Summer Reading

I signed all 3 kiddos up for the summer reading program at our library a few days ago. It's neat that it's online this year, but it is a little annoying that in order to keep track of the books we have read I have to log in using a different user name for each kiddo. They get a prize for every 6 books that I read to them. The prizes this year are:

Prize 1: 6-card ring of rhymes
Prize 2: Plush finger puppet & activity card
Prize 3: Plush ball & Phoenix Mercury game voucher
Prize 4: Book voucher & a completion certificate

I could have signed up Johnny for the kids reading level instead of babies, but I knew that if I did when it came time to collect prizes he and Jacob would fight over them.


I'm still undecided as to what to do with Johnny in regards to preschool this Fall. Up until Myanna was born I was planning on homeschooling starting with Sonlight's P3/4 Curriculum along with the Rod and Staff Preschool Activity Books. Now though my life is so busy just taking care of the princess that I can't see having enough time and/or energy for schooling him as well as taking everyone out of the house for social activities.

With that being said I'm going to try an experiment this summer. Sonlight's curriculum is bascially just a huge set of children's books along with some suggested activities. I always have a hard time picking out good books for the boys. I had a lot of luck with the books in Before Five in a Row - especially We're Going on a Bear Hunt and the Jesse Bear books. One of the books from Sonlight is an anthology called The 20th Century Children's Book Treasury. While I agree that it's a steal at $26.40 for 44 stories I don't like to read out of such a big book with the boys and the pictures are small. Also less than a third of the stories are appropriate for their ages. So I thought that I would check out from the library this summer the ones I think the boys will like and then we can always add them individually to our home library if we enjoy them. (I'll post a list on the sidebar later.)

I'm also going to order a second set of the Rod and Staff Preschool Activity Books. Johnny and I have already done a few pages in the first book and he surprised me with what he could do. The other day I decided to make two photocopies of one of the worksheets and let Jacob just color his while Johnny and I worked on it together. Then of course Johnny colored over his work too. :) It was just the right amount of time to keep both of their interests. I just hope that Jacob grows out of eating the crayons soon. I think we are over eating the play dough though. :)

Then today my friend Monica emailed me a link to a wonderful site called Totally Tots. There is so much good stuff on this site that I was a little overwhelmed and I'll have to keep going back to explore a little bit at a time. One of the gems that I found was their Now I Know my ABCs activities. So far they have a weekly craft and activity for the letters A-F. What's nice is that at the end we'll have a book made by the kids with the whole alphabet. It seems like a fun program for Johnny (and maybe Jacob too) to learn to recognize his letters. They also have extra activities and a suggested reading book for each week. So my plan is to gather all of the stuff for these first 6 letters into individual ziploc bags that I can pull out this summer. We probably won't do one each and every week. Some weeks we might do two - who knows? I'll also try and get the suggested books from the library. I'll be interested to see how much each kiddo gets it. It seems like Jacob is already saying and doing stuff that Johnny wasn't at his age.

Then we will also try to find as many cool places to go as possible this summer. It's sad that so many indoor places are now closed in Surprise - A Little Surprise, Soccer Tots, and Nutin' But Fun. So far we are have 3 more music classes through the city on Tuesdays. Then we will switch over to the storytime at the library. In June I'll be taking the boys to swim lessons for 2 weeks in Glendale. We are looking forward to going up to Vegas for a week in July to visit my sister and her family. There is always the Monday visits to Grammy's house - although she will be gone for about 3 weeks this summer. Then we have various outings with my Moms of Faith Group. I'm sure there will also be many trips to McDonald's for dessert and play time. We have a wonderful one only a couple of miles away with a musical toddler area.

So over the next month or so hopefully I'll have a better idea as to what to do with Johnny this fall. On one hand I really want to homeschool, but on the other it would be so nice to have a couple of mornings each week to run errands with only two kids or even take just Jacob and Myanna to some activities without their sometimes bossy big brother. Even if I decide to enroll him in preschool in the fall that doesn't mean that the door is closed on homeschooling forever or vice versa. We'll just wait and see what God has planned. :)