Uu- Us

This weeks theme was "Us." Our words to remember were "God made us wonderful." We learned about the wonderful bodies that He gave us, and the focus was on our 5 senses. We did a lot of activities to explore the senses and we learned the song "Oh be careful little eyes."

For our tactile letter activity we made a squishy bag. I didn't have hair gel so I used some creamy body wash instead. I put some in a ziplock bag and we added some blue food coloring to make it pretty. Then Boo practiced writing her letter Uu with a Q-tip.

We also continued to used our blend ladder to practice reading words with the short /u/ sound like "sun." I'm so proud of how well she's doing and remembering all of her letters.

Here are some of the fun activities we did to help us learn our 5 senses..


Touch
I blindfolded Boo. She had to reach into a paper bag and try to tell what the items inside were by feeling them. Then I put socks over her hands and it was much more difficult to figure out what she was holding. We discovered how we need our skin to feel. We also went on a texture hunt. Boo had to feel things around the house until she found an item for each texture on her list.

Hearing 

We played a game with plastic Easter eggs to experiment with sounds. I gathered some small items to fill 4 eggs with. Then I made a matching egg for each item, so 8 eggs that made 4 different sounds. I came up with: rice, pennies, beads, and a rock. Boo had to shake the eggs and match up 2 that made the same sound. Then I let her guess what was inside each one by the sound it made. Next we filled 5 glasses with different amounts of water and tapped it with a metal spoon making an xylophone. We listened to the differences in the sounds they made and then took turns making music. I don't have a pic, but finally we played "freeze dance."  I played the radio and the girls had to listen to the music and freeze every time I stopped it. 


  Smell  
For our smell activity we just had a blind smell test. I put a different smelly item in each cup, and had them close their eyes and try to tell what they were smelling. I used: popcorn, orange, her shampoo, cinnamon, chocolate syrup, peanut- butter, playdough (oddly one of my fav smells), and banana. Unfortunately Boo only guessed 2 of the 8 right and some of her answers were crazy :/ Good thing her other 4 senses are working, because I don't think she'd make it on smell alone.

 

Sight
We did a couple activities to show how much we depend on our sense of sight. The first was to sort Lego's by color. I had Boo first try to separate them with her eyes closed. She got really frustrated when she kept getting it wrong. Then she sorted them with her eyes open. We talked about how we can't hear, smell, touch or taste color, but we need our sense of sight. Then we did a similar activity where she had to draw a house using her eyes and then try to draw it with her eyes closed.

 






Taste
We had a sick day this week and so we ended up having to cram 2 senses into one day, so we also did taste on the same day as sight. We tasted a lemon, sugar and salt and discussed the difference in taste. Then we samples some snacks and they had to tell me which one was sour, sweet, etc.

Since we had a short week we ended up skipping our craft. We had planned to do self portraits that said "God made us wonderful."

These are the books we used with this unit.

 

Baby Bear Highlight:

The highlight of Baby Bear's week is that she used the potty for the first time! I'm so proud of her and so ready to be done buying diapers!

Sis Highlight:

Sis is finishing up reading her Felicity books. We've really enjoyed them. We are going to watch the movie to celebrate finishing the books. We will have a week of review and learning a little bit more about the time period. Then we have a "Colonial Days" week planned. I decided to keep most of her activities and crafts to do all together in one week rather than spread them out. I think she's going to have a lot of fun.   

Aa- Apple

I gave up all of my hopes of going to an apple orchard to pick our own apples for this unit because life is just too busy right now. Instead we went to the grocery store and did our best to find a variety of apples. Even without the field trip we still enjoyed the apple unit (and we did make it to an orchard to pick pumpkins and have some yummy apple cider.)

Our words to remember this week were, "If I stay in Jesus, I will have much fruit." We focused on the Fruit of the Spirit. After telling her what they were Boo said, "Mom do I have any fruit growing in me?" I said, "what do you think?" She answered, "no." I said, "well have you given your life to Jesus and do you love Him?" She said, "yeah."  So we did this project to see if the Fruit of the Spirit were evident in her life. I made a poster of a tree and wrote each fruit on a paper apple. I told her that all week I was going to watch her and if I spied her having one of the fruits she got to glue it to her tree. A couple hours later she was waiting patiently for me in the other room while I helped Sis with a problem, so we glued the patience apple to her tree. By the end of the week we had at least one example of each of the fruits in her life.

