Storm in the Night (part 1)

Our new book of the week is Storm in the Night by Mary Stolz. It is a story of a grandfather and grandson stuck in the house during a storm. The power has gone out and the grandfather decides to tell a story about how he was afraid of storms when he was younger. Here is how our week has gone so far.

Our first activity of the day consisted of rhyming words - what words/pictures rhymed with the word cat. She placed the pictures cards under the cat picture. We are also working on recognition of sounds and trying to put those sounds together to read. I found a learning mat where one would read the word, build the word with magnetic letters or tiles, and then write the word. The build a word mat can be found here.

J decided she wanted to make the word cat from the capital letters as well as the lowercase magnetic letters. You can see my table-top pocket chart with our rhyming word cards.

She then wrote the word cat. I laminated this mat so we will be able to use it over again. Since we had the magnetic letters out, I asked her to separate the letters into capital and lowercase on her magnetic white board.

This took some time and some of the letters we had to compare visually but she finished it. J calls the capital letters - mamas and the lowercase one - babies. So she asked if she could reunite the letter families when she was done.

She was ready to reunite them when she finished. For Social Studies, we are still learning about the symbols of America. This week's symbol was the bald eagle. We watched a video of a bald eagle hunting and we read some facts and a mini-book about why it was chosen for our national bird.

She colored a sheet and we discussed that the eagle was holding 13 arrows to represent the original 13 colonies as well as the 13 leaves on the olive branch (which represents peace). I found a quarter and we made several crayon rubbing of the eagle on the back and she brought out her magnifying glass to look at the eagle (and the man she said) closely.

We traced her handprints and footprint to make this eagle from colored paper.

The final product and she was wondering if she had a cheesey smile...

I found some clipart and we discussed the symbols that we have learned so far and added them to our chart. We wrote some facts about each symbol - the only one we haven't done is the Statue of Liberty (next week).

The game of the week just happens to be one that I found in a thrift store for a dollar. It was too cute to pass up. It is The Sleepy Princess and the Pea. Wow, I just found it on Amazon and it was $22! It involves some skill because you have to keep adding the parts of the bed without toppling them over. It comes with a little wooden "pea", four sets of bedding, and a wooden princess. There are two levels of play and we just played the simple one. After we played the game, J wisked it upstairs to play with the princess and the bed. Whenever I look at games, I always try to find ones that can be downsized into baggies and easy to bring. This one fits right inside a ziplock and is squishy, so it could fit anywhere in my suitcase. It was worth my dollar, I think.

We have many activities planned this week for our book, see you soon.