The first activity we did was to use our bingo markers to dot all the Os we found on our paper. The
kids did this so quickly I missed them in action..
I emptied the beans out of the sensory bin and replaced them with balls and hid the letter O pictures in them.
Matthew and Samantha matched the the O pictures to the sheet.
While the other kids did their school work Samantha put together her new Elmo puzzle. This was her first time doing this puzzle and she did it without help! She was super excited to not need help!
I bought this puzzle over the weekend at a yardsale. There is a dice you roll and then you place the matching piece in your puzzle. It came with multiple sets so I think it is supposed to be like a bingo game but she is using it like this.
In one of her drawers I put materials to make her own apple tree. The tree trunk was build already but she used her scissors to cut the green leaves herself. Then she glued the leaves and the apples onto the tree. This activity did not keep her busy as long as I was hoping. I guess I thought she would cut out more leaves.
When you run out of activities for your 3yr old do you know what happens? I'll tell you what happens she will go in her sisters room and find her dress-up makeup and put it on! Oh well I guess it could have been worse!
Samantha also dot painted her Os and apparently her octopus with an orange bingo marker. As she was doing this she exlaimed, "Mom orange starts with O!" She was really excited that she recognized a word that started with her letter.
Samantha practiced tracing her Os with a dry erase marker and then I had her cove her Os with pom poms. She did not want to do this at 1st because I think she thought it would be difficult but after she finished she was super excited!
Here Samantha is painting her O orange with a Q-tip. This was our final O activity for the week. She did this in the morning before we left for our apple field trip. Next week we will start U and we will finish the vowels!
Another week in Egypt and I feel like we are just getting to the exciting parts:pyramids and mummies!
As we started into our history lesson Monday Kaitlyn asked, "Are we doing any projects today?" And of course we were. After reading about pyramids I asked the kids to build a lego pyramid. Simple right?
No. Because they both needed the large green platform and there was only 1. So they decided to work together to build 1 large pyramid. It sounded like a great idea to me. They could work on their teamwork.
After 20 min of work this is as far as they got. They decided they wanted a hollow pyramid so that you could see the mummy On the ground next to the mummy are the canopic jars and in front of the mummy you can see the lid ready to placed ontop of the mummy. This is where I decided to stop this project and I thought maybe we would come back to it the next day and work on it again.
Tuesday began and Kaitlyn asked again,"Are we doing any projects today?"
We were in fact. In a combined history/art lesson we were going to make our very own canopic jars.
Making your own canopic jars turns out to be very messy.
We had to tear lots of newspaper into small pieces.
We then put the newspaper in the blender with water and blended it to a pulp.
After it was all pulpy we had to strain the excess water out of it.
Then we mixed the pulp mixture with glue.
Now you can actually begin sculpting.
This process took awhile and it was messy and so therefore I didn't get a picture of Samantha working on her jar because she finished to quickly. But here are the few pics I managed to take:
This last picture is Kaitlyn's jar. She is molding it into the face of a baboon which was one of the Egyptian gods. I know you can't tell from the picture but it actually looks quite a lot like the picture she was copying. Next week we will paint it and hopefully the details come out more clearly.
Wednesday Kaitlyn asked again, "Are we doing any kind of special projects for history today?"
And that is when I realized we had trouble.
Somehow I had managed to set the precedent that we would do a project everyday.
But we aren't going to do a project everyday. I would like to but time and budget only allows for so much. Somedays I wish all we needed to study was history. I love history. I find it fascinating! Unfortunately math, reading,spelling,etc are important to so we can't just read history books and do projects all day! But we will do a project every week. Kaitlyn was not happy with that answer. She is a hands-on, project kind of girl but sometimes we just have to compromise.
We did however watch a documentary on Netflix created by National Geographic called, "The Secrets of the Pharaohs". I personally learned a lot of new information watching it and we even got to watch a man actually mummify a person!
Music
We are still listening to Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint Saens.
This weeks section was the tortoise.
The kids really enjoyed listening to the slow moving music and imaging a turtle crawling about.
Math
I cannot tell you enough how much I love Right Start Math! I love its hands on nature. It is so great to memorize facts through the playing of games. Right Start also makes use of its own version of the abacus. This is a 2-sided abacus each side with its own purpose. Last year Matthew begged and begged to be allowed to use side 2. I'm not sure why, he just did.
