Kindergarten Wrap-up

Despite the lack of school posts we have been plugging along.  We are mostly finished with the Rainforest portion of Animal Worlds and will be moving onto the Ocean portion.  After that we will have successfully completed AW (minus the polar region)!!  It will feel good to know that we stuck it out and completed a core.....now I know we can do it, it will be so much nicer in the upcoming years.  I think that we (Annabelle and I) have learned so much about each other this year that all our upcoming homeschool years will benefit from it.

We talked a lot about ants the past few weeks.  This wasn't a part of the curriculum, but the animals that they were studying didn't have lapbooks readily available for them.  Ants did and since we have them in our house AND the rainforest portion talks a lot about army ants and leafcutters I thought it would fit right in.  We did a notebook page study I just haven't put it together yet.  Annabelle was truly fascinated with ants....but still doesn't like them. lol   This is her pink ant that she made....it is obviously the queen, can't you tell? :)

We talked about a lot of tropical birds, toucans in particular.  We bought a whole bunch of fruit ( I do realize that raspberries and apples aren't tropical, but those are the only fruits I knew Annabelle would eat) and had a taste test.

Annabelle's reaction to having to taste at least one of every fruit.....not too happy. lol

The boys LOVED it!  They ate the whole tray.  I learned that I do not know how to cut a mango. :)

We finished up our adventure reading for the Rainforest unit.  The book is about finding an undiscovered butterfly so that a wealthy man will buy that portion of the rainforest and save it from being cut down. 

At the end of the book I thought it would be fun if Annabelle got to make her own 'undiscovered' butterfly.  May present to you the Rapunzel butterfly..... :)

We had this little guy come and visit us at our door one day.  We've been talking about dragonflies and butterflies a lot so this was a nice surprise.....it was a cold morning so it hadn't warmed up yet and was easy to catch.

We observed him and then let him go.

We've also been working through our Horizons K math and All About Reading and Spelling Level 1.  It really is assisting her in becoming a stronger reader.....

 .....as well as helping her enjoy reading a little bit more.  Still having her bad attitude show up, but it is becoming less and less a problem......

 ....she can read great, she just has to work at it....and she really dislikes working at something. :)  Daily reading out of the Sonlight I Can Read It readers.

 We have started her 1st grade science, Apologia Astronomy.  I LOVE this curriculum....and she is really liking it too.  They have a lot of hands on activities which she really enjoys.  We are enjoying the note booking portion of it too.

We made a model of Stonehenge and talked about what it may have been used for (telling of the seasons, when to plant, time of day)....

 I think that it turned out decent. lol

 This was our balloon model of the solar system (not really to scale...the sun would be a lot bigger than that).  It will be used for review of the planet names/order of the planets.  She really enjoyed this.

 Happily doing some Bible verse copy work for her notebook.  I was surprised that she liked doing this....normally she doesn't like to write at all.

I would say that what Annabelle is enjoying the most right now is her Bible studies.  We are using Bible Study Guide for All Ages.  I am pleased with it, I really like that it will grow with us.

This great printout of the genealogy of Jacob can be found at a great blog Our Country Road   This has really helped us with learning the names of the sons of Jacob.  She looks forward to singing the song every morning and pointing out the people on the chart.

 Working on the student page.  The Discover the Bible portion is so interactive and asks her tons of questions during the actual story so I know that she is listening and understanding.

 The boys joined us for one of our crafts.  They really wanted to get in on the coat of many colors action. :)

 Asa, Silas, and Annabelle.  Annabelle just wanted to do the coat and color the Joseph during some of our reading.

 We talked about showing favoritism.  I gave Silas a sucker before I read the Bible story and told him how much I loved him and how glad God had given him to me (right in front of Annab and Asa), then proceeded to go to read.  There was an immediate uproar.  We talked about how that made them feel, and what should be done about those feelings.  After we talked I gave them each a sucker and told them the same thing I told Silas.  It especially hit home with Annabelle....it is really cool to see these concepts click with her.

 Our second lesson moved onto Joseph being sold into slavery.  This lesson also dealt with lying (which always needs some reinforcement in our house).

 This was our Joseph in the pit craft.  We've done this before, but it's an easy and fun one to revisit.

