Wow, it's been a while!

Haven't blogged in quite a while. Summer has been busy so far and isn't really slowing down!

What prompted this blog entry was observations of my son and nephew together. I've been telling myself, since June, that I want August rather "schooly", in part, for preparation for September. Just some basic routines down for September to go more smoothly. I also had in mind to have some activities ready for ds (6) and nephew (7) because they tend to get too loud and rambunctious; they just feed off each other's adrenaline levels and it becomes insane!

Well, we had our nephew over for a sleep-over Monday night and boy, did the two of them go crazy at times. I was actually kind of feeling stuck this morning, trying to figure out how in the world I'm going to come up with activities for a month for the two of them when I couldn't figure out something then and there!

My mind turned to Montessori and how focused she was on kids having something purposeful to do, any activity that would capture their attention and keep them focused (in a natural way, of course, not like the addictive attention capturing of tv or other video). Her thing, for the young ones (ages 3-6) was to start off with practical life activities. I bet it's still a good place to start given the boys' ages. Science activities are always good; I need to make sure I go through some books and pick out some specific things we can do. Fortunately, our first week is only 2 days, so I get a milder transition to having the two boys together. Other than that, I've thought of getting some bingo games together for working on sounds, syllables and simple words. What I probably really need to do is sit down and think of things I already have the resources for, or can VERY quickly whip together, because I've just thought of various other things they've enjoyed doing in the past: plants, pots, counting chain, landforms.

So, some stuff for me to think about over the next week!