Home made Puzzles

Abigail has always been a puzzle lover. I have pictures of her doing an 12 piece interlocking puzzle at a year old, she was doing 48 pieces ones by two...but then she stopped. She sort've lost all interest in doing puzzles larger then 60 pieces and barely did any puzzles this past year...until yesterday.

Yesterday she came across a Disney Fairies puzzle that was 100 pieces and she did it without a problem, today it was a 150 piece Sleeping Beauty puzzle. In addition to doing the larger puzzles she has decided to make her own.

How to Make a Homemade Puzzle (No tools required)

Materials Needed
*Childs Artwork
* Scissor
* clear packing tape
*Sharpie

1. Have your child draw a picture on piece of paper. The more colors they use the easier the puzzle will be to put together.

2. Wrap both sides of paper in clear masking tape. This is very important, if you do not do this the sharpie will leak through

3. Draw puzzle shaped pieces on the BACK of the paper. Don't draw the lines on your childs drawing.

4. Cut out the puzzle pieces and have your child put together.

New Blog

So I started a new blog just to keep track of what I am doing with Abby homeschooling wise. We really are not doing anything spectacular, but I find that I do better when I write things down. Since I am still working full time, it will probably be very hit and miss. THis will still be my main blog and I will still put most of our adventures here. The other blog will just be for the nitty gritty of what we do.

Homeschooling 101

This year in addition to preschool and her many many activities (violin, soccer, ballet, gymnastics, and cubbies) Abby will be "in"formally homeschooling also. We have proven this summer, that Abigail's brain needs to be kept busy if she is going to sleep well at night. Apparently the more she knows the more she needs to know, so we will be trying our best to handle this at home.

Since she will be going to Kindergarten in 2011 I am hoping to do more outside of the box stuff to keep some stuff for school to teach her (HAH!) but she does best with standard academic stuff so we will definitely be doing a mixture of stuff.

Currently we are starting with Junior Great Books (Dragon Series), Headway Program (On a Blue Hill) and handwriting. She also has a jumpstart first grade program that is in love with. We finished Singapore Math this summer and I am debating between 1B and a different math program. I am also going to buy Explode the Code Online for her when money is more fluid.

I am planning on creating a homeschooling blog, just to keep track of what we are doing, but that needs to wait until I can think of a good blog name :)

Until then Pictures of course :)

Manuscript- Ab has known her letters since she was 18 months and could write them since two, but we are working on forming the correctly and not writing everything in all caps. We are going to do a letter a day and then she writes three words that start with them. If you cannot tell from the drawing, when she writes bottom, she means butt.

Tonight we also started reading the Junior Great Books Dragon Series. The first story was The Frog Prince by The Brother's Grimm. I read the story and we are going to do a unit on it, not sure what we will include but definitely will at least cover the life cycle of the frog and possible parts of a fairy tale.

Thats all for now.

and some art

Here is some art that ABigail has produced in the past couple of days. I am really loving how well she uses perspective to capture what she is drawing.

This picture does not really do this painting justice. Abigail spent between 20-30 minutes painting an eye ball tonight. She did a great job capturing the little details like catch lights, tear ducts and the general shape of the eye (which is not round) I really like this one.


This next one she made with her Auntie Liza last week. Again the amazing use of perspective as the prince is on the ground and the princess is high up in a tower.



Lastly is this picture that she made tonight. It was interesting to watch her use markers, something we don't typically use. I am biased but again I love her amazing use of perspective. She never quite explained this picture- but I still think it is very funky.

and just because...

She is on a role here so I am just going to keep on blogging.

Here is a story that Abby wrote tonight. She wrote it all by herlsef and illustrated the picture...I like how she decided to add her full name and phone number to her story.



And yes she does know some of her times tables. We did some more tonight and she all the 2x I wrote except 2x4...she must have closed her eyes for that one.

Holy Multiplication Batman!

The other day in the car Abby asked me how far the playground was, and I told her she needed to count to 100. So she then asked me , how many times 10 is that, and I told her 10...and quickly followed up with ...Do you know your times tables? And she said yes...and by golly she does, at least some of them.

She finished these three boards in less then 8 minutes. She was so excited to share that I did not want to go to far. I will keep trying to figure out what knows.