” week…. and it’s been extended into this week as well.  I didn’t get a chance to do many things with EJ surrounding the letter M (or take any pictures, either)… except we are making many memories together.

I love this time of year – I have so many fun memories from when I was a child that my family still tries to keep up today.  I want those traditions to become fun memories for my children as well…  and I want to add new ones that give special meaning to Christmas.

A wonderful memory we are working on is making music together as a family.  I chose the verse, Let the mountains sing together with joy. Psalm 98:8, to work on together for the letter M, and I love how it shows how all creations sings the wonders of God…

EJ has recently come out of a “no singing” phase – just in time, too!  I don’t know what I would’ve done if he got all upset each time I wanted to sing a Christmas carol.  Now we are singing together all the time.  Of course, a favorite is Jingle Bells, but a children’s choir he is in is singing Away in a Manger and Joy to the World in a candlelight service on Sunday.  I love hearing his little voice quietly singing about the baby Jesus and then belting out with joy at the coming of the King.  Note to self… get out Flip Video camera and actually record some of these memories!!!

We also have a lot of musical talent in our family.  My husband, Josh, is an amazing guitar player (that’s how I met him!), and our sister-in-law was a music major and still teaches piano… We keep talking about getting together to sing carols with Josh on guitar and Laura on the piano – we had an impromptu sing-a-long after Thanksgiving dinner that foreshadowed beautiful music for years to come!

What special memories are you making with your family this year?  We’d love to hear about them!  And look for my special memory this Wednesday in our Joyful Impressions Carnival…

Here’s wishing you many merry musical memories as well!

You don’t want to know what “G” is for this week…

OK – I’ll tell you… it’s been gross around here this week.  After 2 days of Dieter with a stomach bug, we thought we were out of danger, until both boys were hit again late tonight.  So it’s 2:00am, and EJ and I are hanging out in the living room in between “episodes.”  I’m keeping up with the constant flow of laundry, and all I can say is thank goodness for Noggin.

It’s hard to live out our G verse right now: “Give glory to God for ever and ever.  Amen.” (Gal. 1:5).  Thankfully, He does guide us through these rough times, and we can truly give Him the glory for that!

I’ve promised EJ a giraffe tomorrow, so hopefully we’ll be able to sneak some fun in here in the middle of all this grossness.

“Do not fear…”

… we’re on to letter F!  F is for fun, friends, family, flowers, farmer, fireman, football, food, fruit, fox, flag, father, fall, fish, frog… I know I’m leaving some out!

We kicked the week off early with some family time!  EJ is finally old enough to really be able to play with someone else, which has made the past couple get-togethers with his older cousin tons of fun!

They were inseparable, which was fabulous to watch.  There was also some football on TV, which was fabulous and fun as well.

Today, we went over our F verse, “Do not fear, for I am with you.” (Isaiah 41:10).  EJ’s been acting “scared” a lot lately – perhaps a symptom of his age, but it doesn’t help that this age falls in with all the frightful Halloween displays at the store.  We’ve always prayed that God would take away all scary things from the house and all scary thoughts from our head, and I thought a simple verse proclaiming God’s power over fear would be a good idea to back all of that up. 

The verse is also the basis for one of the Seeds Family Worship songs – one that I really like and is easy to pick up.  I realized what I was doing wrong with choosing and trying to teach a verse each week – or rather, what I wasn’t doing right.  I wasn’t praying about it.  I would pray about our week, but not about which verse specifically we should focus on, or how to present it to EJ, or that EJ’s heart would be softened towards the verse.  Once I prayed for all of that, the burden just felt like it fell off my shoulders and verses just popped into my head.  I am not limiting the verses to the ones in the Seeds Worship CDs, but if it happens to have a song attached to it, I will use the CD to help.

Something else I did last week was create a special playlist in our iTunes for the week.  I put any and all children’s songs that had important “E” words in it into the playlist, and we had our own soundtrack for the week!  It was fun, and not too mind-numbingly repetitive.  I’ve done the same this week, and I hope we will enjoy it as much!

We’ve got some fun activities planned this week with fruit and family-flowers, and I’m thinking about something firetruck-related.  We’ll see if that pans out at all. So, finally, we’re back on track!

C is for…*

A few of my favorite things start with the letter C.  Chocolate, cookies, chocolate, cake, caramel, cocoa, candy, chocolate, chips…

Here are a couple more that start with C, too.

I did the clip art again.  I keep coming back to this because I can pick the pictures and words I want to use, instead of ones others chose for me.  And I made it fun again…

Glue!  EJ was so excited about this.  He kept asking for more C words… “What’s next?”  I went with the glue stick to keep my nerves calm.

Our verse for the week was picked out by Daddy.  I was thinking about “Let the little children come to me,” or sticking with the first part of last week’s verse, “Children, obey your parents…” (we still need a lot of work on that one).  But as I mentioned it last night, my husband recommended this one.  Perfect. Lots of C’s, easy to repeat, and several important lessons to learn about God and our relationship with Him – all rolled into one verse!

