Prepping Schoolwork for when Mommy is Gone–Pictures included!

Today is almost the last Friday of the year, can you believe it?  2011 has flown by just like this week has.  As three of my children are working their way out of pneumonia this week we did not do much in the way of school.  Instead I took time to prepare for Mason’s arrival.  I thought I would share pictures from one area of preparation I finished this week.

Schoolwork!

You see, I have learned children thrive on routine and my dear mother agrees.  She’ll be watching all my children for the weeks my husband and I are in the NICU with Mason and she asked that I have some schoolwork ready to help fill the mornings in a familiar way.  In the front of this filing cabinet drawer you see folders labeled with Day 1, Day 2, and so on.  In each day’s folder are work for my four oldest children (ages 4-10).  Each child’s work has their initial on it, which you can almost see from the butterfly page above for Daniel. 

Their daily assignments are as follows:

• Makayla – 1 math page, 1 language arts or critical thinking type page, and 1 book to read and notebook about: There is a different book in each folder for her and they alternate between science and history topics.
• Joseph – 1 math page, 1 language arts page, and reading one story from The Runt Pig reader to Grandma or silently.
• Emma - 1 math page, 1 language arts page, and reading one story from Run, Bug, Run reader to Grandma or silently.
• Daniel – 1 printed page in the folder and any 2 pages from the Preschool BrainQuest workbook. Ideally Daniel’s 2 pages will be in different color sections of the workbook, doing the next empty page in that color. I don’t care what sections he works in and am totally okay with him doing as many pages in this workbook as he wants, he’s my workbook boy some days.

Oliver and Caleb don’t get pages to color as neither really enjoy that right now.  Instead I’ve gathered a box of activities they enjoy.  There are a mix of activities including:

1. Pegs and pegboard
2. File folder games
3. Dry erase books
4. Magnetic cars and trucks
5. Math blocks
6. Puzzle blocks
7. Playdoh
8. Fishing games
9. Pattern blocks for little ones

My children have seen me printing and preparing the school work and all are excited to start using it.  It’s a change of pace from our normal and will be fun for them.  Of course none of them wants to wait until January 9th to start using it, but the anticipation is half of the fun!

Have you started thinking ahead to the new year yet?  Can you believe it’s almost here?  I’ll be posting more about that next week, plus a review of this year’s highlights. 

Merry Christmas!