Joyful Learning Wrap-Up and Next Year's Plan

I've been chronicling adventures with the Joyful Learning Curriculum here but the time has come to say goodbye. Looking back we really had a awesome year, did tons of fun crafts and activities and made a lot of memories so I'd call it a big success.

Of course, I adjusted the program to fit Lucy and me quite a bit so my "review" will reflect that but there was a lot I liked about it:

• The themes were fun and made it easy to quickly find other activities by searching pinterest or other sites. 
• Almost all of the activities that we did from her site were a big hit. 
• We liked making the variety of playdough recipes. We did play dough before this but the variety kept things fresh and Lucy inspired to play more than I think she would have otherwise.
• The songs and findgerplays were great. I know these things are good for kids but I never remember to do them or if I try, I can only think of a few.
• It wasn't overly academic. I said before my goal wasn't for her to learn any specific skills but just for us to have fun doing things together and this program was great for that. It had enough there to inspire me to plan things without causing either of us stress. 

I would have changed:

• The books. Some of the book selections were good but overall, I wasn't too impressed. But I'm kind of a book snob. 
• The amount of songs and fingerplays. It was a little overwhelming for Lucy since with a new song every day she couldn't ever really learn them. At first we tried reviewing more and I should have just hand picked one or two that I thought might be her favorite per theme but towards the end I ended up just dropping that part altogether. 

So what's the plan for next year? Well, I had expected to move on to the Hubbard's Cupboard 3-4 yr old program but it's based mostly on bible stories and Craig and I have decided to do something a little different for Bible as a family and I thought doing both would be overkill.

I looked at other programs but wasn't really happy with anything I saw.They were too academic/work sheety. I then thought about going without one but since we stopped doing the Joyful Learning themes I can tell I've spent a lot less special time with her. It doesn't need to be, and can't really be, one on one time without Jonah but even if he was around, she knew it was planned for her and that she was the focus and she needs that. 

So I'm putting together my own program and while at first I was kinda dreading the time and effort, now that I've got a good portion planned, I'm really excited about it. It's still very much a work in progress but if I get my act together, I might be able to share it in advance of the month, if not, I'm sure I'll still share monthly updates. Let the learning begin (again)!

Joyful Learning in April

April was all about birds. Technically, it was supposed to be about birds for half the month and baking for the other half but we never got around to baking. We do a lot of baking on our own so having Lucy help me make bread or pizza would be similar to asking her to help me fold laundry or put away dishes - she likes to help me do those things but would not consider them to be special fun school projects. It worked out since we were sick a lot of April anyway.

But don't feel bad for us, we had a great time learning about birds! In fact, I was a bit sad looking over the pictures because I did a really bad job capturing all the fun we had. A lot of our bird fun involved talking, watching and imagining and those don't always make good pictures. I'd rather have good memories than good pictures but it makes it a bit harder to blog about.

We started by talking about the parts of a bird and colored in a little booklet. Talking about the parts of the bird led to a discussion about how we could describe birds and identify them. We then did this matching game. Our printer was out of color ink and it ended up being much harder if printed in black and white, oops!



I had a neat birds of Missouri poster from our conservation department and I actually cut it up and laminated the individual birds so that I could put them on a ring. I only put a few on to start with, ones I had seen in our yard before. As we've seen new ones, we've added them to our ring. It makes it easy for Lucy to flip through and find the right one and I can read her the name. It's been less than 6 weeks since we started this and she can already identify 4-5 by sight.



To encourage us to remember to actually watch for birds, I picked four birds from this printable that were easy to identify and that I knew we saw fairly consistently and she pasted them on top of a large piece of paper. For a whole week we marked what birds we saw everyday, counted them and talked about more and less.

We also learned that you can identify birds by their sounds. I am not very good at this but we had a fun time listening to the different sounds here. This activity was even more fun once we realized the cat didn't know the birds weren't actually in the room and would search frantically for them every time we played one. Apparently she is better at bird song identification than we are :-)

Then she decided she just wanted to draw some birds by herself.

 I know I'm biased but I think she did a great job and I even took my favorite to be a cover for a binder. Nothing brightens up my organizational supplies like kid's art. In case you are wondering, it is a harrier hawk and its nest. She told me it was but I didn't know what a harrier hawk was so I had to google it because I kept asking if she was saying "carrier hawk" (which isn't really a type of hawk but I don't know hawks and I guess I was thinking about carrier pigeons) and she was getting upset with me. I have no idea how she knows what a harrier hawk is but there you go!

Another day we sorted feathers and made patterns.

