Week 3 - a Travel Week

This week's Seton Home Study Kindergarten Phonics letter is M. So we supplemented with the Letter M for Monkey unit lesson from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

Because we spent this week in a hotel in Charlotte, I did not bring a lot of supplemental material. When we travel, we do our core work and a little extra. But I just don't have the space to bring everything. Here is what we did:

Letter M Tracing (PreK)
Letter M Cutting Practice (Prek & K)
Letter M Magnet Page (Prek)
Monkey Pattern Activity (PreK)
Monkey Shape Puzzles/matching (PreK)
Capital/Lowercase Mm Sorting Game (PreK)
Monkey Prewriting Skills (Prek & K)
Letter M Do-a-dot page (Prek & K)

Our Preschool package from Seton Home Study arrived last week. The lesson plans and the Early Literacy books are not quite finished, so everything else was shipped. I am working the Seton Preschool into what we have been doing.
Both Joshua and John-Michael did pages 1-16 in Rod & Staff's Adventures with Books. The Seton Homestudy Preschool uses R&S's ABC series books with A,C, & D. Book E (Everywhere we go) is used in the Seton Kindergarten, and B (Bible Stories to Color) is in the 1st Grade program. R&S advises using these books for 4 & 5 year olds in preparation for 1st grade (R&S does not do Kindergarten).

This book series is really too advanced for my 2 year old (preschooler), but it is good practice for him. Joe and I knew that we would be doing Preschool with him for more than one year, so we copied the pages in the book for them to use so the book can be re-used in the future. They are also meant to go in order, so we are starting with Adventures With Books and doing a page a day. Since we are ending on day 18 this week, we are doing 1-16 (4 pages a day) and next week we will have 2 days with 2 pages and then one page a day there on out. That is so that we go through the 3 books in 180 days.

In our Religion class this week, we reviewed our prayers from the previous weeks (Our Father, Glory Be & Hail Mary. This week we added our Guardian Angel prayer to the list. To supplement we did our Hail Mary coloring page(scroll down to Hail Mary coloring booklet) and a Guardian Angel Coloring Page

Homeschooling while traveling CAN be done. My husband travels extensively for his job and we are fortunate enough to be able to travel to the cities with him. While he's off working, the boys and I do our work and also enjoy the sites the city has to offer. This week has been a pretty slow week for us in terms of what we wanted to do. Mostly because I am reacquainting them with traveling after such a long period off.

Joe travels almost exclusively with Marriott which we love. We try to choose a Marriott or a Residence Inn to stay at when we go with him. The Residence Inn is almost like a little apartment so that I can cook at nights to save on money. They always have a little kitchen table and this is where we do our work.

Joshua working on his handwriting - forward circles.

John-Michael and his magnets. Our trays fit into my school bag. :)

Joshua and the Do-A-Dot age. I like to alternate book work and manipulatives with him. I usually give John-Michael a manipulative and Joshua his bookwork. Then once Joshua is done, he gets John-Michael's manipulative (which he flies right through) and I work one on one with John-Michael.

John-Michael's Monkey magnets page

Joshua and their Monkey Scissor Practice sheet.

Almost all hotels now a days have some type of desk set up. In larger hotels, I can usually share a desk with Joe as the desks are sometimes longer than my dining room table. This week, the desk is a small desk so I took it over.

My desk all set up

This is my school bag. Which is actually a Creative Memories album tote bag.

The inside of the bag. The very back section holds all of our workbooks/textbooks, and thr front hols my lesson Plans, Plan book, magnet trays, and my folder. The front holds our pencils, erasers, scissors, glue sticks, etc.... The boys' pencil boxes were brought in another bag and stay on top of the refrigerator until school time.

All set up for our lesson. My Plan book with our activities, my folder with our week M activities & printouts. Stacks for our worksheets today and on top of the phone is the two stacks of this weeks already done work. Near the lamp is my Christian Formation Class (Sunday School)books so I can make up the lesson plans for that.

I hope this encourages you to be able to go out and travel with your homeschooler and not worry about falling behind on curriculum work!