Teachable {MOM}ents

Today is my darling daughter, Evelyn's, first day of Preschool. I am homeschooling and I am so excited about it! My husband and I made a decision even before our now 3 1/2 year old daughter was born that we would homeschool, and today was the first official step into that world. I have been working on our school room for about a month now, and have been accumulating curriculum and resources for the past year. I have lesson plans done and themes planned out. This is my heart <3 This week and next our theme is: All About Me/Creation. The Letter of the week is A and we will be reading "God Gave Us You" and "The Kitten Who Thought He Was A Mouse". We began our day today with free play - watercolor and playing Alphabet Memory. Next we moved on to Circle Time. We sang songs, did our Calendar, found letters in the alphabet, I assigned her a job for the day (Drink Pourer at Lunch), did "What Are You Feeling" - Evelyn said, Mad, Sad & Happy ;) and then r...

A Not So Charming Prince… Last Friday night I took my almost two-year-old daughter to see Disney’s new animated movie, “The Princess and the Frog”. I have to be honest, I was sorely disappointed with this film. Having grown up in the generation of, “The Little Mermaid”, “Beauty and the Beast”, and “Aladdin”; I felt that Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation left much to be desired. My biggest concern with the movie was the lack of positive character development and connection, specifically speaking, Prince Naveen. What happened to Prince Charming? Well, there was nothing charming about this Prince - in fact, he was the opposite of charming. A better name for him might be Prince Self-indulged, or Prince Entitlement. Prince Naveen’s opening scene in the movie depicts him mucking it up with lots of woman. He was coming to visit New Orleans for the sole purpose of finding a rich girl to marry. He was, what my family calls, a “schmoozer”. Now, I don’t have a problem with a character havi...

I have been thinking about Jesus being the ultimate teacher. Jesus created "teachable moments", isn't that exactly what the parables are? Jesus took 'every-day' moments and turned them into 'teachable' ones. Jesus really used every moment as a teachable moment, and as I strive to be more like Him, that is definitely an area that I hope to improve upon. So it was Day 4 of "The Very Hungry Evelyn" book, and she 'ate' through four red strawberries. She painted strawberries with strawberry Jell0, and ate some real strawberries as well (she liked the Jello better!). I had to let some cleaning go so that I could get this done and get us all ready to go on a family outing (read below), but sometimes it is good to have days when you realize that your children are more important than the dishes in the sink :) My friend, Amanda , actually just blogged about this as well. We went to a soccer game for the school my husband teaches at (Mansfield Chris...

This is my first blog entry of this new blog! I am excited to start this blog. This is dedicated to my life as a mom and all the adventures that road takes me on! I have a daughter, Evelyn, who is 18 months old and I have a son, Beckett, who is one month old. I worked for about 5 years in early childhood education prior to having my children, and that carries over into my parenting. I believe children should be able to have many different learning experiences. I am not perfect, and I don't claim to be an expert, but I do have strong beliefs when it comes to raising children and I enjoy sharing my ideas and having lots of fun! As my blog title states...I believe every moment is a teachable moment with children. I don't always remember that, but am striving to be better! This week I had planned to continue learning about apples as we have been, but Evelyn has been really interested in "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle. So I tried to think of new ways to explor...