And we even made two types of nests. The first was made out of yarn and mod podge using a balloon as a base (we popped it once everything was dry).

I was really impressed at Lucy's cutting skills. We haven't done much cutting lately because her scissors got lost but I recently found them and thought she might be able to handle cutting the yarn if I held it for her. But then I turned around to get something and when I turned back, she had already cut some all by herself. I guess I should also be thankful that she only cut the yarn!

The second type of nest was made out of chow mein noodles, chocolate chips and jelly beans leftover from Easter. Not a particularly healthy snack but I was trying to use up things I had on hand. This is another cute nest snack if you are hoping for something healthier. We also watched a bird hatch out of an egg and hung up some pretty birds in the window (and a chance for threading and more cutting practice).

The best parts of the bird unit were the unplanned ones. She did a lot of pretending this month. She started to pick out outfits so that she could be specific birds (her favorite was red shirt = robin) and call us different birds according to what colors were were wearing. Then she would find whatever empty basket or box she could, fill it with her silkies and plastic Easter eggs and sit on "her nest." Even when I thought she wasn't pretending to be a bird, she probably was because everytime she got hurt, she would start crying "cheep cheep, mommy, the baby bird hurt her toe, tripped, etc."

I did get these pictures of her being a robin in the rain. She sings the song "Robin in the rain, what a saucy devil" which in case you are unaware, is not quite how it is supposed to go but there is no changing her mind once she's decided. And yes, I'm the mom who buys her kid awesome rain pants but completely forgets that she doesn't have a rain jacket or rain boots.

At first she wouldn't go out in the rain but this was also the day our new furnace was being installed and she saw the penguins on the truck and had to go give them a hug. Once she was out there, she had no trouble splashing away,  

And that's what we did last month. 

Joyful Learning in March

March was all about Easter. ( technically April was supposed to be about Easter but that didn't make sense this year so I shifted things). It doesn't seem like we really did a whole lot, but we did, it just wasn't picture-y type things.

We started by decorating. We hung up our Easter Banner (from way back here) and then decorated the ficus into a Resurrection/Easter tree using some colored paper eggs and adding our Resurrection eggs circles over the course of the month.

I prepared 12 eggs to help us countdown but instead of doing them the 12 days leading up to Easter, I spread them out over the month. I used Wife and Mom Today's verses and image ideas (but I found my own free clipart online).

Lucy really enjoyed opening them up (can you tell she styled her hair herself that day!) Some days we only read the verse and talked about it, and maybe read the same story from the Jesus Storybook Bible. On a few days, we had accompanying activities and crafts. Here are a few:

Making a sheep by coloring in her handprint and adding paper reinforcers. It actually looked very cute and sheeplike half way through but she kept adding more circles because she didn't want the sheep's legs, feet, face, nose, etc to be cold. In the end it was more of a mass of white circles but still a lot of fun, especially for kids who love stickers.

While we did that craft, we talked a lot about sheep in the bible and learned Isaiah 53:6 using Colin Buchanan's doo-baa-baa song which is incredibly catchy. It only took us that session to have it memorized although she knows says Isaiah like an Austrailian :-)

We painted over the tape then peeled it back to reveal - a cross! Okay, it really wasn't that big of a surprise but it looks quite pretty on our wall.

We colored eggs using fruits and veggies (blueberries, red onion skis, red cabbage and beets).



I missed the part where she said she dyed the peeled eggs for the first couple batches but the blueberry ones had both unpeeled and peeled and the peeled one was bright indigo and the very first one to be eaten! (left picture below)

 
This is what you get when you ask an 2 year old to smile!



I think if she had dyed eggs before she would have been disappointed with the muted colors we got but since this was new for her, she loved it and ate hardboiled eggs all week - starting with our passover/seder meal. We did it pretty much the same as last year, just reading from the (Jesus Storybook) Bible and talking about what the food meant. She really enjoyed dipping the bitter herbs in salt water part.


Here I am doing the lame leaning in thing because I thought Craig was cropping the picture much more than he actually was. Too bad, because maybe it would have cropped my junk laden island out too. 

We also made a palm branch and a tomb. We also made resurrection rolls again this year, but I actually got around to making real dough (this recipe). I know most of the recipes say to make the butter and cinnamon/sugar part represent the oils and spices but we don't do that so I'll share our way.

The marshmallow is Jesus. I asked her if Jesus had ever sinned and she knew the answer was no so we talked about how that meant he was still clean and white.

Then we talked about we have sinned and then we rolled "Jesus" in the butter and sugar and talked about how he was willing to take our sins and dirtiness onto himself. Then we wrapped him in dough and baked him in a oven/tomb, complete with guard.



