Fourth Week of May...

This was a slower week.  We are done with our curriculum and I'm not ready to start our summer curriculum until May 9th... so I'm rethinking what we will be doing until that point.  We had two play days this week on Monday and Friday and I know the children enjoyed them but missed our learning time as well on those days.

Since we finished the alphabet last week we spent some time doing some alphabet review activities.  We did some letter recognition and beginning sound activities with these circle puzzles I found.  The letters were pre-glued by me and the children had to figure out the beginning sound in the picture and match them with the letter that makes that sound.  Our letter books paid off because they did very well with this activity.

We found the matching lowercase letter to the uppercase letter that you can download here from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

And we played letter bingo that I didn't take a picture of.

We talked about worms in the garden and why worms are useful to any garden.  We then did a number ordering activity using worms.

And we waterpainted worms... well kind of cartoony worms.

We talked about how we could find ladybugs in the garden and why some bugs are good for our garden and why some bugs aren't good for our garden.
We did a shape review activity with the ladybug.

We matched spots on wings of the ladybug.

We fingerpainted a ladybug.  First we used a black crayon to make the black spots and the fingerpaint resisted the crayon when we painted the ladybug with our fingers. 

And we used stamp art and made a flowery, sunny, ladybug picture.  Here is what the children came up with.

We also watched our plants grow and grow and grow.  So I currently have the task of thinking where in my shadey yard with many deer... where we can plant them in hopes we can watch them grow. 

And that concludes our short week!  Hope everyone has a nice holiday weekend... we will be bound again to New York to drop one of my son's off the the Culinary Institute so he can continue his education after his externship in Pittsburgh.  Can't wait for him to come home in July and cook for me!!!  Mmmmm!  They get three weeks off in the summer and are right back at it.

Third week of May...

A bit more sun this week... I'm happy to say!  We spent much needed time outdoors playing and taking advantage of the sunny, dry weather when we had it. (we still had rain... but those moments of sun and dry were wonderful)

This week we finished up our alphabet with the letter Zz.  The children were very excited to reach the end of the alphabet.  As we always do we did many different activities and completed our weekly letter book.  Below are pictures of our letter book for Zz.

We practiced rhyming using a "garden" theme that you can find here at Homeschool Creations in her gardening pack.

We reviewed our numbers two ways this week.  We used the Homeschool Creations gardening pack to look for the trowel.  As it was each child's turn they would call out the number they thought the trowel was behind.  If the trowel wasn't present we would turn that number over and go on to the next child. 

We also played number bingo.  Both games were very fun for the children.

We also did many gardening activities this week. 

We sorted seed packets from Homeschool Creations garden pack.

We sequenced how a seed grows several times

We used garden tools to compare lengths and match.

We talked about roots and thier job and made a picture with roots.  It is hard to see on this picture but we drew a plant growing above the ground and made yarn roots under the ground.

We did a left to right visual preception activity with flowers, insects, and fruit. We moved from left to right and colored only the flowers and oranges as we moved across the page.

And we made a flowering tree and talked about how a flower makes a seed.  We used a pre-cut tree and made leaves with a green dot marker and glued tissue paper for the flowers.

And how can you do a gardening unit with growing things?  We did several growing and science projects this week to learn more about how seeds grow into plants and how plants work.

We used our window greenhouse to watch lima bean seeds germinate. 

We used our root watcher to grow peas.  The children are amazed at the changes that are made each day.

We are studying what happens to seeds when they are and aren't given water and when they are given water and get sun or stay in the dark.  We are growing pole beans here.

We talked about the job of the stem of a plant and have been observing celery in colored water since much  of the celery is a stem.  They liked how it changed colors and understand how the stem pulls the water up to the leaves.

We are watching what a root will do in water (a potato that the end was cut off).

I think the children will be very surprised and very pleased with how things progressed over the weekend!!!

Thanks for stopping over and seeing all the fun things we did this past week!  Hope you enjoyed seeing what we did.

Second week of May...

Here where I live we have literally been soaked.  The melting snow on top of a lot of rain... and I mean almost every day in April and May not looking much more promising...we have been flooded.  Could it get any worse?  Well our little mini creek in our backyard became a roaring river!!!  My whole playground was flooded and part of the river.  Here are some pictures... and the mulch you see is floating on water.  Not sure if we will ever get back there to play...  :(

This week we worked on the letter Yy.  We did several activities and did our letter books for Yy.  Below are pictures of our Yy letter books.

We spent one day on frogs.  We talked about them, learned fingerplays about them, moved like them, and did a prewriting activity and made a frog puppet.

We learned about things that belong together.  I got a bunch of toys and separated some of the parts and we put the parts together.  We then did this activity sheet.

We also used garden vegetable pictures to review more and less/most and least.  My kids all get the more and less... it's least they struggle with. 

We also practiced counting and recognizing numbers with a few hands-on activities and this activity sheet.

The remainder of the week we talked and did activities with flowers.  We used one page of Homeschool Creations gardening pack that you can find here to talk about the parts of a flower.

We used water bottles to make flowers.  I got this idea from a blog in which they made spring daisies.  You can view the blog here.  Ours didn't turn out like spring daisies, though, but they are very nice flowers.  We used the bottles with the white paint, fingerpaint for the centers and made stems and leaves with markers.  We used fancy scissors to cut the grass (that is what we call them anyhow).

We made a cut and paste tulip.

We used our number recognition and counting skills to put the right number of petals on the flowers.  They had a tough time with this... they do better with an object (dot markers) than using there fingers.

We matched flowers.

And we waterpainted a plate and made it into a beautiful flower.

Since I operate a family child care... family is a big part of my business.  The kids love my children and my husband.  I snapped a few pictures with my daughter with the daycare kids.  They loved this!

Next week we will be doing letter Zz.  On Friday I am planning an alphabet party... we made it through the whole alpahbet.  We will also be talking a lot on seeds and begin planting some things to watch them grow.

Hope you enjoyed our week!  :)