My little artists

I will readily admit that doing arts and crafts is not my strength in life. I purposefully sign the kids up for activities that involve arts and crafts. For example, I have signed Nadia and Ian up for a "Dare to Dream" art program for 3-6 years olds in February (two Saturdays) that is based on the work of Ezra Jack Keats, one of their favorite authors. Over the past week the kids have painted ever single day. Nadia has mostly been using watercolors on construction paper. Today she told me her painting was of two seahorses. They also have used pages from paint with water books. Oliver has used pages from the type of book where you just need a wet paintbrush. He loves it, but it's a good thing those pages are non-toxic because he likes to put the paint brush in his mouth. I'm working to break him of that habit! In general he's much better these days as far as putting stuff in his mouth goes. Ian made HUGE progress last week with coloring. His fine motor skills are delayed a bit. He became interested in using the Color Wonder markers

on the Monster's University pages that Nadia got him for Christmas at AWANA, and that did the trick! What a difference! In light of that improvement, I decided to start teaching him to write his letters. Up until today, the only letter he could write was "I," and he wasn't using a proper grip. Today I got him to hold a marker correctly for the first time ever. WOOHOO! His sensory issues are part of the reason why using a correct grasp has been a problem. Today we worked on the letters O, P, and T, and he wrote the word "TOP" all by himself. I was so proud of him! I'm going to start him in the Handwriting without Tears pre-K book tomorrow. We had been slowly working through level one of the reading program, but I'm going to take a break from that and just work with him on handwriting instead for the next few weeks. Nadia just finished the Level 2 reading program. I've decided to take a break before moving to Level 3. As a teacher, I loved doing thematic units with my students. I'm a big advocate of integrating the subjects rather than teaching each subject in isolation, but I haven't done any thematic units with Nadia yet because I first wanted her to learn the basics with math, reading, and writing.

I've decided to do our first unit on the Winter Olympics! We started the unit today by learning a little about Russia and ice hockey. We're going to study a different sport each day. Tomorrow it will be bobsledding! Nadia colored an Olympic flag and did an ABC dot-to-dot of a hockey stick. Typically Ian doesn't join in with Nadia during her school work time, but I am planning to include him for most of our Olympic activities. Last year we only had cable for 4 months (Sept-Dec) since neither of our teams made the playoffs. Even though our teams didn't make the playoffs again, Paul wanted to keep the cable on through the Super Bowl this year. Because the Olympics will take place soon after that, I've decided to keep the cable on through the end of the Olympics. We'll turn it off for six months (March-August). I hope the kids have fun and learn a lot as we cheer for Team USA and learn about Russia, the Olympics, different sports, etc. I'm getting quite a few books from the library on the Olympics, Russia, etc. Reading to the kids is one of my most favorite things to do!