Sonlight Week 3

Week 3 of Sonlight and we are still moving. We finished The Boxcar Children last week and moved to My Father's Dragon for our read-aloud. We totally finished that in a heartbeat. J loved the story and I am in the process of trying to get the next two books in the series so we can see what happens. Here is what we did this week...

In Bible, we learned about the importance of obeying God. We read about Adam and Eve and discussed ways we obey God.

Our letter of the week, which we call the mystery letter, was M. J practiced writing her M's and she created an letter page.

J is working her Wordly Wise book 1. We do about 2 pages a day.

In Reading, we practiced our word families. She would flip the cards over and read the words on them.

For My Father's Dragon, she created a backpack with pictures of all of the items Elmer took with him on the adventure. She was so enamored by this story, she found items around the house and packed her backpack as well.

We worked in some math for our read-aloud. In the book, Elmer ran into 7 tigers in the woods. We found 7 wild animals (not all tigers because we didn't have 7) and we figured out how many eyes they had, how many feet, etc... Homeschool Share has a free lapbook for My Father's Dragon. It has some awesome printables.

In Social Studies, we finished reading about the Egyptians and made Egyptian bread.

It was actually pretty good. We ate it with butter and honey for dinner.

In Science, we read about different types of destructive weather and we made a tornado in a bottle. Luckily for me, I had a tornado tube that I brought from America when I taught in the classroom so we didn't have to use duct tape. J added some red food coloring and purple glitter. When we read The Wizard of Oz, maybe we will add a little house and a cow!

As a final project for Science, we made a weather vane. Here, J and Kaleb are testing it to see if it works. We will put this outside on the balcony and check the air currents. (at least I know that Kaleb is ready for blowing out his birthday candles!)

Another busy week for our learning. I am glad it is going well. J has loved all of the books we read and she keeps begging for more. Hope you had a great week as well. Next week, we have a new book - Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and we will be working with the sight words up and a.

Book of the Week - Kindergarten

Our book of the week was I Went Walking by Sue Williams. This book will help us to continue our color words and begin our sight word study of the words I and see. Here are some of the activities that we did based on our book.

J continued learning our color words - she wrote, stamped, cut out, and put them together.

J worked on a farm sheet that I found. She determined which tiles were words and which were letters. The worksheet was found at Maggie's Kinder Corner. (sorry I don't have the direct link for the worksheet but she has tons of stuff and alot of it is free.)

J learned her first sight word - I and wrote it. This worksheet comes from a book that I purchased from Scholastic.

We read a sight word book from Scholastic with the words I and see to practice.

She created a picture using our farm magnetic shapes.

J practiced writing tallies using this farm game that I found. I printed the wheel with farm pictures, added a brad and a paper clip. She spun the paper clip and added a tally to the animal that it pointed to. Sorry I don't have the link to this file.

J is working with her sight word I.

I pulled out the wikki sticks that I purchased in America and J traced over her sight words. Wikki sticks are fun, they are wax like sticky strings that can be reused over and over again.

For one last review of our sight words, I gave J some sticky flags and she flagged all of the sight words in the book. The book worked well for her sight words - I and see.

One last fun thing we did for colors and our book was an experiment using colored vinegar and baking soda. I used four colors to tint the vinegar and gave J a dish full of baking soda. She used an eye dropper and added drops of colored vinegar to the baking soda. She certainly was surprised at the result. This was a quick and easy thing to do.

Well, we finished practicing our color words and will move on to another great book - Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. See you next week for the book of the week.

Book of the Week - tot

I have such a long list of books that I want to enjoy/work with this year. But we were not done with our color words (doing one a day), I decided to enjoy another book with colors. The book for our week is I Went Walking by Sue Williams.

It is on the same line as Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? I went walking and what did you see? I saw a black cat looking at me. What I love about this book is the the animals are not immediately noticeable in the pictures until you turn the page. The child has to guess what the animals are based on visual clues. 

For the tot version of this book, I went with a farm theme. Most of the animals seen can be found on a farm. So here is what we did.

Here is a picture of my activity bins for the week. All of the activities are from my I Went Walking tot bag. You can find the post for my tot bag here.

Kaleb and I read the book and then used the props to retell the story. We practice animal sounds, which he is very good at.

Kaleb then played with the magnets that I made. He could name most of the animals on the board and we practice (with help) matching each animal.

I let him work with the horse sewing card. I did not add of the sewing cards in his basket, only one or two will do. I did not want him to get overwhelmed.

I added the tonging activity and he surprised me by actually grasping the pom poms with the tongs. This can also be a color sorting activity but I just started him with putting them into the bowls.

He loves magnets, putting them on...taking them off. I gave him the animal sort and he placed the animals on the cookie sheet. Again, we worked with the sounds the animals made instead of the sizes, which will come later.

He loved the puppets. We played with them for awhile.

I then hid all of his farm animals in his shredded paper sensory bin. He had to find them. Instead of moving the paper around to find the animals, he just dumped it out.

Lastly, I gave him some brown play dough and some farm animals to play with. He made tracks in the mud dough. He is still trying to figure out play dough so I don't give him too much to play with. We still have an art project that will involve chocolate pudding, yum! All of these activities will be in his bins all week in the hopes that he will work with them while I teach J. I hope these tot bag posts will encourage you to create your own tot bag. 

