Sneak Peek Week 12: Parable of the Sower, Farm

Ok. So officially for the next few weeks I will be doing school from Tuesday until Saturday. I have obviously found it to be difficult to post on Saturday and Sunday. So I'm going to experiment. I will continue to do Wednesday. That has been fun. I will also continue the Week in Review on Saturday. I am going to try doing the Sneak Peek on Monday, but it will definitely be up by Tuesday. I think that Sunday is so busy that in the afternoon between church services all I want to do is relax with Zak. Monday is difficult as well because I use that day to recover my house from the weekend. So we will see how this works!

We have a very fun week planned with lots of fun crafts. We will be introducing the letter Ff and talking about farms a lot. Our Bible lesson for the week also fits the farm theme. We will be talking about the parable of the sower. I hope to have some good conversation with Annabelle on this. It will most likely be spur of the moment because I don't have a whole lot planned specifically to enhance the lesson. I was going to be checking out Hubbards Cupboard today to see if there were any supplemental activities on that site. So onto the rest of the activities. So many things you can do with this theme, it's had to choose!

This is a picture of our farm activities for the week. Starting at the top left and going around clockwise. Roll a barn is a fun game that we are going to do with our big dice that we got in the Target dollar bins. It is played just like the game Cooties....only you're trying to build a barn instead of a cootie. Then there are farm animal coloring books. Next is a game called How Many Spots. I plan on using black or brown pom poms for the spots. You play by drawing a number card and placing that many spots on the cow. Simple enough right? Then we have a farm animal matching game. I am also going to see how Annabelle does at playing memory with them. Also we have a heads and tails matching game. This is fun because Annabelle and Asa can be silly with these too and make funny animals. Last but not least is a barn puzzle. I actually printed out two of these pages, cut one into squares and I'm going to have Annabelle paste them onto the picture. Thought that would be more interesting for her than a paper puzzle....plus she loves to use glue sticks. :) All of these printouts can be found here: http://www.1plus1plus1equals1.com/FarmTotBook.html

and here:

http://www.2teachingmommies.com/2010/09/farm.html

A vegetable garden that reinforces counting to five. I made this activity myself using clipart. It took a lot of time, but I really like how it turned out. The veggies are all numbered, as well as the spot they are to be planted in. They are also all have velcro on them so they don't slide around on the posterboard. I hope that this helps Annabelle with her counting skills.

We don't want to forget about the letter Ee during farm week so I made this cute egg counting activity. This also took some time to create, but again I like how it turned out. Annabelle just needs to stick the corresponding amount of eggs on the hens.

To help introduce the letter Ff we will be using frogs as well. This game I got off of this website: http://folderfun.ning.com/ It is technically a file folder game, but will be just fine without the folder I think. It is slightly more challenging in that there are two colors to match, not just one. Sorry about the dark picture. It really is more cute than what it looks like in this picture.

Here is another game that I made. Although it is not an original idea. I plan to spruce it up a little more too eventually. I would like to get more fry cartons and more 'fries' either roll the dice to find out how many fries to put into a carton, or write numbers on the cartons and put the corresponding amount of fries in it. I really love the dice I've found....can you tell. I think that it is because it reinforces counting by making Annabelle count the dots and then count again the corresponding amount of 'things' (in this instance fries) that she is supposed to put somewhere. I guess that I just like that it makes her count twice and she doesn't even know that it isn't all that fun. lol Wow, that was kind of rambling, and made little to no sense. Welcome to my mind. :)

That is it for pictures. In addition to all of these things I got out our Little People farm, our farm animal beanie babies, farm themed books and puzzles, and even fun Melissa and Doug farm scene magnets. Should be a great week! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Week 11 in Review

The Eric Carle/Tower of Babel week was a success! The kids really enjoyed playing with the blocks, and there are so many fun things to do with the Eric Carle books. This post is picture heavy, so I will just get to it.

On Tuesday we read the Little Cloud. What more fun could we have than playing with clouds (shaving cream). We've done this before just on the bare table, but it is kind of a pain to clean up. Being older and wiser this time we contained it to cookie sheets. They still had a blast even with the boundaries in place. lol Here are Annabelle and Asa getting as messy as possible.