One of the things we did was count our apples, sort them by color and make an apple graph. They must have been out of yellow apples at the store that day because I couldn't find one anywhere, so we did red, green, and called the lighter ones pink.

I  found the book "Apples" by Gail Gibbons at at the library. It was not suggested in the MFW curriculum, but it was really good for learning about apples (with the exception of one sentence I had to change.) We talked about where fruit grows, apple orchards, seeds, parts of an apple,different colors and sizes of apples, and we looked at the names of some different kinds of apples. Of course we also ate an apple for snack.

I'm starting to run out of new tactile letter activity ideas, so for this week we just re-used our salt tray and practiced writing "Aa" on lined paper and did all of our regular phonics worksheets. She's had a lot of practice with this one already since her name begins with the letter A... Surprise! Her real name is not Boo!

 We used this video clip from Johnny Appleseed each morning to learn this song that our curriculum suggested. My how Walt Disney has changed! I was shocked to discover that there is an old Disney movie that gives glory to God! I'm so impressed that I want to find a copy of this movie for my girls now.

We read a chapter out of the book Grasshopper on the Road called, "A New House." In the story an apple gets smashed that happened to be the home of a little worm. He has to find a new apple to make his home. I drew up this worksheet and Boo had to design a new home for the worm. Then she told us all about the new house. Her apple home had a bathroom, bedroom, living room, and even a laundry room. I thought she did a good job using her imagination. Worm even had a tiny stuffed bear in his bed, and he threw his clothes on the laundry room floor!


For our words to remember craft we made apple stamping placemats. This ended up being really messy. They had paint all over their hands and feet (don't ask.) I cut a white poster board into 4 equal sections. Then we cut 2 apples down the middle, got some acrylic paints, and used our apple halves as stampers. The finished product will have our words to remember glued in the bottom corner and be covered with clear contact paper to be used as placemats.  

Here are some the other books we read this unit

We finished up our unit by using our apples to make a yummy baked apple crisp with vanilla ice-cream!

Tt- Turtle

Well we finally made it home from a super long tiring vacation in the Smoky Mountains and then a big weekend ( all my girls and I were in my sister's wedding!) I sat down to prepare school, opened my manual to the apple unit and said "no way!" It seemed like too much to prepare after such a busy two weeks, so I decided to go with turtles instead. Hopefully we make it to apple next week. It was fitting though, because we just recently visited two zoos and an aquarium all of which had turtles to observe.

Our words to remember this week were "I don't quit, I persevere." Of course we read the story of the Tortoise and the Hare. We talked about what it means to persevere in general. Then we talked about how many Christians walk away from the Lord when trials and persecution come, but it's those who persevere until the end that receive eternal life. Boo made some finger puppets to act out the story too.

For our tactile letter activity I gathered up a pile of random items from around the house and I let Boo practice making capital and lower case letter T's out of it.

Boo also pointed out that she thinks capital "T" kind of looks like a table which starts with "T." I thought that was pretty smart!

I used these two books to present information and facts about turtles. We learned that there are many different kinds of turtles and that baby turtles hatch from eggs.Land turtles have legs and can hide in their shells. Sea turtles have flippers and can't hide inside of their shells.

For our craft we made these cute little turtles out of stuff we had around the house! I cut the center out of paper plates and we colored them yellow for the underside of the shell. Then we glued head, tail, and legs to the other side. We glued small Styrofoam bowls for the top shell and covered them with pieces of colored tissue paper. We glued our words to remember on the bottom of our turtles. The girls had fun playing with their turtles too.

The most exciting thing for me this unit was that Boo started learning to blend letter sounds to make words. We started using the "blend ladder," where we place a letter before and after a vowel on the ladder.We only used the "a" right now. Since we skipped the "Aa" unit I was a little hesitant to begin blends, but she knew the /a/ sound already so I went ahead. She did great with it. She has always had a hard time remembering her letters and sounds, but she wants to read so bad. She was elated when I told her she was reading her first real words!

We also ran a little race to teach us about perseverance and sin.  Instructions for this were right out of our teacher manual for Bible time. I thought it was a great illustration. First the girls took turns running to the slide and back. Then I added a heavy bag. Boo kept going even though she tripped once. The third time I added another heavy bag. It took her a lot longer and was almost walking on the way back because her bags were so heavy, but I was proud that she persevered and finished the race. After the race we talked about how like the heavy bags made it difficult to run, sin weighs us down and makes it hard to finish our race as a Christian. When we repent and get rid of the sin we are free to live for Christ! Then they dropped their heavy bags and the girls ran freely for a few minutes. I think it made the point and it was fun.