 This is just Annabelle who was really excited about the new desk that I found for her at a garage sale for only $2!  She says she is in 'real' school now. lol :)

That is what we've been up to the last few weeks in May.  I can officially say that Annabelle is now in between K and 1st grade.....she will tell you that she is in 1st grade though. lol My postings will probably be a little more sporadic like this during the summer.  We are really only schooling 3 days a week (sometimes 4), and with the weather being so nice it is hard to sit down and blog sometimes. :)  But I will try to post something 1-2 times a week.  I hope that everyone else is having a wonderful warm season so far!  Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Linking up to Preschool Corner and Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers (for the first time...yea!!!)

Tot School: Pizza!

We had a fun week! Looking back we really had 3 little themes so I'm going to separate Asa's portion of the post into those three categories so that it doesn't look so disjointed.

PIZZA
I made this cute little pizza toss game (not including the box). I printed out images I found on Google that that could be pizza toppings then mounted them to cereal boxes and laminated them. Asa would then throw the toppings into the box.
Perfect throw!
Making pizza for lunch.
This might look kind of gross, but the kids really enjoyed it. I made pizza playdoh by adding Italian spices to the dough. I left some the natural color and dyed some red for the sauce and pepperoni. The cheese is yellow yarn.
Using clipart from the computer I made a sheet of pictures with corresponding words to use as a guide. Then I gave Asa a copy with the just the pictures. He used alphabet stamps to match the guide words. He really had a whole lot of fun with this little activity and I will probably do something similar for future themes. It's so nice when he likes something I put together!
Checking the guide for the next letter.
Next up is a little sensory bin search and find. My kids love these little search and find bins! The pepperoni was hidden in the alphabet noodles and Asa had to dig them out and place it on the matching letter.

For the life of me I cannot seem to find where I printed off this cute little pizza file folder game from. It was just a recent post too. Let me know if you recognize it so I can give credit to the fabulous creators. I got the idea for the alphabet pasta box from Spell Outloud.
Looking for letters.
Working on his P is for pizza craft.
Finished product. :)
JOSEPH
While listening to the lesson of Joseph's colorful coat (taken from Danielle's Place). We focused a lot on different colors: green for the brother's envy, black for their hardened hearts, red for the blood on Joseph's coat, blue for how sad Jacob must have been. Each time I said a color Asa would use that color on a coffee filter until he heard the next color.
After the lesson we sprayed the coffee filters with water and when they were dry we cut them out and put them on Joseph. Asa's is on the left.
The next lesson we did was how Joseph was obedient to God and was thrown into jail. While in jail God used Joseph to tell men about the dreams they had. This was the foundation for Joseph being used in the future. We talked about how even though bad things happen to us, God never leaves us. This worksheet and the one below are from Henny Penny's
In this lesson we talked about how Joseph was given the meaning of Pharaoh's dream. Even though Joseph's story is sometimes sad and frustrating when it seems to go wrong God had a purpose and a plan for Joseph's life. What men meant for bad, God can use it for good.
ST. PATRICK'S ACTIVITIES
Flower transferring. He worked so hard at using these tweezers and ended up transferring most of the flowers with them.
Sorting Lucky Charms
Marble painting shamrocks. This was so fun, easy, and surprisingly not messy. I think that we will be doing this quite often.
Plus they look so pretty on a ribbon hanging in the window.
We also made rice krispie treats, only we used Lucky Charms. I got this idea from Jada Roo Can Do. Cute little blog, you should stop by.
SILAS
Silas really was quite camera shy this week. So I wanted to make sure that I put the camera down a lot while I was playing with him. This resulted in a lack of pictures of what we did, but I was able to take a handful of photos of him.

Tearing apart my hard work on the pizza toss game. Little stinker. :)
He is still really enjoying the poker chips with letters written on them.
Of course for pizza week we played with our Melissa and Doug pizza a lot.
While Annabelle and Asa were working on the alphabet search and find bin Silas enjoyed playing with some dry noodles. He really liked feeling like he was doing something special too. (Who doesn't like that feeling?)

He also made some dot art.

That was our week! We are going to be taking a break this next week from schooling. Zak is coming home so our time is going to be spent on cleaning (or in the kids case listening to mommy tell them not to make a mess a zillion times), and loving on daddy when he gets here. It has been a long almost 6 weeks and we are looking forward to relaxing with our whole family together again. I will probably post with some activities of our next theme....Noah's Ark/Rainbows it should be a fun one! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

I'm linking this to Tot School at 1+1+1=1 head on over and see what other toddlers did this week.