We also had a new activity in our workboxes this week. They had to put stickers around the outlines of the shapes on the paper. They both enjoy stickers, but there were too many shapes. Annabelle only had the gumption to complete two. I will definitely do this again, but will use a sheet with fewer shapes on it. This idea I got from the Confessions of a Homeschooler blog.

Asa had a good time matching the Big Es and the little es (he calls them the mommy Es and the baby es)

Annabelle is improving in her counting skills. I've been focusing on this a lot the past week and a half. In this picture she is playing on of the elephant counting games. She is giving the correct amount of peanuts to the elephants (the numbers are on the elephants). To top it all off she is making an incredibly goofy face. I wanted to start posting pictures of them looking at the camera and smiling, but this is as good as it gets folks. :)

The really funny thing about this goofy, smile face is that her daddy has several pictures of when he was a little guy smiling just like this. Teeth are a beautiful thing....wish she would show them off! :D The kiddos made spiders with their play-doh this week. We read The Busy Spider to go with this and the next activity. Annabelle's spider turned out really cute.....

Asa's spider.....well lets just say that this little guys gene pool must be pretty screwed up. That's a lot of legs!

This is the second activity that went with The Busy Spider book (which, by the way, is a really cute book if you haven't read it). Zak and I made this giant spider web out of yarn after the kids went to bed (didn't take long....maybe 20 min.), and they woke up to it this morning. Asa said, "Mommy....the living room is all tangled up!" What a funny little man that one is. Annabelle and Asa really enjoyed exploring in this and were pretending that a spider was chasing them. Silas hated it. He really doesn't have the mobility skills to move through it yet. lol

Running from the spider.

Getting something tangled up in the web.

Just a funny picture of Silas and me. This is his indecisive face. He can't decide whether he's happy or ready to freak out.

That is it for this week in review. We have a pretty fun theme lined up for next week. Make sure to stop back sometime tomorrow and get the sneak peek. Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Sneak Peek Week 11: Tower of Babel, Elephants, Eric Carle

I know. I know it's Tuesday. We didn't get a good start to the week due to my printer being out of ink and I had to wait until I could go get some to prepare the rest of the things that I needed to do this week. I have a real hard time skipping things and doing next week's lessons this week and this week's lessons next week. Call me crazy...or anal. :) We actually really enjoyed doing school on Saturday with daddy home last week, so that is what the plan is again this week. I will return to the normal blog schedule after this post.

Before I go to the regular program I just want to share some exciting news with you. After 7 lllloooonnnnngggg months of searching, praying, and trusting God, Zak has finally found a job closer to home! We are very thankful for God's faithfulness and are excited to finally get things back to normal around here! Ok, onto the sneak peek.

This week our Bible lessons are going to be focusing on the Tower of Babel. There probably aren't too many lessons that a preschooler can glean from this, but it brings so many different building activities to the table I couldn't resist it. The obvious lesson for adults is that God wants us to worship Him and trust Him. The only way to the Father is through Christ (or in the OT through sacrifice) not by anything that man can do or build. People at this time stopped relying on God and started relying on themselves. That is pretty intangible for a preschooler, but Annabelle might surprise me. Either way it is always good for knowledge of the Bible to be given. She will be familiar with the passage and we can build on that in future years.

So in this picture you can see some of our building items....which are at this moment being played with (and scattered all over the living room...what a mess! lol) I also bought some frosting along with some giant and big marshmallows. We should have a good time trying to build an edible tower. There are also some great printouts at Henny Penny to go along with this lesson.
Our reading this week is going to be focusing on books illustrated by Eric Carle. Sidenote: Did you know that these weren't written by him, just illustrated. The poor authors that really wrote these books are totally overlooked! End side note. I hadn't had a chance to run to the library at the time of these pictures so not all the books are in here. We are doing a different book everyday with a fun craft to go with it. These books are a lot of fun and the ideas are endless with them. Plus, kids love these books!

Lo and behold what took me until 2am to finish last night in order to be prepared for today.....the elephant activities. We have large floor numbers. I plan on using our big dice for this to find what number that Annabelle is supposed to find and stand on. It will also help with her counting that she is having so much difficulty with. Poor girl.

