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 - 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!