FIAR - How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World

Five in a Row - How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World

April 15-26, 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

I ended up sticking with this book for two weeks because there are SO MANY great apple activities for PreK and Kindergarten out there. I'm using FIAR as a jumping off theme for the week but going much deeper than the manual does in reading, writing, spelling and math. Here's what we did!

LANGUAGE ARTS:

Apples in the Basket books (from TpT) were great for reading numbers and colors as well as following directions ("I see six green apples" and they had to draw six green apples in the basket). Then they assembled them in numerical order and we turned it into a book. They love little books! Their spelling words for this week were from the -AKE family (make, bake, cake, shake, Blake...) and from the -AP family (apple, cap, happy, Pappy, trap...). They played I Have, Who Has (from TpT) with an apple theme. We also made an Apple Poem book (Pinterest) and stamped the star from the inside of the apple.

SCIENCE:
Our big science activities this week were diagramming the life cycle of an apple tree (see to tree to blossom to apple to seed), writing words that describe apples using our senses (red, cold, crunchy, yummy, hard, sweet, etc), labeling the parts of an apple and making our first Venn diagram (which they did GREAT with!). We compared apples and bananas.

MATH:

I made an apple pattern page for them by printing a page of apple outlines and coloring in the first four apples in a pattern, then they finished the page. We also made pie graphs this week! Since they are twins and I wanted them to each have their own data to collect we used Favorite Pies and Favorite Pizza (Pie) Toppings. We called 20 friends and family members and they had to ask them what their favorite was, then circle it on our data sheet. I drew the pie graph segments and we counted the totals and colored in the appropriate number of segments to represent the results. Then we made apple pie and pizza for dinner!

SOCIAL STUDIES:

I made a separate story disc for each ingredient in the story rather than just moving one story disc around on the map. They also colored the flags for Italy, France, Sri Lanka, Jamaica and England from Crayola.com.

No week is complete without a little art project. Green paint on a paper plate and some apple stickers. I love how they drew all their brothers holding apples too : )

Next week is Mike Mulligan. Perfect for these vehicle loving boys!

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.

FIAR - The Tale of Peter Rabbit

Five in a Row - The Tale of Peter Rabbit

April 1-5, 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

This was our first row and it went great! The boys are still in preschool two days a week so it was a bit of a challenge to fit in everything that I wanted to do, but we managed to do just about everything and have a fun time doing it! I found so many great ideas on Pinterest and other blogs of families who row that the possibilities were almost endless. Here's what we came up with...

SOCIAL STUDIES:

Locating England on the world map, coloring Union Jack flags and talking about rules and why we have them. Just like Peter's mom told him to stay out of Mr. McGregor's garden so he wouldn't be put in a pie like his father, we have rules to protect us and keep everything/everyone functioning like it should.

SCIENCE:

I can't believe all the science we built into this week! We started with the celery experiment and the boys wrote their conclusions in their journals. We did a graphic organizer for rabbits and plants, labeled the parts of a plant, read A Green, Green Garden by Mercer Meyer, planted our own basil and cilantro plants ($1 Spot at Target!) and wrote the steps to planting seeds.

LANGUAGE ARTS:

The copy work came from the first sentence in the book from the Peter Rabbit lapbook on HSS. We used -UN as the word family this week for spelling words (run, fun, bun, spun, sun, funny, bunny, runny, sunny, stun, etc) and worked together to come up with a list of vegetables that Peter could have eaten in the garden. Then they chose five of them to write and draw on their paper. After reading this story five times I started to notice how many adjectives were in the story (brass buttons, white cat, old Mrs. Rabbit, brown bread, young cabbages, etc) so I wrote up a quick list of the adjectives and nouns to match as they listened to the story. [There were a few worksheets that I had to create on my own from ideas I saw online, but this is one of the only activities that I made up this week.]

MATH:

Carrot patterning (I colored the first four carrots and they had to finish the pattern (AABB, ABAB, ABCABC, ABBA)), planning a new garden for Mr. McGregor using Unifex cubes and some parameters on spacing and addition using carrots. We played with these a couple different ways: matching up the tops and bottoms while looking at all the pieces together, giving each boy six green tops and putting out one carrot at a time. They had to figure out the answer and see if they had it in their hand. Then we played the reverse - they had the equations and I would put out an answer and they had to see which equation matched the answer. They got pretty fast by the end! 

BIBLE:

We talked about the Fruit of the Spirit and the Parable of the Seeds this week - how it's important to have strong roots of faith in Jesus so you aren't blown over by the things of this world.

ART/COOKING:

I printed off some Peter Rabbit coloring pages and let the boys find that image in the story to watercolor. They really did a great job matching the colors! We also made carrot muffins this week which have already disappeared - just substitute carrots for zucchini in your favorite recipe. Just as good if not better!

If you have any questions on where I found any of these resources just leave me a comment! We are rowing Make Way for Ducklings next week - should be fun!