SIS HIGHLIGHT

I would say the highlight of Sis' week was learning about sound waves. We tied two paper cups to a very

long string and had to see if we could hear each other through them. I was doubtful, but it actually worked! The sound waves traveled through the string, and with the cup to her ear Sis was able to hear me talking very low from far away!

This past week she also mastered her 5x multiplication facts and started diagramming sentences. We're still reading Felicity and learning about the colonial days. We finished our unit on whales and moved on to pinnipeds. She also completed her first science field trip sheet in her Zoology journal after our visit to Ripley's Aquarium in Gatlinburg. This was the first of two big aquarium field trips that we have planned for her this school year. We are really enjoying our apologia curriculum and learning all about sea creatures.

Nn- Nest

I'm getting behind on my posts! I meant to post this last week and forgot to do it before we left for vacation.For the MFW k users who are following along and was expecting this post to be "apple week," we decided to skip apple and come back to it in a couple weeks so that we can go to the orchard.Our "Nn" week was a short one for us though, because we're getting ready for a vacation and a wedding. We still managed to fit in a few fun things.

Our words to remember were "God takes good care of me." We talked about different types of animal homes and then specifically about birds nests and how they make them. Then we discussed how if God takes care of the animals, He will also take care of us.

For our tactile letter activity I tried to keep it simple this week, so I just drew an "N" on paper and Boo used pieces of colored yarn to practice building her letter. We also used our salt tray to practice lower case "n."

 

For our craft (that we make each week in place of badges) I found this cute paper plate craft. It was really simple. I just had them color the back side of a paper plate brown and then cut the plate in half and stapled it together to form a pocket. Then I cut out some simple bird shapes and they glued on beaks, drew eyes, and stapled them into the nest. We decided to cut up some strips of the extra construction paper to stuff inside then we glued on our words to remember. I thought they turned out really cute and it was a quick easy craft.

 Our curriculum said make an edible nest and suggested a recipe, but I thought that rice crispy nests would be easier. By this point we were all sick too and didn't feel like doing anything! They were yummy though!

 

We read a book every day this week. Here's what we used..The Scarecrow"s Hat, Silly Little Goose, Nest (mostly pictures), Annie and Snowball and the cozy nest, The Best Nest.

I had so many more plans for "nest" week but we never got to them. One was to make mini nests out of brown paper lunch bags. You just roll the sides of the bag down till ot reaches the bottom and forms a nest shape and then I wanted to go on a nature hunt to see what we could collect in our nests. We never got to it though. We have on more week off for vacation before we get back to school, so it will be a couple weeks before I post about apple, but I'm gonna try my best to keep this blog up to date.

Ll -Leaf

It was kind of challenging learning about leaves before fall is really here. A few of our leaves are just starting to change colors, but most are still attached to the trees. This lesson would have been so much better if we could have raked up a big pile and jumped in them (one of the girls favorite things to do in the fall.) We did manage to find enough fallen leaves to do our activities and Boo learned the letter Ll so I guess it all worked out fine.

Our words to remember and Bible portion of this unit was "I will live and grow in Jesus." On Monday we picked a single leaf off of the big tree in our backyard. This leaf didn't want to be part of the tree anymore, but thought he would be better off on his own. We took our leaf inside and watched him all week. By Friday he was withered and brown. Jesus is the tree and we are the leaves. If we remain in Jesus we will live and grow spiritually, but we can not live apart from Him. "Those who do not belong to the Son of God do not have life." 1John 5:12.

Even though it was "slim pick-ins", the first thing we did was hunt for leaves around the yard.





I found a free download for leaf identification cards
HERE , so we used these to try to sort and identify our leaves.

We read "Autumn Leaves" and "Fall leaves Fall!" to learn a little bit about why some leaves turn colors and fall off trees every year. 

For our tactile letter activity Boo made the letter "Ll" with Play-Doh. I love crafts, but there's just something about Play-Doh that makes want to run the other way. Maybe it's the huge mess and the doh crumbs that I'm usually still cleaning up a week later. Anyway, I'm a mean mom and won't let my kids play with Play-doh very often. So this was actually a bigger deal to her than it looks! She actually cheered when she saw me get it out and I realized that in her almost 5 years she's only played with it a couple times...I know, sad!

