It was brought to my attention that my many of you who are Mac users could not print my PDF files successfully. I am a PC gal so I couldn’t do much. BUT, I began hearing about the problem from so many of you I began to investigate and thankfully I found a solution and it is quite simple!
A huge thanks to a few of you who joined in a Facebook discussion a few days ago to help me out, and to a few of you who helped me via email!
The big solution…make sure you are using ADOBE READER and not the default preview for MAC. This is a manual change and something that you have to check every time, or set it to be the default for your PDFs.
Also-for PC and Mac users, be sure you are using the most up to date version of Adobe, this accounts for the other 90% of problems people have!
Happy printing! If you have had problems and this fixes it, let me know…or if you still encounter a problem, comment also so we can try to help!
We surprised the kids with a fun night of dying our Easter eggs! Before we started we read the book, The Best Thing About Easter and discussed the truth presented in this book. That things we do, like dying eggs, are OK, but we must never think that they are the BEST part about Easter. JESUS is the best part of Easter!
We had a great time together, and as usual Krash had us all giggling the entire time. That boy is a nut.
We even helped Ladybug tie-dye an egg ;-) She wasn’t too impressed.
I will be posting Raising Rock Stars sporadically throughout the month of April, as we will be taking a family vacation in the middle of the month!
Visit theRaising Rock Stars Webpage to download your own notebook pages and to see links to previous Rock Stars posts! Please read there or here before you add your link.
We are carrying on around here, getting ready for the big change from Tot School to Preschool with Krash. I am spending hours and hours behind the scenes preparing for that. We are going to officially begin mid-April. We go on vacation April 10 for a little over a week, then plan to get into Preschool when we return! For now we carry on in Tot School fashion, these being his final weeks…wow time flies!
Krash has always been better at letter ID than number ID, so we are working hard! Here he is putting his magnets in order {with help from me}. We also practiced counting 1:1 several times once they were all in order.
We went outside to play with our lowercase alphabet beanbags {my mom made them for us}
We used our ABC floor puzzle letters to work on K’s name, here he is hopping on the letters as he says them. We dug out our bottle top spelling cards and this time he chose Nana first ;-).
He also worked with his color wheel, I remember not so long ago when he couldn’t open clothespins at all! He’s so big now!
We continue to explore our Easter theme and added in our Resurrection Eggs this week. Krash had a GREAT time exploring them each morning freely. We are teaching through them, but I also gave him time to just explore.
I made K color eggs, putting a few small items in the colored egg to match. He opened them all, dumped them all out and then put them all back correctly.
G is for goat! We read a few farm books, his favorite being Grumpy Morning.
Ladybug explored eggs this week! She played with her eggs every day and loved them every single time. We used a basket and also an empty parmesan cheese container to play with them. She didn’t really like it when we put them all into the container and made her get them out herself ;-)
Pac Man counted one at a time for her as he put them in…she just stares at him, it’s adorable.
I was brave and let her explore our Sensory Box…Easter basket grass! The box was mostly for Krash, but he wasn’t all that interested so it became for Ladybug. I let her go at it on this day and she had a blast!I think things like this are important {under CLOSE supervision} because it exposes babies to textures and sounds they probably wouldn’t encounter otherwise. You can just see her little brain working as she plays. I love her face below ;-). She also loved playing with the pegs this week. I gave her just a few and she loved holding them, perfect size for her little hands! Pac Man is always stealing kisses ;-).
She joined us for morning calendar time this week and was so cute. Lately she has been napping during calendar time but this day she was awake and she loved it! She held our cards for us!
Definite learning going on here during Fort Building 101.
Krash is obsessed with ladders. Daddy was working outside hanging a new swing for us and Krash had to be right in the action. I love his face below ;-)
He is also obsessed with tools, apparently the ladder needed some fixing.
Are you wondering where to start with Tot School? Read here!
READ THIS for more details about linking up to Tot School. If your blog is not linked back here to Tot School, and your post is not specifically a Tot School post, your link will be deleted to help Tot School surfing moms.
Please put your tot's age (in months) after it, like this: 1+1+1=1 (41 mos)
If you are NEW will you please leave a comment letting us all know so we can be sure to visit you?
Math: the Latest Tweak {Loved this post about Math U See from a long time blog-bud Laura}
Toxic Easter Candy & Safer Alternatives {K is affected by artificial dyes so we have explored this topic, we personally have switched mostly to all natural and organic candy if any at all-although not 100% thanks to grandparents, church and friends…we do the best we can}
The Day {I remember getting the email from Julia’s mom last year, telling me that the tot she had submitted for our Meet feature on TT was diagnosed with cancer. I have followed her journey since that moment and rejoice that I can read this post with joyful tears in my eyes}
What Creeps Around {from Kristi’s Redeemed series…it’s a tough read but necessary}
Thanks for another week of great reads in my spare time!
