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? ; )

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.