Theme: Pete the Cat

Pete the Cat

O and E: 4.75 years old

June 10-14, 2013

In our book basket this week:

LANGUAGE ARTS:

We did a lot of writing this week, which I have realized is Owen's least favorite thing to do. I've had to get really creative about how I present the activity. We played Rainbow Roll while writing words from Pete the Cat (Pete, cat, song, love, good, along, what, all, white, etc). Basically anything that turns writing into a game is a winner. We made a sequence strip of Pete's trip down the street and drew pictures for each of the activity. The paper I found on Pinterest didn't seem to have enough boxes though, so we had to consolidate some of the pages. They both picked a color and wrote a story about how Pete's shoes changed colors and then cut and taped together their own Pete's. I love these! They each wrote two pages to go in our own Pete book - Owen's pages turned Pete's shoes Green (from grass) and Pink, Blue, Purple and Green (from gummi bears). Eli's turned wet (from ocean water) and brown and white (from oreos). We practiced writing color sight words and reading number sight words (the color by number page), and telling the difference between real and nonsense words. So much to do!

MATH:

After reading Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons we did a sorting activity based on shape, color and size of our buttons. The boys made up their own color patterns for Pete's shoes too by following the instructions for the type of pattern (AB, ABC, etc)

SCIENCE:
With all this talk about colors, we had a playdough color mixing afternoon. They loved watching the colors turn into a new color. We've done this before with water, but this seemed a little more magical to them. After that I drew venn diagram type circles on their page and they colored the combinations that they had mixed.

I can see why so many people love Pete the Cat! Next week we're starting a two week theme on Dinosaurs!

FIAR - Owl Moon

Five in a Row - Owl Moon

June 3 - 7, 2013

O and E: 4.5 years old

This was hands down one of my favorite weeks yet! Between Pinterest, the manual, blogs and Teachers Pay Teachers, there are TONS of owl activities to keep learning fun and interesting. We couldn't even get to everything that I wanted to do, but it was a full week!

In addition to Owl Moon, these were in our book basket this week:

LANGUAGE ARTS:

We did a lot this week with similes. These first few pages are from The Peanut Gallery and were adorable. I made up the I AM page and was so proud of their hard work writing and creating and reading. Their answers totally captured their personalities and interests. We made an OW Sentence book and an Owl Bag book. For that, we made a list of five owl facts and I wrote them on paper. The boys chose which four they wanted to write and then drew a picture to go with each sentence. They decorated the front to look like an Owl and were so proud of their finished products! We took a first look at nouns this week. They categorized them into Who, What, Where and When based on an activity I found online, but I think next time I would cut out the When category since it's not really a noun. I wrote the words on little Owls and they had to read them and put them in the right category. Not bad for their first time. We also did a "I'm wise as an Owl page."

MATH:

I made a quick Owl Patterning page and started the first four patterns for them to finish. Since they are getting so good at this I left the last line blank for them to create their own pattern. Great job boys! We started a Roll and Color Owl page but didn't get around to finishing the game so I didn't take a picture : )

SCIENCE:

We made a graphic organizer for Owls using the Are, Have, Can approach. They came up with a lot more answers than they had room to write ; ) We talked about nocturnal animals, who is nocturnal and what features they have that make them suited for nighttime activity.

ART:
I found so many adorable owl art activities and didn't end up doing any of them! In the end, it was more important to work in spelling, writing and reading than painting, so I had to let go of all my grand plans for handprints and paper plates ; ) We did make owl masks and had a super cute owl lunch though.

We're taking a FIAR break next week to do Pete the Cat - the boys are so excited!

FIAR - Harold and the Purple Crayon

Five in a Row - Harold and His Purple Crayon

May 27 - 31, 2013

O and E: 4.5 years old

We took a little break from FIAR while the boys finished up their school year in PreK 4, but now that they're home all week we're back in full swing! Harold was a great book to start back with because there is such an element of creativity and imagination. Here was our week:

LANGUAGE ARTS:
The boys completed the How and Why word pages in their Sight Words workbooks. Their spelling words this week were based on the word Crayon (play, bay, day, gray, pray, stay, sway, today, okay...) and Boy (Boy, joy, toy, ahoy). We practiced writing them in purple shaving cream on the table, which they loved! I wrote a (fairly long!) sentence on the wipe board that they had to read and then copy into their writing notebooks - The ship in the bay will sway today and the boy will say Ahoy!

SCIENCE:
I found a Shades of Purple page on Pinterest that we tried but all of our colors ended up like a black/brown/blood color. Weird! Maybe our food coloring is just too dark?! We also did a color experiment using colored water and paper towels. The blue and red water travelled up the paper towels and when it mixed together in the middle glass it turned purple. The middle glass started empty, so it was really cool to watch it fill up and change colors. They wrote 'Will red and blue make purple?' in the writing notebooks when we started the experiment and then went back to write Yes!

ART

We made a Shades of Purple quilt using all the purple crayons and markers we could find. Then we ordered them from lightest to darkest, which the boys then wanted to do with the whole rainbow of colors! I unrolled a large piece of paper and they drew the story in order. I couldn't believe how well they remembered every detail! We read Harold's Circus this week too, which they also wanted to draw. Little kid artwork might be my favorite thing of all time. If you haven't read that book, we thought it was just as great as Harold and the Purple Crayon. I found Crayola books in the Dollar Spot at Target called Squiggles and Giggles. It was perfect for this week! They turned lines and I turned splotches into other pictures - for $1, it was a great find!! What week on purple would be complete without making a Purple Berry Pie? Delicious!

We put the Harold story disc on Dallas because of the city that he drew and because that's the closest city to us. Why not!

Owl Moon is next week. I can't wait - there are so many possibilities for learning with an owl theme!

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!