50 Days Celebration

Yesterday, we celebrated a different kind of milestone for our kindergarten year - 50 days in school. You read correctly, we have completed 50 days in kindergarten. I felt a mini celebration was in order, this is some of what we did.

We danced to some music...J (in her socks) and

Kaleb. We danced to our new Jackson Pollock song which ties into our artist study (which will be posted later).

J practiced her tallies by making 50 tally marks.

J practiced counting to 50 by 5's, 10's, and by 2's.

J also wrote her numbers to 50, all by herself. We have been practicing counting to 100 every day using 5's, 10's and 1's. But this time, she wrote her numbers without having me to repeat them or tell her what number was what. I am so proud.

Then, to top off the celebration, we had ice cream sodas for dessert while watching Planet 51 (a fifties type of kid movie). Our ice cream sodas were orange soda and vanilla ice cream.

Kaleb enjoyed the ice cream soda as well. Not too bad of a 50's day celebration. 50 days down and how many more to go?   (answer: 130 more days to go, yay!) The printable for the 50's math practice came from Flying Into First's freebie.

Tot Tuesday

Kaleb has been working with our nut sensory bin but I thought it was time to give him something new to play with. So, I changed his bin. I decided to go with a fall theme - popcorn kernels, a pine cone, some silk leaves, a few acorns, and some apples and pumpkins made from salt dough. I was excited about this new bin - to give Kaleb a new experience. Here's what I learned....

Kaleb didn't like the change. At first, he spoke to me about it and kept pointing to the acorns that I had placed in a plastic bag. He wanted the nuts back. When I asked him to try it, this is what he did.

He used the metal coffee can and cleaned out the bin. He removed the leaves, the pine cone, the apples and pumpkins....so he was left with...

kernels and acorns. Then he went to work...

pouring, scooping, busy, busy. What was I thinking? He doesn't want the fru fru stuff, he just wants the basic. How funny! I guess I will try it again, sometime soon. Well, it was still fun for him.

Sonlight Week 9

Sonlight Week 9 is the final week of the first quarter of school. We have been working for nine weeks - learning, reading, writing.... This week brought us a chapter book about being homeless (The Family Under the Bridge) and learning to take care of our earth. Here are a few of the activities we worked this week.

In Bible, we learned about Moses as a baby and how God saved his life.

Our mystery letter was P and J learned how to draw a penguin.

Our new sight word was to and J is practicing writing and reading her new word.

J worked on reading her early readers. We do this every day in order to increase her fluency.

We played sound bingo. I called the sounds and she marked them on her board.

We added Hudson Taylor to our timeline after reading about his life.

I was able to attend a consignment sale here at my DH school over the weekend. I found this great world puzzle. The pieces were large and it had some great pictures of animals. J put it together by herself. I am always on the look out for educational items, especially here. This week brought a little trouble with my favorite camera, I am working around it and hopefully, it will be resolved soon. Sorry for the lack of pictures. Hope your week was full of learning.

Art Thursday

Since we are taking a break from our book of the week activities, I thought it would be nice to work on a simple art project that both kids could do. I found this project idea on Pinterest from Happy Home Fairy and it looked easy enough to complete and since we needed to change our front door decoration, I thought this would be perfect.

I gave the tot and J half a paper plate, some glue, and tissue paper. Kaleb liked gluing the tissue paper squares except for the part of getting glue on his hands.

J fell in love with some red sparkly tissue and wanted her turkey to have some bling.

I helped him glue his turkey head and eyes but it definitely turned out cute.

Not too bad for a simple art project in honor of Thanksgiving. These will look cute on my doors. If you are looking for more cute and simple projects for Thanksgiving, check out my board. Hope your day is full of smiles and glue.

Word Work

This week, instead of a core book, I had decided to concentrate on reviewing J's words that she has been learning in her reading program. We practice our words in many ways. Here are a few of the many ways we work with words.

J works with words in her Explode the Code. This is used daily to aid her reading program and have her work with phonics.

J uses Wikki Sticks to trace her sight words, play dough as well.

She uses her Word Whammer to practice her word families.

She practices using reading, stamping, tracing and writing.

We play games - this one is Where is Johnny Appleseed? Johnny is hiding behind one of her words. To find him, she must read the word and look behind it.

I love my magnetic letters. I try to use these often. They are great for lots of review. J is making words with them.

J reads her sight words daily. Our list is getting longer.

Word flip, she loves this one. This was a game I created when we were reading If You Give a Mouse a Cookie by Laura Numeroff. I wrote her current words on paper cookies and she flips them with the spatula. She has to read them correctly in order to keep the cookies.

I made mini cards that we use for many different games. Here, she is finding them in the rice and reading them.

And we read......

read....read. The more she practices, the more she retains. Everyday, I like to start our reading time with different activities, so she will not get bored. I am pleased with her progress in reading but it wouldn't be possible with practice.

