African Savannah: Zebras and Rhinos

Another week down! One more week left in the Savannah and then we'll be moving on to Swamplands. That should be....exciting. :) We are almost done with two of our chapter books (Born Free and Henry Huggins). Annabelle's listening skills have definitely improved. I did a couple of posts to show some activities that we did to go along with the books. If you are interested in seeing those you can find them here and here. :)

I also wanted to say that these posts are not all inclusive of what we do during the week. There is also LA, Bible, and soon to be added....math. I just liked the thought of doing separate posts for these so that they don't get too long. Plus, it is easier for me to categorize and go back and look for something later if I keep them separate.

We talked about two different animals in length this week. The first being the zebra. We learned a lot about them. Annabelle surprised me when she remembered what part of the grass zebras eat (the tops). We only covered that briefly a couple weeks ago. I guess picking up weird, useless facts starts at an early age. :)

Her favorite thing about every week is making her animal craft. I was only planning on keeping them until we started the next habitat unit, but I don't think she will let me get rid of them. lol They have become her favorite toys to play with these last few weeks.
Loving that it is dry and she gets to now introduce it to the other 'animals'.
We worked hard on her notebook pages again. I love her drawing of the zebra. I tried to explain to her that zebra stripes run vertical (except for their butts and legs)....but she insisted they be horizontal. As usual the elements for this were found at Homeschool Share. I like in this particular unit they included younger children elements like other black and white animals and words that start with Zz.
She also colored the fictional story of How Zebras Got Their Stripes. She 'scribble' colored on a good portion of this story and was upset to find out that it was going in her book like this. She has come to terms with it now, but it was a really good lesson in always doing our best. It is important to learn to be proud of your work because you never know who will be seeing it. With that said I gave her the option to redo it. She opted to just tell people it wasn't her best work. lol She really doesn't like coloring all that much. :)
She was excited when she found out we would be making 2 animals this week. She enjoyed mixing our black and white paint to make a nice gray rhino.
Her rhino is a white rhino because it is nice and likes people.
We talked about two different kinds of rhinos this week: the white rhino and the black rhino. Her notebook deals with a lot of those differences. She seems to remember them pretty good. However, sometimes she calls the white rhino a gray rhino. It only makes sense right....I mean they are gray....but so are the black rhinos...right. This was a conversation that went on for a couple days. :)
She also thought it was funny that female rhinos are called cows. She said, "But it's a rhino, not a cow."
The letter in the curriculum this week was Jj. She worked really hard on putting jewels on the Jjs.
By far her prettiest craft ever (so she thinks).
She also made a jellyfish, which as she pointed out went very good with her brothers ocean theme.
She didn't want it to sting her. :)
Snapped this picture one morning of her and her posse of boys. She is showing them her notebook and teaching them about the animals. So glad we're keeping a notebook. It is such a fantastic review/learning tool.
Hope everyone else had a great week! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Linking up to Homeschool Creations.

Garage Sale Treasures: Week 13

I attempted to find a newspaper yesterday evening to use it to look for sales (I usually just use Craigs List), but there was no paper to be found at the 4 places I went looking for one. Must be they don't believe in putting papers out on Thursday. lol I was kind of bummed but still did my usual routine and was able to find some good things.

Train floor puzzle - $2.00
I think that this is my favorite of the day. Annabelle loves this game (we don't even own it!) so when I spotted this rug game board for $1.00 I bought it. It may be a Christmas present....we will have to find/buy the game to go with it though. lol
I know, I know I bought party supplies a couple weeks ago but Annabelle recently informed me that she would really like a Hello Kitty party. I was going to ignore her request knowing she'd be just as happy with what I found, but then I saw all of these brightly colored Hello Kitty party items for a total of $4.00.
Finally found some clothes. Most of these are 5T for next summer and this winter. $20
Annabelle has been looking at these all afternoon. I'm so glad that she informed me last week that she was in need of 'just for girls' books otherwise I might have passed these up. :) $1.50 for all of them.
These books were all .25 and the alphabet puzzle was .50. None of the books were really on my list, but most will fit nicely with a theme. I was excited about the Dinosaurumpus book and Curious George Goes to the Hospital. $4.75
Misc. school items. Contact paper $1, money flashcards .50 (they're very cool flashcards), finally found some perler beads (a whole bucket full!) $1, fingerpaint paper .50, chameleon .25 (for our rainforest unit), bucket full of really cool wooden bears $1.00. The lady said they were for lining up and pushing over (like dominoes), but they are so cool and there are so many different uses for them. They will be showing up soon in Tot School.
AND because I buy so much stuff every week at garage sales I thought some additional storage was necessary. 5 shelf black thing $4, and the magazine sorters $1 for all. I want to use them for book organization (I need about 30-50 more of these lol).
GRAND TOTAL: $40.00

