The First Two Weeks of June...

Unfortunetly, I have been very busy and didn't have time to post what we have been up to.  We still have been busy... just enjoying more of the nice weather and getting outdoors more.  So I thought I'd take the time to catch everything up.

Our playground has dried out, we added some drains to prevent puddles (or bigger bodies of water) from forming on or near the playground (although the creek overflowing can't be helped and we are praying it won't happen again this year... or ever), and moved 12 yards of wood chips to make our playground ready for fun.  The children had a great time this week.  Here are a few photo's of them.

We have been done with our curriculum for the school year and are phasing into our summer curriculum as of next week... so I had to come up with a few things to do to fill in until we begin our summer curriculum.  I am excited about our summer curriculum as "Musings of Me" got me thinking about "trekking across the USA".  We will be starting our journey in Alabama and doing as many states as we can do.  It will be tricky because I will have a pretty good size mix of children this summer... from 4 years to third grade... but I know it can be done to keep them all brushed up on their skills and have fun at the same time.  Hope you will join our adventure!!!

I started out our summer doing a few alphabet review papers from "Confessions of a Homeschooler" which you can download here.

We then did several activities to learn about our emotions.
We made faces with cut out pieces to show the emotion printed at the bottom of the page.

We talked about how each of these pictures would make us feel if they happened to us.

We drew our own emotion faces.  They turned out really cute!

And we ordered the happy faces by least to most.

I then decided to change it up and do something very different.  I tried lapbooking!  I have always loved the idea... but making six of them has always made me rethink it.  It turns out... it was so worth it!!!  The children really loved them and I've heard from parents that they use them all the time at home.  That in itself makes it worth it to me.

Our first lapbook was "Peter Pan".
The children just loved it.  I used Homeschool Creations theme pack to make my lapbook.  You can find the activities I used here and here.  This is how I put it together.

The cover I made myself.  I used a free clip art picture of Peter Pan and then made several pages of name tracing pages to complete the first page.  Every day we would trace two pages of our name.  I had to cross out the name as I did both first and last.

Our next two pages looked like this.

I glued a piece of construction paper down just to the left of the middle seam on the file folder to that we could have a second two pages.  We used Homeschool Creations pages from her preschool pack to create both of these pages.  Close-ups are below.

I used the "Which one is different" and cut them apart to make a booklet.  I made a pocket to put the rhyming pictures in.  The children love the rhyming pictures as I would call out a picture and they would hunt for the rhyme.  It kind of turned into a game to see who could figure it out first.

The roll and graph is a favorite of the children's after doing this one.  They had a blast seeing who would win... the first character to reach ten blocks.  Of course, we made it a whole graphing activity and I asked questions like, "who got the least number of rolls", "who got the same number of rolls".  It teaches a lot about reading a graph.

Our last two pages looked like this.

Close-ups of these pages are below.

We circled the letter that showed the beginning sound.  I did marker in "sh" for ship because it does not make the "s" sound when you say ship.

I made a digital clock book and then we put the matching analog clock down on the red strip of paper that folded open.

We used the patterning cards on the yellow strip.  This was fun because I would say make a pattern with Peter Pan and Captain Hook and they would come up with the pattern.

and the last three pages were stapled to the back of the file folder to complete our lapbook.

We had so much fun with our Peter Pan lapbook that I decided to try a Toy Story lapbook.  I made it the same way but put a few different activities in it.  I used 1+1+1=1 preschool theme plus some of my own items.  You can download both here and here.  I didn't take very good pictures of this lapbook... sorry.  Hope you can make out what I did.

This is a picture of the first two pages.  I forgot to take a picture of the cover.

We did a "Which one is different" that was several pages.

We did a roll and graph.

We matched rhyming word pictures.

We did a pre-writing actvity.

We did a size sorting.

This is a picture of the next two pages.

We did a sorting activity.

We put numbers in order from 1-15.

and these were the last three pages stapled to the last page.

I hope you enjoyed seeing what we've been up to.  Hope to see you back next week.