Well today he finally got to flip the abacus over and use side 2! he was so excited. The main difference is that when you use side two you actually turn the abacus sideways and it has headings: 1000, 100, 10, 1. Who would have thought a kid could get so excited over an abacus!
Kaitlyn is working on fractions right now. Here she is putting together her fraction chart:
I really like this puzzle-like chart. It has really helped her visualize the fractions and she even enjoys putting it together! Win-win!
Co-op Day
A favorite day as usual here are a few pictures of what the kids did this week in their classes.
You may be wondering how I get pictures of my kids in their classes since I am not actually in all of their classes with them. Many of the teachers take pictures during their classes and upload them to our facebook group. They don't always have time to take picures but I always appreciate it when they do!
Kaitlyn in recyled art creating a pantyhose and coat hanger sculpture.
Here I am teaching my afternoon tots. We are singing "Going on a bear hunt". Some kids are singing, some are playing in our "bear cave". If you can't tell we were having a bear themed day. The book for the day was :
There were tons of fun activities in the morning class but since I teach in the afternoon I only have pictures of some of the afternoon activities.
The kids built patterns with bear counters.
They hibernated in our "bear cave".
We colored bear pictures.
We played with our bear sensory bin.
We even ate bear shaped snacks.
Candy Science:
Matthew in his candy science. Today's experiment used Sprite and Pop rocks. I must admit I am not entirely sure what they learned. Matthew said something about the pop rocks causing the Carbon Dioxide to be realeased from the soda into the balloon. Someone with a chemistry background tell me if that is right. Kaitlyn's class did the same experiment but I don't have any pics of her.
Apple picking field trip
Friday was our 1st field trip of the year-Apple picking!
Beleive it or not I have never actually taken my kids to pick apples. I'm really not sure why. So when the co-op sponsored this field trip I thought we should go.
Selfie on the apple wagon
Matthew and Samantha took off into the orchard filling their bags as fast as they could. Samantha especially thought it was fun because she could actually reach the apples herself and did not need any help.
Kaitlyn on the other had painstakingly searched the trees for the largest most perfect apples. It took her awhile to fill her bag but her apples were large and perfect.
After we rode the wagon back we were told to leave our apple bags(labeled with our names) piled on the grass while we went to enjoy all the other activities the farm had to offer.
Matthew hand feeding the cow.
Samantha and her friend riding on the tractors.
I cannot remember this guys name but he sure had a funny routine with these pigs. All the kids were laughing!
Enjoying some yummy apple cider slushies! I've never heard of an apple cider slushie but I thought they were pretty good.
Of course after playing and exploring the farm for 2 hours we were ready to go home. I went into the store and bought a gallon of apple cider and some apple cider doughnuts to take home.
Upon arriving home I started unloading our van and realized that I never stopped back over by that grassy spot to grab our bag of apples! I was so upset! Kaitlyn was planning on making caramel apples with hers, I thought we could bake an apple pie, and then of course we would have plenty to just eat and enjoy. The apple farm was 45 min away so there was no way I was driving back to get them.
Oh well we still had a fun day and at least we still have apple cider and apple cider doughnuts!
What an awesome weekend at the Marriage retreat! It was so nice to get away with Jon! I learned so much from the lessons and I enjoyed spending time with a lot of other couples from our church that I don't normally spend time with!
But with being gone all weekend it meant I did spend as much time preparing our week as usual. Luckily I used my 2 free hours at co-op last week to plan a lot of Matthew's and Kaityln's school work but poor Samantha's drawers didn't get changed.
Which is fine because she needed some extra work on the letter I.
Preschool Activities
I've been torn on how exactly to teach Samantha her letters. One part of me wants to work on a letter till she has it's sound perfectly memorized and not teach another letter until it is mastered. The other part of me just wants to teach 1 letter per week and move on whether or not the sound is mastered. Then hope that through review she will eventually remember all the letters. I still haven't decided. But since last week we only spent 3 days on the letter I , I thought it was ok to spend some more time on it.
It seemed by the time we traced the I again today, played short vowel shuffle, and found all the I's hidden in the beans she had the sound down. So maybe we will spend 1 more day on it to make sure and then move on.
Samantha built block towers and made block necklaces while the other two did school.