Here are some links for ideas on how to practice your words.

Links

Mom to 2 Posh Little Divas 75 ways to practice your spelling.

Learn with Play at Home 10 ideas for practicing sight words.

Teacher Takers free sight word worksheets - trace, color, paste type sheets.

You Might Be a First Grader  has some free printable sight word games.

Make, Take & Teach has free printable word family sliders.

Mrs. Ricca's Kindergarten she has several free printable worksheet sets - word family houses, sight words, beginning sounds. These are great.

Confessions of a Homeschooler free sight word searches.

3 Dinosaurs free printable color by letter cvc words.

Little Minds at Work has a great post on phonemic awareness and phonics, plus a link to free workbook.

1 plus 1 plus 1 equals 1 has free color by number sight word cards, these are the type I use for wikki sticks but I have made my own as well.

A Turn to Learn a free printable sight word Uno game. We haven't played this yet but will when J learns more of her words.

Worldsapart my pinterest board for reading with more ideas, including some great links for using Bob books in teaching reading.

Tot Tuesday

This is a look into a sweet moment where there was no fighting, just playing. I love this quick moments when they aren't trying to kill each other, they are just playing.

Playing with blocks...

enjoying a snack. Just playing, quietly....until it was time to work on school, then Kaleb got mad about J leaving, and knocked down all of the towers they built. So much for quiet.

Art Appreciation - Monet

Week 1: 
Our new art appreciation unit is on my personal favorite artist, Monet. I wasn't planning on studying Monet just yet but we are graced with some of his paintings in a local museum here, so there really is no better time than the present. We started our art appreciation off with reading a book about Monet that my DD found.

Our Monet focus wall - I found two pictures from an old calendar that I had with Impressionists, several post cards that I found in a stationary store here, and some art cards that I printed from the Internet. This will stay up the entire time we study this artist.

J danced to the song about Monet from Hope Harris. J has been loving this music and I appreciate that the songs are about real artists and their art work.

J put the Monet puzzle together from Confessions of a Homeschooler's art study.

I found this awesome art app called Play Art which lets you make your own "paintings" using elements from several artists. It currently only has about five artists (some which we will be studying) but it is super cute. J is "painting" like Monet and she can save her painting in her "museum." I purchased it for $.99 and it was worth it. So far she has painted like Van Gogh, Monet, Klee.

J drew water lilies with oil pastels and then painted the water using water colors.

She used different colors like Monet did in painting her water - blues, greens, purples, yellows.

Her finished Water Lilies creation. I love how she used all of the colors to paint her water. We then watched Classical Baby - The Art Show. This dvd is super cute and I lucked out by finding it in a Goodwill for about $4. I bought all the titles and I have not been disappointed. This dvd uses classical music to explore paintings of several artists for young children. It has one chapter on Monet's Water Lilies with a mommy and baby frogs swimming in the water among the lilies.

Week 2:

We began our art study looking through an Eyewitness book on Monet. My DD found it in her school library. It is a very detailed book on a high reading level, so we just looked at the pictures and discussed some of the details. We listened to the song - she seems to like this music.

Our next project was to create another painting based on Monet's works - The Water Lily Pond. What you don't see here is that we created a bridge from masking tape and then painted over it.

When it dries, the tape will be removed and a bridge will be revealed. I believe this turned out to be a pretty good impressionistic painting for a kindergartner.

Week 3:
We are bringing our Monet study to a close. Since we were unable to visit the museum during the holiday, I am hoping to do it soon. Our last project was to make some fall trees Monet style.

I gave J some brown paper and had her cut and glue tree trunks. Then I gave her q-tips and a handy brush made from a foam sheet to make her leaves. She was very precise in where her leaves were going. Kaleb is always so upset when I don't let him do what J is doing, so I let him paint as well.

I made his trees and let him have a paint brush. I tried my hardest to contain the paint and let him explore. He painted his hand, brushed my arm (by accident), but for the most part, kept it on the table. He was so happy that he could paint like J.

Here are J's Monet trees

and Kaleb's trees.

And I didn't end up with paint everywhere. Everyone wins! I am trying to get the tot involved more in our artists endeavors but it can be scary. So we are finished with Monet and our next artist will be Jackson Pollack. This should get interesting.

As always, I hope that this art study encourages you to "do art" with your children. I have included some links for inspiration.

Links

The Crafty Classroom the idea for the bridge resist painting came from here.

Confessions of a Homeschooler has the free art study of The World's Greatest Artists. This is where I found the puzzle and she has so many great resources.

Living Life Intentionally has a great project using tissue paper and paint for Monet's Water Lilies.

Toddler Approved the idea for the Monet inspired fall trees came from here. She also has a tutorial on how to make the brush using a foam sheet.

We Heart Art I found the idea of the pastel resist Water Lily project here. She used tissue paper lilies.