Then it finishes as normal with the tomb being empty. We always have a bit of a white puddle left but that just becomes the linens :-)

Joyful Learning in February

February seemed really short. I know that it is shorted than other months but only by a couple days - it seemed a week or two shorted than it should have been...I think I lost time, or my mind, while Craig was working nights. But we still managed to have some fun.

We started off with a valentine's/tea party theme. I love Valentine's Day so I was really excited about this month!

We had lots of math fun all month with conversation hearts. Luckily, she never did suspect they were edible. We sorted them into groups then counted, found the largest/smallest groups, added/subtracted and even stacked (7 high was her record - mine was 6).

This picture is showing her favorite game of "How many more?" - I would put out something like 4 yellow and 1 green. She would count each then I would ask her how many more green she would need to get the same number as yellow. For some reason, she liked this a lot more than just adding or counting so we did it a lot. Then she started setting up scenarios to ask me.

We made a heart banner inspired by this post. I had preassembled the hearts but she picked the order and laced them onto a string of yarn.

I don't seem to have any pictures of the next activity - a heart hunt. Instead of numerals like the original idea, her hidden paper hearts had 12 letters I was confident she knew the sounds to. She would tell me the sound then find the matching letter in the egg carton.

Another pictureless part of our month was heart shaped pancakes. Ran into a bit of trouble when she didn't want me to cut them but then cried because she couldn't eat them without my cutting them (she is so very 2 sometimes) but once we got past that, it was very festive.

My favorite activity of the month was the watercolor doily banner we made. Craig was home that morning so Lucy and I were able to take our time and paint together (and yes, I'm in my pajamas and under her smock, Lucy is too, we take it easy when Craig is around)

I love this picture. She's concentrating so hard!

I think it turned out pretty cute!

Wait, I take that back. That last one wasn't my favorite activity. This next one was! I had seen this tutorial for using bleeding art tissue paper back in January but I couldn't find any in our local store so I ordered it from Amazon. It didn't arrive until February so I just changed the mitten idea to a heart.

 We also did it on a small canvas instead of paper. I was worried the canvas wouldn't accept the color as well but it looked great and the heart ended up being since we used red for the heart and different shades of blue and green so it will match our master bedroom. It isn't hung up yet but I know right where it's going!

We still needed some tea party fun though and I just happened to see this on pinterest! Vinegar + water + baking soda + dye = messy messy fun! I can see why the original poster did this outside but I'm also glad we didn't wait for summer. We talked about colors, what an experiment was, and took turns guessing what would happen (some cups had water so nothing happened, some had vinegar and y'all should know what happens then!). She loved to watch it overflow the cups (I started with a little bit too much vinegar :-) and the fizzy sounds it made.

After she added baking soda to the cups, we tried using a dropper to add vinegar to the baking soda and that was just as much fun. And with her helping, or should I say even with her helping, it didn't take long to get it all cleaned up.

The finale of our Valentine's day theme was a tea party. We made an invitation for Neighbor J and her two kids, put up our banners and then made treats. We started with the bright pink dip recipe from the cookbook Pretend Soup which Lucy got as a present. She loves that cookbook and gets it out every time I get out mine to meal plan. We made patterns with fruit on skewers to go with it.

Then we had a bit of a fail. We made heart shaped pretzels but I'm pretty sure I killed the yeast with overly hot milk. We've made the same recipe before and they were awesome but this time they just didn't raise despite extra time and ended up being heart shaped rocks. We quickly recovered by making bean brownies and using a doiley and some powdered sugar to make them extra special. And of course, tea. Neighbor J's kids actually like tea but Lucy went for water instead.

Next up was doctor/health. I didn't get much pre-planned for this since I was so busy planning Valentine's day but we made it work.

We sorted bandaids into different sizes and made patterns. She wasn't big into pattern making but she did enjoy making "families" with a large daddy band-aid, a medium mommy band-aid and a baby band-aid.

Lucy and Craig made a tracing of her body on brown paper and colored it. Then the next day we measured different parts of her body.

I didn't get any pictures but we did some band-aid painting by putting band-aids over a big piece of paper, painting it all then when it was dry we pulled off the band-aids. She learned the word "experiment" from the tea party activity above so I treated this like an experiment  What would it look like underneath the band-aids. Would it be paper colored or paint colored? She guessed paint and was excited to see she was wrong!

