Weekly Workboxes

I wish I had a cute name for these posts! But, alas, I do not, so we will continue with the functional name Weekly Workboxes! :)

The Workbox System, created by Sue Patrick, is a organizational tool used by some homeschooling families, including myself. The Weekly Workbox post is a weekly post I do displaying some of the things my kids are learning and some of the activities I am putting into our workboxes. If you use workboxes, please feel free to use the Mcklinky at the bottom of this post to link up to the exact blog post you have written about your workbox system. I love to see what other homeschooling moms are doing and how they are utilizing the workbox system in their homes! Also, feel free to grab my weekly workbox button from my side bar to include in your weekly workbox post if you like! It will link your readers back to my blog so that if they too would like to participate or check in on other bloggers who link up to the workbox posts they can do so easily.

So here's what Bean did one day this week:
Handwriting Without Tears K:
TJ Bearytales and his book The Tale of the Cave Bear was in one of his work alone boxes. I love using TJ for the times when I really need a few minutes of peace to work with Miss O. Little Bean takes TJ off to his room, listens to the story and a few songs and then returns. It gives me just enough time to complete my work with Miss O.
100 Lessons--we are on 40 something now.

All About Spelling--This has been going better lately. It's not Bean's favorite, but as long as I keep the lessons short he does alright with it.

Playdough--a nice, relaxing, easy activity for him after we've spent time with reading and spelling. I try to intersperse his boxes like that so that he has a chance to relax after the more difficult boxes. Notice there are only two toys--twisting and cutting--I purposely chose two things that he can improve on while still having fun!

Right Start Math, Level A--we did the bead stair this week, worked on counting backwards from 10, and worked with seeing ten another way--as 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

This is a new book I picked up at the teacher supply store. Do yourself a favor and get it on Amazon. It's cheaper, even with shipping. Each page has a simple drawing and instructions on how to draw the picture. Then below are some sentences the child can copy down. We did this twice this week, and since Bean is way into writing right now, it was a hit! His drawings are not all that great, but I think it's a great way to practice his writing and drawing.

This last box was a vowel sort. We talked about vowels in All About Spelling, so I hid some vowels and consonants in this tactile bucket and he was supposed to sort them. It didn't go all that well; not sure if he was just tired or what, but he didn't really enjoy this one!

Miss O is finishing up Book B already in the Explode the Code series. We finished "h" this week and moved on to "d". I can tell she will have the same issues with d, b, and p as Little Bean does. This box also has he handwriting book--Handwriting Without Tears, PK. We did "A" and worked on drawing triangles.

Here we have a capital and lower case letter sort. Miss O was to find lowercase letter tiles (in the yellow box) and match them with the foam capitals. She didn't want to do this alone, but when we did it together, she did alright. This turned into a game of spelling every family member's name that we know though. :)

Here she had a few Tangram puzzles to complete. She does really well with these. FYI, these came from Ross. I get that question a lot, so I thought I would just add that in this time! Actually, Ross has a bunch of education type games like this for pretty cheap. Most of them are by The Learning Company.

Here are some Unifix cubes. No real goal with this box, just something to keep her occupied. And she did really well keeping busy with these. She sorted them all by color (unprompted), and then she stacked the colors in long lines and proceeded to pass out "ice cream cones" to Bean and I.

Here is a lacing card. Neither of the kids are very good at lacing these correctly, but I still put them in occasionally. The funny thing is that sometimes I am so busy with Bean that I don't have a chance to check what Miss O has done until I am cleaning up at the end of the day. This particular day, I found that she actually had laced about half of this card correctly before messing up. I was so impressed!

Here are two file folder games from http://www.filefolderfun.com/. Both are matching games where you have to match both the shamrock color and the color of the heart. The shades are very similar, so this was a little challenging for O. She kept at it though, with my encouragement, and was able to finish. Sometimes all it takes is having me sitting alongside her to enable her to have the confidence to finish a challenging activity.

That's it! Feel free to link up to any posts you have made this week about the workbox system. And if you do link up, would you leave a comment? MckLinky doesn't inform me when someone links up, so unless I come back and visit my own site (or my MckLinky account), I don't know when someone has linked up. And I would love to see what you are doing, so by leaving a comment you will really help me out!