While the glue was out, we made a collage.  I was thinking about another C-thing collage, but we’re heading to the beach on Thursday with EJ’s cousins (the adorable girls in the top right picture in the collage).  We started talking about the beach during B week last week, and I thought we could continue with that.  He got to use his glue stick and the scissors.  He was thoroughly enjoying himself today.

We talked through what was going on the collage as we picked out pictures from some of my summer magazines.  And we picked out some C words, too.  EJ actually picked out the corn and the chocolate chip cookie.  Both may definitely make an appearance at the beach.  And of course, the cousins’ picture made it into the collage, too.

And for a snack… chocolate chunk muffins! 

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* How many of you started singing “C is for Cookie” when you read this?  It’s been running through my head all day…

Let’s start at the very beginning…

Hiya, everyone!  I’m Leigh – thanks, Amanda, for the wonderful intro!  I would’ve posted some before now about my prep for this week, but today got here before I was ready! 

My son, EJ, is a couple weeks younger than Amanda’s beautiful daughter.  I wasn’t ready to start him earlier with any kind of “structured” learning (not that I would call what I’m doing “structured” in any way – anyone with a 2 year old knows that any structure you plan typically flies right out the window) due to our arrival of baby #2.  Well, now that said baby is 8 months old, I finally felt ready to get going.  Finally.

As Amanda said, I was really excited to peek in on what she was doing with Lydia.  I wasn’t ready for a full-on homeschool preschool curriculum – the ones I saw online kind of intimidated me.  I wanted to pick and pull from things that I liked.  And I’m sure I’ll be changing things as I go – I already learned some things about EJ’s learning style from our time this morning.

So we started with the letter “A” today…  And I chose the verse “And God is able to shower all kinds of blessings on you.” 2 Corinthians 9:8, to concentrate on this week.  I wish the word “glue” started with the letter A.  That was the biggest hit of the morning.

I copied the verse onto a piece of construction paper, and I printed out some clip art for “A” words.  We had an apple, an ant, an astronaut, an acorn, and an airplane.  All of them are some of EJ’s favorite things – especially the ant and the astronaut.  I cut them out and EJ went wild with the glue.  My idea was to kind of have the A word things “shower” down under the verse, and we’ll keep talking about the verse all this week.

I used Amanda’s idea for the alphabet worksheet from First School.  I love that site! 

Crayons would not do to color in the letter A.  Once he had the glue in his hand, he would not let go.  So we covered all the letters on the page with torn pieces of red paper (red for apples).  He even covered the smaller letters and the writing on the side of the sheet.  He didn’t want to hold the paper up for me to get a picture of him with it, so this is what I got…

We talked about the letter A all morning.  EJ’s known his letters by sight for a while, so I had him point out A’s on signs to me as we went to the dentist (which has no A’s in it.  Except I got to say “AAAAHHHH” really big for the dentist this morning, so that was fun.)  We saw automobiles and an ambulance, and we “Ah-Choo’d” over and over (that was hilarious!).  He got to see Uncle Andrew and Aunt Jessie, and have apple juice for lunch.  He also told Poppy (my dad) all about his letter A words over the phone.  I got to sing “The Ants Go Marching” 5 times back to back on the way home, too.  I’m glad I looked up all the verses online before today – I couldn’t remember past “The ants go marching 4 by 4…” on my own.

So what I learned is that I cannot force EJ to do anything.  I already knew this in every other area of his life – I don’t know why I thought this would be any different.  I didn’t really try to force anything on him, but I pushed the verse too hard.  We’ll have to come back to that later today, and hopefully he’s decided it’s OK to listen to me say it over and over again.  Does anyone have any other suggestions about how to help a child learn a verse? 

I am excited about the rest of the week.  We have a full week already planned, so squeezing in just a couple more Athings will be about all we can do.  But EJ is really getting into the A sounds and words that start with the letter A… and he’s already talking about B words and sounds, and even S words and sounds!  So he’s picking up on this fast.  I hope I can keep up!

The Letter N: Nest

I had a few snippets of scriptures floating around in my head for N this week…

Never become tired of doing good. Galatians 8:6

Nothing can separate us from the love of God. Romans 8:38-39

And my own personal fave, that I found online while searching “abc bible verses”:

No drunkard shall inherit the kingdom of God. I Corinthians 6:10b

SERIOUSLY?

Anyway, neither of those verses actually start with N, nor are they short enough (in my opinion) for a 2 year old to master. So, we did the old slice & dice and came up with:

Nothing at all can ever separate us from God’s love… Romans 8:39b (NIrV)

It’s kinda wordy with that “at all” and “ever”, but I put a little cadence to it and I think she’ll get it quickly.

Now, onto the craft!

I wanted to do a nest. She is enthralled with nests! We found one in a tree once and every time we pass that tree–even six months later, she still wants to look for the nest.

Cute, huh?