An incredible unfortunately coincidence brought another opportunity to talk about doctors. Neighbor J's little girl fell and broke her leg. So Lucy and I made her a special treat (Lucy's favorite snack, these energy balls) and delivered it along with a "get well soon" card. We talked about what happened to her and how doesn't feel good but the doctor's put a special hard bandage called a cast to help her heal. I also showed her some x-rays (I just searched Google Images) and even printed out and laminated a turtle x-ray for her to pretend with since her new favorite toy is this twilight turtle.

Between coloring a birthday card for me with Craig earlier this month and making that get well soon card for her friend, she is very interested in writing and card making. I love seeing her little cards all over the house. In case you can't read 2 year old, this says "otbLL" which according to her means "Get Well Soon Giraffe-y"

and this says "tolLE otittto" which means "Happy Birthday Elephant." The funny thing is she is very consistent. I put one of these in the recycling bin and she spotted it a couple days later and knew exactly what it "said" - and of course got upset because if it was thrown away Elephant would be very upset and wouldn't be able to celebrate his birthday. Shame on mommy!

The last activity we did was about germs. I slathered lotion on her hand then sprinkled cocoa to be germs and dirt. I had her try to wipe it off with a paper towel and some came off but not everything and if she touched something else, the germs spread. But after washing with soap and water, her hands were really clean! And we talked a bit more about germs and how they can make us sick even if we can't see them. We are having a bit of an issue with nose picking and it's driving me nuts so I tried to really push the idea that we get germs on our hands when we pick our noses so its better to use a tissue. I don't really think it's working. Do any of you have tips for dealing with nose picking?! 

So other than the nose picking, we had a good clean time this month. 

Joyful Learning in January

We took it kinda easy in January. The first theme was winter/snow which I loved. And it was perfect timing because we had a big snowfall right at the beginning of the month on one of Craig's off days so he took her out to play while I stayed inside the nice warm house and made "just right chocolate" for us all to drink.

We had a blast...

Making maple syrup candy like they did in this book

 

  Talking about ways to stay warm and trying on winter clothes

Making a quilt from felt and fabric glue. It now resides on baby's bed.

Making a quilt fort and reading books inside. A few of our favorite winter reads are Winter Days in the Big Woods (but can't wait for her to be a little bit older so we can read the real one!), Owl Moon, The Mitten, White Snow Bright Snow, The Snowy Day and for anyone who things underwear is funny - Froggy gets Dressed.

Playing in the snow both outside

and in. This was the biggest hit of the month I think. She played with her bucket of snow for almost an hour and only gave up when it become slush.

Painting with shaving cream/white glue "snow paint." She had containers to make round prints but wanted a brush and then eventually move to finger painting. The texture of shaving cream is just irresistible even for a non-mess lover like Lucy.

 .

Making snowball cookies. (Note: If you make the recipe from the hubbards cupard website, decrease the honey by a lot to start out with, a reduced it by a little but these were still way too sweet!)

Having a snow ball fight with sock "snowballs"

 

- and then counting how many went into each basket and figuring out which basket had the most and which had the least. 

I don't have pictures but we made snowflakes to decorate our living room windows. I cut them out but Lucy loved watched me unfold them and then she taped them up.


The second theme was grocery store and none of the activities really appealed to me. I've got a confession to make - last week was the first time I had been to the grocery store since Jonah was born and I didn't even have Lucy with me then. I make the menu and the shopping list but Craig and Lucy have been going on his day off, it's their thing. So I skipped that theme and replaced it with some other activities we'd done before but forgot about or things I had wanted to do with her for a while but hadn't gotten around to and since we ended up getting sick and having a 4 month regresssion cranky baby week, it worked out  and we still had lots of fun.

Playing playdough with these fun printable mats (and I got to try out my laminator ). Lucy got a playdough pizza set for Christmas from grandma and grandpa L and between this mats and that, she played with playdough for over an hour at a time every day in a row. It was great!

The salt box/tray is a classic montessori activity. I used a old hanna anderson box and lined it with a piece of construction paper for contrast. I only set out a few of the easier sandpaper letters for her to copy (i, t, o, b, l and c)

She really loved flipping a new one over to see what it would be

and shaking the box to start over again.

Neighbor J and I were talking a little while ago about how the homeschool mentality can lead to pack rat behavior because you see thing and just know there would be a fun activity lurking in them somehow. This is a perfect example. I found this piece of floral styrofoam when I was sorting though boxes in my dad's garage. Knowing that he was very unlikely to do any floral arranging in the near future, I snagged it and finally threw together an activity. The hammer is from a plan ball hammering toy that she normally keeps with Eeyore (in case his tail needs re-hammering) and the golf tees were from another activity we did a while ago. The tray kept it from being too messy.

So that's what we did this month. What about you?