Little Miss Muffet (part 2)

We finished off the week with plenty of activities. J really enjoyed the Little Miss Muffet rhyme. We conducted an experiment about curds and whey. What exactly are curds and whey? We started with some milk and pour some vinegar into it.

We waited overnight and this is what we saw.

You can't really tell but the milk separated into two parts - the chunky parts are the curds which cottage cheese and cheese are made from and the runny part was the whey which yogurt products come from. I asked J is she would drink it and she shook her head no.

J worked on writing numbers to 20 in the spiders.

Then we played a spider web game to practice her sight words. Each section had a sight word written in it and when she landed on the word, she had to read it.

Lastly, J made finger puppets to act out the story. She wasn't impressed with the yucky spider but she liked Miss Muffet. We finished our week out and we are moving on to another great book and nursery rhyme. See you then.

Little Miss Muffet

We are deviating some from FIAR books this week due to Valentine's Day. We did some heart stuff and I knew we wouldn't have time to finish the book activities. I began teaching J a new nursery rhyme each week. I usually try to have an art project, maybe some Science, writing, etc... This week, our rhyme is Little Miss Muffet. This is what we have done so far.

Working with our wooden numbers, I called a number to J and she created the number with them. I am really trying to encourage number recognition up to 100. We will be working on this until the end of the school year.

She colored her rhyme sheet so we could hang it up on our wall and review weekly each nursery rhyme we have learned. I love watching her color, she has really taken off, trying to stay in the lines.

We read Little Miss Muffet and circled/counted all of the f's in the rhyme.

J made a spider like in the rhyme. She chose to make it colorful. Then she cut it out.

She is doing well cutting thing out. She cut everyone of the legs of the spider herself. I was impressed.

We then used the spider to act out the rhyme. We found a tuffet (pillow), curds and whey, and the spider sat beside her.

She has several words this week. Here she is decorating the word he for our wall. I gave her stickers this time and she seemed to enjoy that.

J is still practicing her other words as well. She working with the word- the. Her work isn't just with sight words. We are also learning to read. She is learning to put letter sounds together to make words. We work our reading lessons together so there is no time to take pictures. I am not just focusing on sight words. We are working on all aspects of learning how to read. I am not pushing her though. I am following her lead. If she is having trouble, I back off and we review the previous lessons until she can get it. I want her to enjoy the process of reading and not have it become a chore. Hope your week isn't full of spiders - haha.

A Pair of Red Clogs

We are still working with our base book, A Pair of Red Clogs. We watched several videos on Youtube about Japan. In the book, there is a picture of the family having dinner on the floor using pillows and a short legged table. J had to have dinner on the floor so we did. We don't have a short legged table but we did eat on the floor in the living room.

Everyone felt like making a funny face. J also worked with her sight words. I pulled out the Scrabble Jr. tiles and found these sight word cards for her to practice.

J made a Japanese fish kite. We just had to add pink ribbons onto the bottom. We used all of the pink ribbon that we had.

We worked on our other sight word - and. She decorated the word for our hallway and then we played a graphing game. I put the sight words she knows into the dice I made. She rolled the die and graphed the words that she rolled.

We had fun learning about Japan and our next story also takes place in Japan. We finished out our week and are ready to move to the next book. Have fun!

Monday's Discovery

This Monday, my Kaleb discovered play dough. He discovered that it isn't good to eat, that it is good for poking, and smashing. This is the first time I gave him play dough and now I know why. If you don't keep a good eye on him, into the mouth it goes. I was helping J with her painting and in a sec, he was chewing it, then spitting it out. Yuck!

 Always the finger, testing things out...

Funny, I didn't get a pic of him eating it, I was too busy scraping it off his tongue - eww. We will revisit this again some day. I love to see something new in his eyes.

A Pair of Red Clogs

We started a new book this week, A Pair of Red Clogs by Masako Matsuno. It is about a little girl who gets a brand new pair of red clogs but she plays the weather game and cracks them. The little girl then tries to hide it from her mother. She feels awful and learns the value of honesty. This book takes place in Japan so we will be learning a little about Japan. J began by coloring some Japanese dolls to cut out.

J took her time coloring the dolls and cutting them out.  I haven't done sensory bins in awhile since we have the colored rice, salt, and bean bins that J plays with. So, I decided to put together a sensory bin for the month of February. I gathered some heart shaped beads, pipe cleaners, pom poms, heart shaped stickers, silk flowers, and pipe cleaners. I put it all together and gave J some containers to play with. She played with this bin for a good hour. 

I would like to give this to Kaleb to play with but it has too many small pieces. I will be making him a large noodle bin soon for him to pour and scoop. He seems to want to be in the middle of what we are doing so I need to come up with some ideas to keep him occupied while we are working. More on that later...On to our school week.

In Kindergarten, J is supposed to be able to identify all of the numbers through 100. So we are focusing on numbers and number order. This week we are working on the number 1 through 10. I made two sets of cards and we have matched them while saying the numbers and J has worked on what number comes before and after. She definitely knows her numbers to 20 but I want her to be able to recognize through 100.

One of our sight words this week is the. J is decorating the word the with wings, eyes, and feet. We hang these pictures in the hallway in order to review her sight words.

We played a sight word matching game. I will be adding more words as we learn them.

And we used our letter beads to make the words we know. I forgot that these beads did not come with all of the letters so we had to make do with some. For this activity again I will use other letter beads that I have. We are still learning about Japan and reading our book, The Red Clogs. Have a good day.

A Year of Finished Projects

I have officially declared this year - the year of finished projects. I have a a basket full of unfinished projects - quilts, crafts, etc... - that I will finish this year. It started with finishing the nativity at Christmas. Yeah, it was technically last year but I feel the need to finish all of the projects that I have been working on. So, I am sharing some finished projects so far. The silly thing is that these weren't projects in my project bin. I saw them and just had to try them out. So, I actually added to the project bin but I also finished them, so I am back where I started, right? Here are my finished projects so far....

I saw this quilt pattern here and I knew that I could make it without the pattern. It was easy enough and I used scraps of fabric that I already had so the project didn't cost me a thing. It doesn't look exactly like the original but it turned out okay. It is a smaller version and is now hanging in my hallway.

This was something I saw on another blog and it looked easy enough to finish in a day. I made the pattern 50% smaller than the original. It was a lot harder than expected but I perservered and finished it. I can't say that I will be doing this type of piecing again. I used my scraps, actually I used the scraps from the Hungry Caterpillar quilt that my mom made for J. I knew I wanted it to be bright but for some reason, most of my scraps are pink. (I know why, I made J a duvet cover and it seems all I have is pink.) This is small and it turned out cute. But it was a pain to make. Two finished projects down and ? to go. I also had time to start the binding on my table runner and stuff some animal toys for Kaleb. I had a busy day today. I hope I can keep it going....and finish all of my projects without adding too many more.

Monday's Discovery

This week's discovery is a quiet moment on the couch. I was cleaning the kitchen after lunch one day and I came into the living room to this....

Why is this so special? Well, usually when they get on the couch, they are jumping on each other or J is trying to watch a movie and Kaleb is pulling her hair for attention. Today, they were just sitting, no fighting, no hair pulling, just sitting. One reading, the other playing with toys. It was great, it was special. It reminded me that not all of their days will be fighting, just some of them.