FIAR - Make Way for Ducklings

Five in a Row - Make Way for Ducklings

April 8-12, 2013

O and E: 4.5 years old

Well, if last week was a challenge because of trying to fit everything in while the boys still went to preschool, this week was even worse because all six of us got a stomach virus! We did what we could (which still turned out to be a lot!) and the boys learned tons about ducks. It's so funny to hear them use words like 'preen' and 'molt' correctly! Here was our week:

Other books we used this week:

SOCIAL STUDIES:

We located MA on the map and added our story disc. We also talked about maps and they drew a map of our neighborhood with hubby (he's WAY better at stuff like that!) and we wrote a thank you note to my parents for the Easter package they sent us. We talked about gratitude like the ducks showed to the policemen in the story.

SCIENCE:

We did the Ducks Don't Get Wet experiment from the back of that book. I cut two ducks out of a paper bag and they painted one duck with vegetable oil and the other we left alone. We dripped water on the non-oiled duck first, then the oiled to see the difference. They thought it was so cool! We also made a graphic organizer for Ducks (Can, Have, Like), labeled the parts of a duck and went to a duck pond near our house to record the sights, sounds, smells and feel of things around the pond.

 (See: Ducks, Turtles; Hear: Water (there's a fountain there), dogs, tweets; Smell: bread; Feel: wind, sun)

LANGUAGE ARTS:

Our spelling words this week were from the -UCK and -ACK families. There were a lot! I'm really liking this method because it gives the boys practice with rhyming and also uses a lot of repetition to reinforce the spelling pattern. Duck, cluck, yuck, buck, luck, stuck, pluck, cluck, truck, quack, back, jack, sack, track, shack, smack, cracker, black, rack... for lots of these I'll give them a clue and they have to guess the word, then spell it too. The copy work was a sentence from the story (from Homeschool Share), we played Rhyming Concentration (though it turned into just matching the rhyming words while they were already face up!) and this week was their first introduction to ABC order. They did great with it! First I wrote the names of the eight ducklings on paper, then they lined up our alphabet magnets and put each duck name under the right letter. That seemed a little too easy for them so I gave them the cards from Concentration and they put those in ABC order too! We made Duck Color Words books and played I Have, Who Has with short U words (like duck). The final thing we did this week was to write five duck facts that they learned.

MATH:

We had leftover peanuts from the Rangers game this weekend so they were put to good use feeding the ducks we found from all over the house. We grouped first (How many peanuts can each duck have if we have 8 ducks and 24 peanuts?) and we learned how to count by twos (counting the pile of peanuts and counting the feet of the ducks). We practiced counting by twos every time we read Make Way for Ducklings when the ducks were all lined up and we could see all their feet. We also played a game using positional words (top/bottom, high/low, over/under, in/out, above/below, between/beside) using a duck as the prop. One person would hide the duck and then have to give positional word clues to the other people finding the duck (it's above your shoulders, it's under something yellow, etc)

ART:

We made Red Light Green Light signals and played the game all sorts of ways (waddling, running, hopping, walking, backwards), colored a color-by-number duck page and made paper plate ducks. I'm a little obsessed with paper plate crafts ; )

You can't row this book without a field trip to a duck pond! Meet Mr. and Mrs. Mallard!

We're rowing How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World next week (maybe the next TWO weeks - there's so much I want to do!!) As always, if you want the source of any of these materials, just leave me a comment! Here's a link to my Pinterest board that has most of these links.