samil and amely school

I’ve been trying to get us back on track – what with the move, a new work arrangement, elections in the DR (which is a huge show and if you know it, you’ll understand why and how it could throw your lives off track for a month) and my trip to Florida with Amely.
I have yet to unpack all of my school-y type things from boxes because, although our closets are way better (not bigger, just better) in this place, there are no extra shelves in the kids closet. I had paid, a while back, to have extra shelves hung in their closet to store all of our teaching/crafting/playing/random stuff in a more organized matter. This new closet has the basic shelves, but not the extras. Luckily, my dad is coming in July and he can do the job while he’s here.
However, I can’t just sit around waiting for him to get here to get the kids back in the game. So, we’ll probably be theme-less for at least a month and just working on the basics. Samil is a little speech delayed (and we’re a little conflicted on what to do about it. Amalio says it’s not a problem and I say we should see someone now in case it becomes a problem) so I’ve been working with him on some basic words and pronunciations (speech therapist I’m not, but all these languages have got to be killing the kid, so I’m flooding him with as much English as possible right now).
I got a ton of paint chips from Lowe’s when I was stateside, and I’ll tell you I felt kind of silly but now that I have them I’m glad I grabbed as many as I did. I have a ton of ideas for them – a color memory game, color matching, “mosaic” pictures, and of course, I’ve seen them on other blogs with tons of ideas, too. The best part is they’re free. This week, we worked on this file folder game I made from the chips – we matched colors and I had Samil try to say the colors and to find them with his finger. We took it with us to the doctor’s office, too, and it kept him entertained for a good twenty minutes while we waited for Amalio to get an allergy test done
I also got some floral decorating rocks with the flat bottom. I’m still coming up with ideas for these, but for now we made AB patterns with two colors.









Samil likes to paint, but he doesn’t like to get paint on himself, so we’ve been trying different ways to paint without the mess. I got these roller-ball paints from Michael’s on clearance. I had tried the idea before in a DIY version (old deodorant jars – the roll on type – pop out the ball, wash out, fill with paint, plop the ball back in and voila! Roller ball paints!) I think Amely likes it better than Samil.

We’ve been chalkin’ it up a lot, too – both on the chalkboard and on the roof. And our summer goal is to read at least two story books a day (that doesn’t include the baby books or counting books we tend to read a lot of anyway). I’m getting us down to a schedule (think flow chart, not hours!) and it’s working out well so far.
If you want to read other totschool posts, check out carisa’s blog, where you can find tons of simple, fun ideas to do with you toddlers!