We did a couple really simple leaf rubbings with our leaves, crayons and white paper. Then we read "Leaves! Leaves! Leaves! This is one that we own. I highly recommend this book when studying leaves with little ones. It's a cute story packed full of leaf info. It has a diagram of the parts of a tree, teaches how leaves make food, what makes leaves green, names of diff kinds of leaves, leaf jokes, a leaf poem and even has instructions for doing the leaf rubbing craft.

For our words to remember craft I found an idea similar to this on Pinterest. I thought that construction paper would be a lot less messy than painting the trunks, so we traced our hands and arm on to brown construction paper. Then we cut them out and glued them to our paint paper to form the tree trunk and branches. Then we used finger paint to make thumb print leaves on our trees.

Here's a link to a magic School bus episode we watched on YouTube after school one day. It taught about how leaves use the sun to make food for plants. It went perfectly with everything we've been learning.

The Magic School Bus Gets Planted

SIS HIGHLIGHT:

The highlight of Sis' week was making apple butter. For History we've been learning all about the colonial days using the American girl Felicity books and study guides. In book 2 we read about Felicity collecting apples to make apple butter with her mother in 1774. Although Felicity hated stiring the pots of apples, Sis thought it was lots of fun. She followed her recipe for apple butter, but it ended up being way too runny to be a spread. However by accident she ended up making the best tasting homemade cinnamon apple sauce ever. We refrigerated over night and the girls ate it all up the next day. Sis got a feel for what it felt like to be Felicity and had fun doing it, so in my book that's a success.

 

Mm- Moon

This week we learned Mm if for moon. Our words to remember were "I am the light of the world." The moon has no light of it's own. It's only a rock, but it reflects the light of the sun. Jesus is like the sun and we are like the moon, reflecting his light to the world.

Both Boo and Sis learned a lot in this unit. Sis said she never thought about how the moon gave off light, because she knew people can walk on it. We did a reflection activity where we shined a light into a mirror and looked at the light reflected onto the wall.

 For our tactile letter activity I drew a big "M" on a piece of paper and Boo placed colored Popsicle sticks on top to build  M's.




We used this book Usborne Beginners Sun, Moon, and Stars for our information lesson on day 1. We also read a lot of books for our story time this week: Happy Birthday Moon, The Moon Shines Down, The Moon Might be Milk, Moongame, and Goodnight Moon.

We talked about astronauts walking on the moon and then we sampled real astronaut food that I found at a craft store...a space freeze dried ice-cream sandwich! I am NOT a fan of crunchy ice-cream! Boo didn't like it either, but Sis on the other hand ate the whole thing. Still it was kind of fascinating knowing we were tasting what they really eat in outer space!

We learned the phases of the moon using Oreo cookies. Boo learned the words "Full moon, New moon, Half moon, and Crescent." Sis learned all 8 proper names of the phases. Then we ate our moons.

On Wednesdays we're suppose to make a badge as our craft, but since I decided to reward her with badges at the completion of each unit, we've been coming up with our own crafts to remind us of our words to remember. I got the idea to make moon tambourines, because our curriculum suggested we sing "This Little Light of Mine." I thought it would be fun to play an instrument as we sing. We covered paper plates with aluminum foil to make shiny round full moons. It was perfect, because we talked about how our lives should reflect the light of Jesus and we realized we could see our reflection in our foil moons. We glued our words to remember on one plate and on the other we decided to cut some moons out of paper to glue on. We made a full moon, half moon, crescent, and new moon and labeled them. Then we filled our plates with dried beans, stapled them together and sung our song. We changed the words to the song, and took turns trying to come up with as many places as we could think of to let our lights shine. Some of their ideas: "Let it shine at Taco Bell, Let it shine at the park, Let it shine at gymnastics." It was fun. I think they could have gone on singing it all day.

We also went to the zoo for our first field trip of the year!

SIS HIGHLIGHT:

Sis is really enjoying learning about the American Revolution and the activities related to that. Her favorite thing this week though was beginning her writing journal. Last year she kept a creative writing journal once a week. She enjoyed it so much that we decided to do one this year too. Grandma found us these fun story cards to use with her journal. She always says she wants to write stories "like Mom" someday, so these will be perfect. There are 32 story prompt cards to help her come with ideas for stories.