Awhile back I wrote a Behind the Scenes post about beginning to transition Krash from Tot School to Preschool. We are almost entirely done with that transition and I wanted to update you in case our journey might help anyone! As I always say-our way isn’t necessarily the right way, it’s just a way that has worked for us. Every child is different and what works for Krash and our homeschool may not work for yours.
At the writing of this post Krash is 46 months old, we began the transition I am writing about now about 6 weeks ago.
I slowly transitioned Krash from Tot Trays on a shelf like this…
to workboxes like this… I got this awesome set up from Ikea. I have known I wanted this for years now, but just couldn’t bring myself to spend the money. Finally my husband encouraged me to just get what I really wanted and honestly I am SO happy I did! This is the set we have.
We did the transition slowly. At first I just switched his normal things that would have been on his trays over to the workboxes, and just let him open them all up and pick what he wanted-the same freedom of choice he had with his tray set up.
Slowly I added in more preschool type work and eventually I added the numbers to his boxes. I set up the 9 boxes with 6 being his workboxes and the 3 on the bottom being his “star” boxes. These are the boxes filled with open ended toys that he can freely play with after boxes 1-6 are finished each day. Here’s a photo I took and labeled to show you how it is working now. You can see he was almost done for the day when I snapped this, as box 1-5 are done and the # cards are off and his finished work is on the tray. Some days I don’t have all 6 boxes filled and if I don’t I just don’t put the numbers on him. It only took him a few days to understand that. Now he can look and see that he only has 4 boxes on a certain day, and then he is free to play in star boxes.
A few random thoughts about how we do things…
He does go in order, beginning with box 1 each day.
I do work with him the entire time, he is not independent yet!
Each box usually is something that doesn’t take a really long time. I break things down into small chunks for him, we will gradually increase his attention span.
He only took a few days of training to get past the “WHAT??? I can’t just do what I WANT for school anymore???” phase ;-). Once I decided we were switching to “Mommy chooses first, then you {star boxes},” I knew I had to make it stick. I disciplined and made him obey even if he didn’t like me too much. Within a few days of fighting me, the battle was won. He now goes in order with very little complaining. He is a strong willed little man too, so don’t think it was easy-I just had to be firm and let him know I was most certainly the boss-even of school.
So, I know you are wondering ;-) what is in the different boxes? Here’s an idea of the types of things I would put in each set…
Here’s our new Preschool Tools store I set up to help me keep all of our suggestions in one place. We still use many of our Tot School Tools as you will see, I just wanted to have a new section as we enter into official preschool years!
We are just weeks away from officially beginning our new Raising Rock Stars Preschool program! I can’t wait to share with all of you, I have been working like crazy behind the scenes to get it ready for Krash and to share with you! Stay tuned!
Just a simple set of brightly colored eggs. Right?
At first glance, yes.
Kind of like Easter.
Bunnies, chicks, jelly beans, eggs, the list goes on and on. Yet there’s so much more beneath the surface. Oh how important it is to teach our children what really happened and what we are really celebrating. We personally have no problem with all of the cute stuff {except the easter bunny-we don’t do him at all}, but it is in the shadows of our real learning and celebrating during this season.
We began our family study of the Resurrection Eggs this past Sunday night. To say the kids were excited and interested would be a complete understatement. They were captivated, even Ladybug! It was one of our best family nights ever…for that alone I am so thankful!
I read the story from our Miss Patty book {The Story of the Resurrection Eggs in Rhyme & Song}. We explored each egg and named the item. As we got to each egg, one child had to find the egg {but not open it}, shake it, then pass it on down the line to let everyone shake it {yes, we even waited for Ladybug each time to figure out how to shake them}. The final child opened the egg and we all ooohed and ahhed.
After going through the eggs we worked through the set of printables I made for our kids, one page at a time. I laminated ours and added velcro for the word eggs. I hooked them all together in order with a metal ring. We went through them, finding the items again and just spent time exploring freely and learning just a bit about them.
Each weekday Daddy is using the booklet that comes with the set of eggs to teach the kids through the Bible, about the eggs. He is reading the passages from our NIV Bible and then explaining it in a way they can understand. We are doing one egg each morning.
Next week we will have part 2, as we explore the eggs together in a hands on way.
~ my camera battery died, which is why there is only one photo, and also why I don’t have any photos of our completed set of printables. I hope to find my charger soon {yes, it’s lost, I am miserable} and snap a pic of our set to show you.
Visit theRaising Rock Stars Webpage to download your own notebook pages and to see links to previous Rock Stars posts! Please read there or here before you add your link.
Ladybug explored eggs this week! She played with her eggs every day and loved them every single time. We used a basket and also an empty parmesan cheese container to play with them. She didn’t really like it when we put them all into the container and made her get them out herself ;-)
I got this awesome set up from Ikea. I have known I wanted this for years now, but just couldn’t bring myself to spend the money. Finally my husband encouraged me to just get what I really wanted and honestly I am SO happy I did! 
