January Family Academy

I'm behind in recording our activities...here are some of the things we've been working on:

We focused a bunch of activities around gingerbread cookies. Here the kids are putting mini m&m's on their peanut butter-covered gingerbread sandwiches.

Jay learned to count by two's with gingerbread and I put them to the song of "Jack and Jill." We read Jan Brett's Gingerbread Baby books and they loved them.

I printed out a bunch of gingerbread printables from makinglearningfun.com. We did number recognition for Kay, number spelling for Jay, color-by-number addition with gingerbreadmen, shape matching with gingerbreadmen, etc.

We also started counting by fives to the song "Ten Little Indians."

Jay is getting really good at reading the calendar so we learned a song about the months of the year to "Three Blind Mice." They both sing the days of the week song (Clementine) ALL THE TIME!

Our green rice sensory box got a lot of use. I put gingerbread buttons in it along with other winter items and they scooped and played to their hearts content :)

Jay decided to write all the numbers from 1 to 100. He's gotten really good at counting and reading the time on the clock. This was something he did all on his own. I love self-learning! Since he loves clocks he did them circular.

We had a great time visiting with cousins and aunts and uncles. I found some fun manipulatives at a scrapbook outlet. Here they are sorting by size and object and making them stand in the carpet.

We went sledding and enjoyed snow and family when we visited Utah.

Jay was thrilled to see and get inside a real helicopter at the SLC children's museum. We went there to celebrate his birthday with their uncles and Grandma.

He also celebrated his birthday at home with lots of flying fun.

This is a photo Jay took of his beloved "chick."

Jay continues with his violin lessons and learned f# for his first finger-on-the-string note.

Here he is teaching Jumbo, who happens to also be a great student.

Jay can read several verses in the scriptures all by himself now. I made him a scripture carrier and he loves to take it to church and help in his class by reading them.

The numbers that Kay is playing with have been a lot of fun-a great manipulative treat!

I'm realizing I don't have many photos of Kay. She has been working on potty training, learning her shapes, and surprised me by knowing all of her uppercase alphabet! She also started speaking in complete sentences at the first of January-she sounds so grown up now!

She's loving her baby things from Christmas and is starting to realize what having a new baby at our house means (I think).

She likes to climb into the infant car seat. She is a little tease!

We also had fun doing snowman activities. Here we made rice krispie snowmen. It was great for Jay to touch something sticky!

Kay loves to sing and play the piano. She sets up concerts like this:

I often forget to take photos of the kids doing our everyday learning, but I love the record of them growing and learning!