She also played with the ball themed sensory bin that I brought to co-op this week.
I buried Matthew's sight words in the ball bin and he searched for them. When he read a word correctly he would use a spoon to scoop out one of the eye balls into a bowl. Everything is more fun when it involves eye balls!
Matthew's Reading Program
Matthew uses Rod and Staff 1st grade for his phonics/spelling/reading/bible curriculum. It uses a 1st grade level bible as its means to teach reading and phonics. It entirely workbook based which is a little scary for a boy who is extremely active. However, it has been working very well so far. It allows him to be very independent in his work and he seems to like that a lot.
This is one of the activities Matthew enjoys a lot. He draws a "slide" on the board with a letter f on top and a letter e on the bottom. Then he takes a small magnet of himself and slides down the slide saying"ffffffff" until he hits the e and then he blends it into he "e" sound. We do this changing the vowels at the end of the slide to practice his blending. This is a review of skills he already learned last year. In fact most of the work he has done has been a review. I was tempted to skip him ahead in the work but I am glad that I did not. His confidence in reading and writing is soaring.
In fact I heard him say something today that I was beginging to believe I would never hear one of my children say,
"I think I am starting to like reading and writing!"
I believe this is do to the fact that I let him do the easy review work that I was tempted to skip. When learning is constantly difficult and frustrating it can make you hate learning.
Don't get me wrong I push my children. Struggling is important because in life you will struggle. But sometimes it is nice to feel confident that you can do something well. That confidence can help you tackle the more difficult things that will come at you later. I am glad to see he is gaining confidence in his reading.
History
This week we continue our pursuits into ancient Egypt. We started off learning about some of their God's Osiris and Set.
This week we read
Everyday Kaitlyn spends time reading on here own in addition to the books we read together. Here are a few of the books she has been reading:
Combining science and history this week we built our own shadufs. When I announced the project of building our own shadufs Kaitlyn immediately asked, "Do you have directions for this project?"
I told her I did not and they were to use whatever items they could find around the house to build it.
"Yes!"she replied
Kaitlyn loves a good problem to solve. So building a simple machine without any instructions is her idea of a good time. We had read about shadufs the previous week so the kids set out to work.
This is Kaitlyn's 1st attempt. She discovered she needed to make the front length longer than the back which caused her to discover she needed to add weight on the back to even it out.
Right after she lifted her 1st bucket of water her string broke. I asked her if she was an Egyptian what would she conclude she needed to do to fix it. Kaitlyn told me she needed to find a stronger string. I honestly did not expect her to fix it. I told her it was now lunch free time and she could play. She however was not satisfied with merely telling me how to fix it so she used her free time to find some yarn which was thicker and fixed it.
The yarn wasn't strong enough either so she fixed it again by using safety pins and duct tape:
That solved all her problems and she did this without any input from mom! Duct tape fixes everything!
Matthew's went together a lot easier because of two things:
1. He waited for kaitlyn to start her project so he could copy her.
2. He allowed mom to help him.
We also studied the 1st written languages this week. We learned about Hieroglyphics and Cuniform. We also learned that at first writing was carved into stone and then later into clay tablets. So of course we had to make our own clay tablet writing:
Kaitlyn planning her message.
Then they rolled out the clay and wrote their message.
Blue says" Kaitlyn Wooff"
Brown says "M W"
Yellow says" Family"
To end the week we started learning about how Ancient Egyptians created mummies. After listening to our history lesson and writing about it for our history notebooks we completed a small project that will be used next week for our big project. We made our own scented oil with oil and spices.
Matthew dumped every spice he had available into his jar. He didn't care what it smelled like he just wanted to use every possible material he had available to him!
Kaitlyn on the other hand smelled all the spices first. Then she combined only the good smelling spices into her jar.
Then we added oil and shook it up! We called it "Egyptian Perfume" . The kids dabbed some of their perfume on their skin and saved the rest for when we mummify our chicken! Kaitlyn's perfume actually smelled good while Matthew's smelled awful. He wore it anyway and he loved it!
Kaitlyn in recyled art creating a pantyhose and coat hanger sculpture.
Here I am teaching my afternoon tots. We are singing "Going on a bear hunt". Some kids are singing, some are playing in our "bear cave". If you can't tell we were having a bear themed day. The book for the day was :