Can I just rant for a moment? Good. I really dislike when there is a block sale advertised and there is only 2 houses on the street having sales. I think that in order to say you are having a block sale there needs to be 7-10 houses having a sale. I've driven too much to 'block sales' lately only to be sorely disappointed. AND if you all are living on the same block and are selling at one house I would say that is a multiple family yard sale....still not a block sale, sorry.

End rant. :) I'm linking up to My Life on a Taffy Pull. I really enjoy seeing what everyone finds garage saling so if you found something please share! Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Henry Huggins

We are finishing up Henry Huggins today. It was a scheduled book for our adventure reading. I must say that compared to Born Free we really enjoyed this book. Annabelle was just really able to get into the story a bit more. We did a few fun things to enhance the story and though that I would share them with you. I also wanted to share the discussion questions that I threw together to ask at the end of each chapter.

Chapter #1 - Henry and Ribs
Why couldn't Ribsy come on the bus?
Why is it important to follow the rules?

Chapter #2 - Gallons of Guppies
Why couldn't the fish be in one bowl?
Why was it hard for Henry to give away his fish?
We also picked a stuffed animal for her to give away. Then we cleaned out her fish tank.....
...poured in rocks.....
....and bought two guppies (Tommy and Chucky), who sadly did not make it longer than 2 weeks. (In the picture they are on the left side of the tank by the plant.)
Chapter #3 - Henry and the Night Crawlers
Why was Henry responsible to replace the football?
Was it good of the man to return the football?

There were a lot of fun things that could've been done with this chapter. We just didn't have the time to do it....and I don't think Annabelle would've appreciated it much. (Think fun with worms)

Chapter #4 - The Green Christmas
Why didn't Henry want to be the little boy in the play?
Did Henry have a good or a bad attitude?
Was it nice for the other kids to be teasing Henry?

In this chapter Henry gets green paint dropped on his head. We mixed blue and yellow paint to make green (kind of green...there is too much blue in it) and painted a little boy green. Then she used her finger to make green paw prints.

Chapter #5 - The Pale Pink Dog
Why did Henry want to use the bath tub indoors instead of the washtub outdoors.

This activity is super easy....we painted a pink dog. :)

Chapter #6 - Finders Keepers
What do you think will happen to Ribsy?
What boy should get to keep him?


It was pretty easy to come up with these activities for Annabelle to do (plus more that we didn't even have time to do). I think that she really enjoyed them. During the extra activities we were able to reopen our discussion of the book. It is amazing some of the conversations that came out of a simple scheduled adventure reading. Everything from the importance of pet care, to being responsible with other peoples things, to why we can't paint our brothers green. :) Really looking forward to what comes out of our next book. Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Born Free....the end is near!!

I must say that I am feeling relieved that we are nearing the end of Born Free. It is not a bad book by any means. I was just a little bland/dry with vocabulary way over Annabelle's head. I have found myself wondering why I just didn't put it on the shelf and return to it on another time through the program. I came up with a few answers:
1) It was our very first chapter book EVER, quitting at the first try seemed to me to be a downer.
2) I didn't want Annabelle to think that every book she has a hard time getting through she could just skip (or pretend she has a hard time getting through).
3) I noticed after the first week of reading it her listening and comprehension skills were getting much better. If this was a benefit of this book I did not want to hinder that.
4) I noticed that it challenged me to think of ways to keep her engaged. I love a good challenge that involves thinking skills on my part.....keeps me sharp (kind of). :)

This was the first engaging activity I thought of due to number 4. I wrote a post about it in detail. Feel free to check it out if you're curious. This kept her busy for a number of readings...
...so did coloring for her animal notebook. Believe it or not she is really listening here!
Sometimes what got us through the reading was taking a little break and acting out some of what we just read. She's pretending to be a lion. This is how they drag things around.
Other times it was the promise of a fun activity. During one of our readings it talked about the beach, the reef, and all the colorful fish that the author saw while snorkeling. After this reading we went and looked at saltwater fish at Petco.
Another time there was a picture of a tribe woman with beautiful beaded adornments on her. For that reading Annabelle beaded her own necklace.