Here are the rest of the E/elephant activities. Clockwise starting on top left: Elephant size sorting, Counting (placing the correct amount of peanuts on the elephants), Big E, Little e matching, and Big E, Little e color match. All of these can be found here: http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/2010/04/prek-letter-e.html

and here:

http://lovemylifex4.blogspot.com/2009/08/alphabet-fun-letter-e.html

There is the sneak peek. I just realized that I do have another activity not pictured here, but we might not get to it this week anyway....we have a ton of stuff to do. I will make sure to post it next week. Have a great day. Happy blogging.

jess_hak

What We're Doing Wednesday

Here it is my first Wednesday post. I'm mostly going to just let it be pictures. We are a day behind due to two of my kids and I being sick on Monday. :/ Not a fun day. We are all back to our normal selves. Here is a glimpse of what we've been doing this morning.

Letter Cc cut and paste (trying to finish up a couple of Cc worksheets that I forgot I had...that's ok it's good for review).

The Envelope Game. This is the one that I thought that she would have a hard time with. She has had no problems at all with it. She thought it was kind of fun to match words. I wanted her to look at the camera and smile, but she said she was too busy with school to stop and look at me. lol
Marble Balancing. I got this idea off of another blog (Confessions of a Homeschooler). They really had a good time with it. Took up 15 minutes of the morning!

Lastly, here is the Big Lion, Little Lion game. They both really liked this. Annabelle wanted to do all the big lions and Asa wanted to only do all the little lions. I thought that was humorous. Especially when Annabelle pulled a little lion out of the bag.

I realized that I don't have any pictures of Silas. During this time he was finishing his morning nap. Then making a mess...eeerrr I mean playing with the kitchen food and his blocks. All in all it has been a good morning! Enjoy your Wednesday. Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Sneak Peek Week 10! Daniel and the Lions Den, Ee, #5

The first week of October is going to be kicked off with Daniel and the Lions Den. This is such a fun lesson to do with so many different craft opportunities. It also holds remarkable lessons in God's protection, why we don't need to be afraid, trusting in God, and also doing what is right/standing up for what you believe in in the midst of adversity. This game is pretty simple and self explanatory. Sort the big and little lions.

I am introducing the letter Ee this week. Annabelle has been doing really well with her phonics. I am somewhat reassured that I can teach her and she can learn from me. I feel much better about this than I have in previous weeks. Not only that I am ok with the fact that she is in preschool and most of what that means is just being a kid and playing. There is no need to pressure her into learning faster than she needs to, we don't have to meet anyone else's standards or deadlines....which takes a tremendous amount of pressure off of me. Learning is fun! That is a huge goal of mine while I'm homeschooling. I want this to be enjoyable for all of us.

Anyway, sorry for the ramble. Here are the games that are going to help introduce the letter Ee to Annabelle. This is the Envelope Game. It will possibly be harder for her than previous games so we'll see how it goes. She will have to match the picture (that I wrote the word on) with the envelope with the correct word on it (only the word no picture). I'm interested to see how she does.

The standard file folder game.

This game will help review numbers and the recognition of them. There are two sets of numbers so that Annabelle and Asa can play at the same time and I don't have to listen to them argue. lol This can be played a couple different ways, but I will just post the way that we plan on playing it. The object is to help the elf put the numbers in numerical order (the elf is to reinforce the letter Ee). They will either pull a number out of the bag or I will tell them which number to put in the bag....haven't quite figured that out yet.

This is just a simple square puzzle. This will be our last week with square recognition. Annabelle's ready to move on....Asa still calls it a triangle. lol

And finally I made some new play-doh. The colors aren't as vivid as I hoped they would be. I think that is mostly because I'm trying to mix primary food coloring to get the colors I want. Guess I'm going to have to go to a cooking store and get some real colors! It is supposed to be purple (which does look much better in person than on camera), lime green, and orange (I will say that those two colors turned out alright though). We don't really celebrate Halloween here (just a personal preference), but the colors are still fun to play with.

Well, that is it for now! Looking forward to my first Wednesday post. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday. Happy blogging.

jess_hak