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 - 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 - 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!

Tot School - Cc

Tot School - Cc is for Caterpillars, Cows and Camping

Owen & Eli: 37 months

Cows & Caterpillars

The alphabet tracing pages from Money Saving Mom for the letter C tied in great to the caterpillar portion of our week. We also made pompom caterpillars and The Very Hungry Caterpillar using handprints. By the end of the week, the boys were talking about cocoons and caterpillars turning into butterflies just like they learned about in the books. Our paper plate craft this week was making cows - so cute!

Camping, Clouds and Colors

We made C and c using cotton balls to make them look like clouds and made a rainbow out of all the boys' cars. We had a great time pretend camping this week and doing all the camping activities from Homeschool Creations and 2 Teaching Mommies. They have great stuff! We used the felt counting fish (originally from Counting Coconuts) to go pretend fishing at our campsite and practiced counting and number recognition too.

Dd for Dinosaurs, Dogs and Dr. Seuss next week! Linking up to Tot School at 1+1+1=1.