My Micah Bear

Ever since Micah got his new bed, he likes to do puppet shows for us. Caleb and I lie down on the floor and watch the parade of stuffed animals. The voices he does crack us up!

He doesn't quite get the concept of hiding your own head during a puppet show, yet!

He's thinning out quite a bit. As a baby he was chunkier, but now we have to tighten all of his pants to the tightest button on the elastic strips. And if we ever buy shorts without that adjustable band, a belt is a must! Or else his pants fall down.

This is just a cute picture!

HOMESCHOOL!!

We moved out of Cy-fair School District (actually, if you walk across to the other side of our street, you're back in Cy-Fair! We're that close to the district lines!) so we had to stop going to "Aunt" Lindsey's awesome pre-school!

So we went ahead and started an *informal* unit study at home. We'll do unit studies at a slow pace throughout the summer and then we'll start Homeschool officially in the Fall.

Our unit study is centered on baseball! There's a kids MLB site where he can look up all the different teams, mascots, etc. We looked up all the teams in our state and then mapped them out. He's been doing puzzles (hands-on and online) of the United States, too.

He's got a few spelling words- ball, bat, baseball, Texas, USA, etc. He has to open a word document on the computer by himself and then type the words I tell him. He's learning the "enter," "backspace," and "caps lock" keys.

After he spells his words I ask him to highlight the longest one. Or his favorite word. Or the word that starts with "t." He practices highlighting and then he has to either change the font size or font type. He cracks up during this part!

We play alphabet baseball a lot. It's a game I learned from a homeschool online seminar with BJU. Your child gets in batting stance and you "throw" and imaginary ball and say a word. Micah only swings at the ball if the word fits into the rules you've already established. For example: Swing only at words that begin with "A," or end with "T," or rhyme with "ball." He loves this game!

He's very interested in streets and driving directions. When we drive, he always wants to know what street we're on. So, we pull out our Texas map and identify the major streets we live near. Beltway 8, Highway 6, I-10, etc. Then he uses toothpicks (grouped in sets of 10 and individually) to create the number of the street we're talking about. Then he uses the sets of toothpicks to create certain numbers I've written out on a paper (that's what he's doing in the picture below.) We're mostly working on counting by tens right now. He's also getting math practice by playing an addition and subtraction game on the MLB kids site. And we play our own math game by adding up "runs" that our imaginary baseball teams get.

I bought a book called Hello Texas! and we read a page every few days. It showcases different cities in Texas and then shows a little boy saying "Hello, Alamo!" or "Hello Johnson Space Center!" or something like that for each city. After we read about a certain tourist spot, we go back to our map and find the city. Then we watch a youtube video about the attraction. If he's really interested in the attraction, we'll spend a long time looking it up online- photos, videos, etc. I'm hoping that one of these attractions will allow us to request a brochure by mail so he can get a hands-on look at what we see online.

At the end of the unit study he'll help me write a letter to become a member of the Coca-Cola Astros Buddies club. And we'll go to a baseball game (he's learning the rules of the game and we've watched videos about the history of the sport) and possibly to one of the cities showcased in our book. Right now his favorites are The Fort Worth Stockyards and the bats under a bridge in Austin. So, Aunt Liv, Aunt Cari, Aunt Susan, and Aunt Ash- we might be stopping in for a visit next month!

Since we're not officially starting homeschool yet, we've been able to do the unit study without any stress at all. So far the unit study has been really fun, but I think I'll probably want more structure once we officially begin.

Thanks to all of you who've been encouraging about our homeschooling choice! I'm lucky to have so many friends who are going this route ahead of me and can help teach me the ropes. And I'm so excited that God led us to Copperfield Church more than a year before He led us to the decision to homeschool. Beginning in September we'll join the homeschool co-op that's only one year old and hosted by Copperfield Church. Micah and Caleb will be one of (as of now, although Tanuya expects numbers to grow considerably!) 165 other students who are homeschooled!