I Went Walking Tot Bag

My new tot bag is based on the book, I Went Walking by Sue Williams. This was a simple bag to create since I had most of the items on hand and I didn't have to make much. I based many of the activities on farm animals since most of the animals can be found on a farm. Here is what I included...

I created storytelling props by using some clipart that I had from my Mailbox subscription and I scanned the image of the "walker" from the book. I colored the clipart on my computer and used the colors from the story. I then laminated the character and added velcro so we could use them on our felt board.

The animals can also be used for a sorting activity that includes some fine-motor practice. I will place the animals inside bowls and have my tot use tongs to place pom poms into them. At first, these will be just for the practice of using tongs, then we will use it for a color sorting activity.

I added a farm animal matching activity which I made magnetic from Frogs in my Pocket (link below). I printed two copies of the animals and laminated them. Kaleb can match the animals to the pictures.

Another magnetic activity I made was a size sort game that I found from Creative Preschool Resources (link below). I know Kaleb is too young to sort the sizes of the animals right now but he will be able to do this later. For now, we will use these to practice animal sounds. He just loves to stick the pictures on the magnet board.

I also added farm hand puppets and sewing cards for retelling the story and hand-eye coordination. These were bought from a store so I didn't make them myself. However, if you do not have any puppets or sewing cards, these would be easy to reproduce (links at bottom).

The final activity I added was Little People farm animals. Again, we had these on hand and I didn't have to buy anything. I will use these for the sensory bin. Currently, our sensory bin has shredded paper in it. I will place these animals in the bin and have my tot  find the animals. These would also be good in a rice or bean sensory bin.

To see my tot bag in action, please check here. I hope you enjoyed this addition to my tot bags. To read about my other literature based tot bags, please check here.

Links to Create your Own

Creative Preschool Resources - this is a great free printable pack that I found the size sort. There are other activities that you can print as well.

2 Teaching Mommies - another free printable farm pack. They have some great units!

Lawteedah - another free printable farm pack.

Frogs in my Pockets Blog - this is where I found the farm animal matching game that I laminated and added magnets to.

3 Dinosaurs - has a great farm printable pack with several downloads. I love her stuff.

Zitman Fam - make your own farm puppets, complete with patterns!

Gratefully Growing Grace - if you don't want to make large puppets, you can see her farm animal finger puppets here.

Love and Lollipops - has a great farm sensory bin complete with popsicle stick barn.

Creative Preschool Resources - has a simple pig craft which can be added. We are planning to do this and I may let them paint the pig with chocolate pudding!

Worldsapart (me) - here's a link to my pinterest farm activities for tots. I am still trying to figure out how to add the pinterest button, it just doesn't want to work for me.

Tot Tuesday

Kaleb has found a new favorite toy. This is great news for me since it will give me a little extra time teaching J (everything helps). He has found Mr. Potato Head.

During Math, he brings me the container of Mr. Potato Head and begs me to open it. He then sits on the floor and proceeds to put it together.

Pieces in and pieces out...it keeps him occupied through Math...

and makes us happy.

Monday Memories

It was Sunday morning and I was eating the breakfast my DH made for me (we actually had some bacon). Kaleb wanted me to read a book to him but I was busy, so J stepped in. She read him his favorite book - Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? which just so happened to be our book of the week.

They were having fun practicing the animal sounds of each of the characters in the book. It was so fun to watch. I love moments like these. Hope your week gets off to a good start.

Sonlight Week 2

Our second week is well underway and we are having fun. I have added some activities to the regular schedule, not because I felt that Sonlight was lacking in activities but because literature is my true love. I felt like we should incorporate some activities with books.

In addition to our regular math, we are exploring different ways to represent numbers. I found this great mini number book. Every day we work with two numbers and discuss ways we can represent them. We write tally marks, dot patterns, number words, number sentences, and dots on a ten frame. We use dominoes to see the different number sentences we can create. They are a great visual for our math.

B is the chosen letter of the week for the Sonlight curriculum. She practiced writing upper and lower case "b's" and created a page with pictures we found in magazines.

In Science, we read about light and weather. We learned the correct order of colors for a rainbow. This ties in nicely with learning our color words.

We even created a rainbow with a prism that I had from my teaching days. She thought this was especially cool.

We learned about early settlers. J wove a basket from paper. This was a little difficult for her which surprised me. Last week when she sewed her dress seemed to be an easier task than the basket. But we got through it. Maybe I should have chosen a place mat to weave instead of a basket.

This picture is how are day looks. Kaleb pushes the small kid chair to the table and stands on it to see what we are doing. He insists on coloring or trying to do what J is doing. If he doesn't get results, he will grab what she has and run.

One of our read-alouds for Sonlight is The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner. I was concerned because of her age but she has loved this book. She constantly begs for more than one chapter a day. This is a project that we did so she could act out the story. We made our own boxcar from a tissue box and we used items from her toys to create the scene. She has been playing with this all week.

In Social Studies, we are reading about the Egyptians. Here is J's name using hieroglyphics. Discovery Kids has a hieroglyphic page where you can type in your child's name and print out what it would look like in Egyptian. Cool!

I found some Egyptian paper dolls that J colored from Practical Pages.

And here is her Egyptian headband from First Palette. I knew she would love this, her favorite animal is a King Cobra. She wore this headband all through lunch. We completed our week with some Science experiments. We have definitely been busy. Hope your week went well too. Happy Sonlight!