Homeschool Update: Ocean Life & Musical Instruments

             Hey folks! It's been awhile since our last homeschool preschool update and it's the same old story: I'm terrible at sticking to a schedule, we stay on one subject longer than I mean to because I can literally go a week before thinking “Hey, we haven't done any school stuff in awhile”, I pick out too many projects to do, Myka isn't interested in doing some of the things I find, and the list goes on. To recap, most of our issues stem from me being a poor planner, in a way, and a poor “sticker to schedule”. As I've also mentioned in a previous update, thank God in the state of Indiana you don't have to have your child enrolled in kindergarten (public or home) until they are 6 years old. This relieves the hell out of me because I'm clearly not ready and Myka's not quite there yet either.

             Anyways, enough of that. I want to share some of the fun projects we have been doing! I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I participated in a webinar type thing several months ago about planning and following your child's interests in what you plan for “school”. I feel like this has made things more fun and interesting for Myka. (It's been fun for me, too, planning stuff because it's been subjects I'm interested too!) We started off with dinosaurs, then did some fall activities, of course, then moved on to ocean life and have recently started musical instruments after an “enthralling” episode of Sesame Street sparked her interest. ;)

             Ocean life seems to be a major preschool theme, so we found plenty of crafts and experiments/activities to do. Admittedly, most of the science experiments and activities we tried didn't work out like they were supposed to, but that's ok.

Note: Before I start in on the pictures, I would just like to apologize ahead of time for their quality, or lack thereof. I take most of the pictures used in my posts with my cell phone because let's be honest: It's usually a lot more readily available than a camera. With that being said, I recently got a much needed new cell phone (Seriously. It would randomly freeze up, turn itself off, fun stuff like that.). Unfortunately, the camera on it isn't great, so I'm still trying to get used to it. Moral of my longer-than-intended spiel: Sorry the pictures suck!

Here's an overall view of our crafty projects on our “school wall”. (Guess I should get our winter alphabet with the cute snowmen up now, eh?)

Paper plate crabs, animals that DO and DO NOT live in the ocean activity, and hand print octopuses. (The last one was a major hit. It's the first time we've made anything from her hand prints and she thought putting paint on her hand was super awesome.)

Paper plate pufferfish and “make an ocean” activity.

Paper plate seashell. (Seeing a theme here yet? Haha) I'm not gonna lie: I had Myka paint this while I was in and out of the kitchen to keep her entertained. When I saw that she had painted it all one color, I was kind of disappointed. How boring! But once it dried...Wow! It looks a lot neater in real life.

             We also made sand foam one day, which actually turned out pretty cool. Other than that, our salt water density experiment didn't work, the different zones of the ocean in a jar kind of worked (they came out darker than they should have, therefore hard to differentiate), and the ocean/foamy sensory bin didn't quite turn out how we wanted...But I have a habit of making due with what we have on some of these things and just maybe didn't read or skimmed over the directions on a lot of them, thinking “Oh, ok. How hard can it be?” :/

             Now we are on to musical instruments! This also seems to be a popular “kid theme” as I've found tons of websites on how to make your own kid-friendly musical instruments! I'm pretty excited about this theme too because I used to be a band nerd. I was secretly really pleased when Myka showed an interest in instruments after that episode of Sesame Street. Those are the few things she and her sister play well with together too. It's entertaining listening to her and Ripley bang on their little Barbie piano together in Myka's room. :) Plus I know they aren't getting into trouble. Mwa ha ha!

             So far we have made some simple homemade instruments and they watched some YouTube videos on different instruments one morning. (We don't let her do too much on the computer because she becomes obsessed, but hey. I figured I may as well let her watch something educational while I fed the animals. ;) )

Our happy little sun “shaky shaky” maker. Myka insisted I draw a grumpy face on the other side, which somehow turned out looking like an emo girl after she was finished coloring on it. Lol!

I also made a paper towel roll kazoo which, admittedly, does not work as well as toilet paper ones AND we didn't have plain wax paper, but it works. She's also holding up her straw pan flute, or whatever you want to call it. I'm hoping to FINALLY make a rain stick tomorrow. I've only been meaning to make one for forever.

             What have you been up to school-wise? Are you taking a break for the holidays right now?