It also talked about the author water painting some. For that sitting she water painted this beautiful rainbow with fireworks.

These were just activities that I came up with as I pre-read the book. My plan was to do them afterward not during, but they proved to be most useful during. I would stop and recap what was happening every once and a while to make sure that Annabelle was still listening. :)

Overall, I am very glad that we persevered through this book. It has been quite the experience and we have both learned quite a bit from it. However, I'm quite ok with the fact that I will not have to reread it again until Asa is in Kindergarten. :) Happy blogging!

jess_hak

Learning to Work Independantly

I worked on new ways to help Annabelle cope with working independently today during our morning school time. This is the time when she works on language arts. I think that with time this will eventually go much more smoothly. At least today her attitude was MUCH better.

We have books that she will work out of most days. I wanted her to be able to know where to stop without me having to check on her. (Even though she comes to show me her book after every little step she does...we will work on that next).
Here is my solution for her. I printed off a clip art stop sign, laminated it, and then put it on the page that she is to stop on. She works each page until she sees the sign. She really thought that this was great.
This is our first day working in the Explode the Code book so I needed to help her with the directions. Other than that she worked very well by herself. I took this picture while I was helping Asa. Most of the time I would have to be solely paying attention to her in order for her to feel confident about doing work like this. A step in the right direction!
Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Linking up to Homeschool Creations. :)

Tot School: Trying to get it together!

My goodness! It was more difficult than I thought it would be to do 2 different curriculums at the same time with three kids! I'm hoping that this was just because it was our first week. At least the kids didn't feel any of the pressure that I felt. They had a great time. Asa just kept asking, "What's next momma?".....over and over and over. The trays that I refer to in this post can be seen in more detail here. :)

This pic proves that I need new tot trays, so I can officially designate the ones I have for craft trays (as they have already been used as such). I like this little book and Asa enjoyed using his ten black dots (pom poms) to count along with throughout the book.
Working on the number 2 page.
Working on his Number 2 book. I found these at Hart 2 Hart. She has a really fun blog full of really fun ideas!
We worked on number recognition with numbers 1-4. We didn't need to do this because he apparently already knows these numbers (and the numbers 5-12.....I had no idea). Either way he enjoyed this little egg carton game and played with it quite a few times this week. I had a couple different versions, both are from Hubbard's Cupboard.

Version 1
Version 2
Shaking the bead around.
He really enjoyed cutting his ocean animals.
After he was done cutting them he asked to glue them on some paper. I obliged. :)
Counting shells. He did so good at this. I was very impressed.
Writing numbers in the 'ocean bag' (a gallon zip lock bag filled with blue and white paint).
I worked with Silas this week on identifying the colors red and blue. This is a little activity bin that I put together using those colors.
He enjoyed it, however I'm not sure that he's any closer to indentifying these colors. :)

He worked on the same number books that Asa did. This pic is a little blurry, but his little face is so sweet. He's working so hard to put glue on his little piece of paper.

Shell sorting. Don't mind the huge bug bites on his face. He really just liked these big shells and wanted nothing to do with the little skinny ones (like Asa's counters above). He would pick out all the big ones and leave the others in the basket. I suppose it is more efficient to sort this way. lol
He LOVES to color. This coloring tray was the first he went to.
I just really like how he takes a relaxing approach to his schooling.
He thought it was really fun to make footprints in the the 'ocean bag'. I thought it was funny how he used his hand to pick up his foot and stick it on the bag.
Matching sea creatures in his pocket sorting chart. This was another favorite this week.
He also dot markered (yeah, that's a word) a jellyfish.
I think that his all time favorite of the week was the fishing game. He played this for the entire mommy time portion of his tot school (40min.) two days this week, and then played it at least 10min. the other 3 days. I think with this game he really started to understand the concept of red, blue, and sorting a little better.

Continuing the ocean theme next week and will also post more about our Bible lessons next week. Happy blogging.

jess_hak

Linking up to 1+1+1=1