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!

Tot School - Zz

Tot School - Zz is for Zebras!

Owen and Eli: 44 months old

 

This has been the craziest month ever! My big goal was to finish the alphabet before the baby was born, and I did, about 3 days early! In addition to that, a water pipe burst in our house, we got in a car accident on the way to the hospital, and my sister and her three kids came to visit the day after we came home from the hospital. That's right - 7 kids five and under for almost a week. Crazy!

Despite it all, we managed to finish the Letter Z with a few zebra activities added in. We used marbles rolled in black paint to make zebra striped Zs and our paper plate craft was a zebra face. The worksheets this week were mostly from education.com and moneysavingmom.com.

On our shelf for Zebras and Zoo animals:

This is who I get to spend my day snuggling up with!

Hope y'all had a great week in Tot School. I might be checking out for the summer to adjust to life with four kids!

Tot School - Xx

Tot School - X is for X-Ray and foX

Owen and Eli: 43 months old

Fox books on our shelf from the library this week...

Our handprint craft this week was really easy and turned out really cute! The snack this week was a bust - for some reason my white chocolate wouldn't melt, it just kind of turned into a messy clump. The had fun assembling the pretzel sticks and mini marshmellows though. The finished snack should look like this.

Our printables this week are all from education.com, A Heart for Home and MoneySavingMom.com. We only had three days this week for school because we took off for Sea World for our last weekend trip before the baby comes. We kept it a surprise until we pulled into the parking lot - the boys were SO excited!

 

 

 

Linking up to Tot School. Next week - Yy!

Tot School - Ww

Tot School - W is for Weather, Whales and Watermelon

Owen and Eli: 43 months old

There are loads of fun weather related science experiments on Pinterest! We had a pretty mixed bag for weather in Texas this week too, so it worked out well to talk about rain, clouds, wind, sun, tornadoes and fog. We watched some YouTube videos on tornadoes, and then made our own tornado in a jar using water, dish soap, vinegar, food coloring and glitter (for the debris). Pretty cool!

We found objects around the house and yard that they hypothesized whether or not they would be able to blow away using straws and their own wind (ie - their breath). All three of them loved this game and they raced their objects across the floor. It only got gross when they tried really hard to blow a heavy object and ended up spitting through the straw!

We 'painted clouds' using shaving cream on the table and practiced writing our Ws in the foam.

We made 'rain in a jar' using water, shaving cream and food coloring. Next time I'll make them choose just one color at a time - several colors at once gets really dirty looking and murky.

We made frost in a tin can too using shaved ice, water and salt. We ended up having to put it in the freezer to get the frost effect. I think this experiment would work better when the house is a little colder. We used our magnifying glasses to check out the frost crystals up close.

We talked a lot about seasons and the weather that usually comes with each season. I let them each choose a picture of a tree in a certain season to draw a picture of what you might do outside then (ie - building a snowman in the winter). I love the differences in my twins! The first picture is what Eli did with his winter tree. He turned it over and drew a 'watermelon machine' that shoots out watermelons. Owen's is the middle picture, where he meticulously colored each branch and the dirt brown and the grass green, then drew a man walking in the leaves. The third picture is Garrett's, who loves practicing pulling every cap off the markers and drawing one line with each color. He's only 20 months - I can't expect much!

Our whale activities were mostly printables, like the alphabet tracing pages from MoneySavingMom.com, the color by number from education.com (notice the difference again in their coloring personalities!) and the preschool reading pages from education.com.

Here's what we found at the library whale and weather related books...

And of course, you can't learn about W without eating a watermelon snack! We made paper plates into watermelons and tried another color by letter page too, with the same result again from Eli. What am I going to do with this kid!? ; )

Only three letters to go! Next week we're learning about X is for X-Ray and Fox. Stay tuned! Click here to see what other Tot School kids learned this week.