So, I drew an amazing nest with a Sharpie. *swoon*

Then squeezed some glue out on an index card, grabbed a q-tip for applying…

Cut up some yarn. (The same yarn I’ve had ever since I learned to use a knitting nobby at camp in the 3rd grade. Seriously, I need to do some culling…)

She spread the glue out and we stuck the yarn on!

Next we grabbed some cotton balls, glued those onto the nest. They’re supposed to be eggs. (I know, it kinda looks like spaghetti & meatballs.)

Then I had a flash of brilliance!

Lydia got the best book for her birthday! It’s called The Noisy Egg. And she loves it! Well, it’s about a mama duck who makes a nest, lays some eggs and then waits for them to crack. Her favorite part is when a tiny beak pops out of the egg first.

So, we added a little orange fun foam beak to each cotton ball egg. (They were just little fun foam stickers I had in an assortment box I bought at the craft store.)

I thought our collage was beautiful! But after reading The Noisy Egg, Lydia decided we needed a mommy duck, too. So, we scrounged around for some mommy duck pieces. I found a few big shapes, a strange little pipe cleaner thingie and a couple of googly eyes–so there’s our mama duck!

On a super-spiritual note, I think the verse and the mama duck with her eggs kinda go together. God even describes himself as One that will cover us with his feathers, so we can find refuge under his wings. Just like a mama duck, God won’t let us be separated from His love!

Additional “n” or nest-y type books

Best Dad in the Sea (all about NEMO who gets caught in a NET!)
Are You My Mother? (a little birdy hops out of his nest looking for his mother)

What We Usually Do

Each week, here’s what I try to do. I’m not “homeschooling” her every day or anything. I just try to integrate our verse & letter into about 3 different activities across 3 different days. If I actually get all 3 of these things done I feel VERY VERY accomplished. Each post following this one will showcase one or more of these segments:

Day 1:

First: Find a Verse

We read the verse from the Bible, write it down on paper and then repeat it a few times. I try to pick verses that actually begin with the letter we’re focusing on. That doesn’t always work. Some verses are inappropriate for a preschooler…

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth— ofr your love is more delightful than wine.” Song of Solomon 1:2

or they just don’t mean much…

“Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself.” Deuteronomy 23:12

I want to put scriptures into my children’s hearts that will be helpful to them (DO NOT BE AFRAID!) or that show some great quality about God (GOD IS LOVE!).

I usually look at the New International Reader’s Version first. It’s on a 3rd grade reading level and is in short sentences. However, I also use BibleGateway.com to look at several versions, in case something is written a little bit easier (or to make it start with our letter!)

Second: Go to Starfall.com

This is seriously my favorite thing ever. It’s a free site for parents and teachers. It’s got all kinds of computer “games” that teach letters and reading. The ABC portion is so cute. You click a letter and then it goes through all sorts of words that begin with that letter–they’ll show pictures, animations and even games. But the best part is it says the letter’s sound every time you click. I love listening to my daughter repeat the sounds with every page.

Third: Find a craft

I try to find a picture or craft that can be on our same Bible verse page. We display it all week…mainly so I can remember to say the verse with her. So, we’re not talking big honkin’ craft here. Just something more than coloring is all I’m after. We’ve done stamps, fun foam, feathers, yarn…whatever just happens to be laying around the house. Seriously, I have NEVER bought anything for this crafty endeavor.

There are tons of great sites out there. You can view them all on my sidebar.

Fourth: Letter Recognition
I usually print a Capital & Lowercase letter and let Lydia trace it. I found a great site that has the printable letters with the directional arrows on each one. Not that my daughter uses or understands the directional arrows. But still, it’s fun for her.

The tracing of the letters, the computer game, craft and Bible verse MAY take us a half an hour to a full hour. It’s not structured. I don’t make her do the craft the way I want. (Wait till you see the elephant she made for E. yikes.) It’s just about introducing the letter and saying the verse as many times as she’ll do it!

When our crafts and coloring sheets are done, we hang them up in the living room. She loves looking at her “abc verse” all week…especially if someone comes over, that’s the first thing she wants to show them.

Day 2: Activity

I try to find something else to do that goes with our letter.

C? Are you making chicken for dinner? Let your preschooler help.

A? Going grocery shopping? Let your son pick out three things at the store that begin with A. (uhm…apples, apricots and artichokes)

K? Go fly a kite!

E? Tivo a show about elephants.

F? Make an American Flag from tissue paper and let your child display it in their room.

Just whatever I can find online, remember from doing as a kid, or can just make fit into our letter.

Day 3: Library Books

We go to the library and look for books that begin with our letter. Or are somewhat about our letter. Or about the craft we did.

For example, the letter A; I found books about Johnny Appleseed. Then I just searched our card catalog for anything that had to do with apples. For B, we got Berenstain’s B Book. For C we looked for books about cats and caterpillars. For E I found Elmer the Elephant. You just have to search around.

Hope this helps! Please leave comments or questions!