Category: Homeschool

On the Christmas crafts post I told you about Jolanthe’s blog called Homeschool Creations and I just love it! She has all these pre-school unit packs that she has put together. She shares all the things she did with her kids. The best part is that she allows you to download her PDF’s for your personal use. I was able to only print the skill’s that I thought Nadia needed to work on. And as a side bonus I got to use my laminator again. I got all the books she suggested from the library. The Bible Verse Nadia learned was Matt 6:21 “Where your treasure is there your heart will be also.”

Here are the items we started with:

I made the folder for her to work out of – the front with her name and book details, the back with a game.

Practicing sizing with the ships. Smallest to largest and largest to smallest. You can see a couple of our crafts in this photo too.

Some more crafts we did becuase you know I love crafts.

I found these great lowercase letter tiles at Staples and each day I put out vocabulary words for her to spell.

Nadia decorating her workbook.

So the main book that we worked out of was “On a Pirate Ship” by Sarah Courtauld and Benji Davies . After we read that a couple times we talked about the story and I asked her to tell me what happened in the story and then what her favorite part was. I wrote that on the cover of her folder. Then we read another book each morning when before we started our lessons. Some we read multiple times like “How I Became a Pirate” and “Pirates Don’t Change Diapers”. Nadia thought that one was especially funny since we are going to have diapers in the house again with little sister.

Other things we did for “Pirate School”:

• Vocab from the main book and pirate words from the printables. The letter tiles were great for spelling. Nadia’s favorite word was doubloons.
• For math we used the counting sheets to count the bags of gold. She was really getting hung up on 6 and 9 so I mixed them all up each day until she could do it.
• We played the pirate game on the back of the folder with the dice.
• Practiced patterns with “jewels”  (I used heart shaped pony beads).
• Talked about the animals in the various books
• Talked about the weather -what happens with the stormy seas and calm seas.
• The pirates drank steamy drinks and I asked her what this meant. She said, “Tea like mommy!”
• I made her “walk the plank” on curbs and at the gym.
• We talked about personal hygiene – because the pirates don’t brush their teeth, take baths or brush their hair. Nadia said, “EWWWWW!”
• We played with the puppets from the PDF and Nadia had a whole host of different voices.
• We got all the blue crayons out of her crayon holder, sorted them from light to dark based on the wrapper and then colored with them in order. Then I told her that was like the ocean, all different shades of  blue.
• We looked for stripes and dots on all the pages of the main book.

Then almost every day Nadia did her reading lesson with Daddy and I did some of her other curriculum. Chinese School started again last weekend so we have homework for that too.

Nadia really, REALLY enjoyed this. She saw me cutting out the stuff for “Fireman School” and asked if we were starting “NOW?!?” I had to break the news to her that I am still getting everything together.