FIAR - Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

Five in a Row - Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

April 29 - May 3, 2013

O and E: 4.5 years old

** Because this blog is just my personal way of keeping track of our activities so I can do them again with younger siblings I am not going to link to everything that I used. If you'd like the link to anything specific, just let me know!**

That said, here's a link to my Pinterest board for lots of my inspirations for the week

Preschool is coming to an end and it feels like the weeks are just flying by. It's hard to fit in everything that I have planned with the boys, but we're making it work as best we can. Once we don't have weekly commitments over the summer I think our rows will go a little smoother - but maybe that's just a pipe dream!

LANGUAGE ARTS:

This was our first week for the boys to retell the story in their own words. It was so funny how they would remember certain sentences word for word, then skip whole chunks of the story and move onto another part. I typed up their stories and then they drew a part of the story on the page. Our spelling words this week were the -IKE family (Mike, bike, pike, spike, like, strike) and their journal prompt was to write one thing they would like to do 'better and faster' like Mike and Mary Ann. Owen's was 'I would like to run better and faster than Blake' (his cousin) and Eli's was 'I would like to swim better and faster than bull sharks' (his obsession!). We concentrated on Long I vs. Short I sounds, made a little book where they had to read the sentence and fill the dump truck with that many rocks, and made a little book about squares.

MATH:

I found some great construction themed pages on Teachers Pay Teachers for this week! We used a construction cone page to practice patterning and used a page with directions and trucks to practice ordinal positioning. I also cut up several pieces of construction paper and the boys had to put them together like a puzzle to make squares. We went through magazines to find pictures of square items and made a collage. We played a dice game (not pictured) where you would roll the dice and use that number of blocks to build a skyscraper. The person with the tallest building wins!

SCIENCE:

I saw an idea about steam power that we tried and was a total bust. We made pinwheels out of paper and then let a tea kettle get to a boil so it would shoot steam out of the spout. It's supposed to turn the pinwheel, but we couldn't get them to spin! We used 'wind power' instead and just blew them : ) We did watch 'The Way Things Work' about Steam Power though, so hopefully that helped explain it better than a failed science experiment!

FUN!

While looking for my ideas for the week I came across a picture of this cake and knew we had to make one. I used my chocolate zucchini cake recipe (on my Pinterest board), chocolate frosting and mini chocolate chips - delicious!! We also made bulldozers and drew the picture around the machine and watched the Bob the Builder movie when he meets the real life machines.

What boy doesn't love big machines?! They loved this row! I wonder how Madeline will go next week? ; )