Winter Promise Week 7

It was another crazy homeschool week, seems like these are becoming more and more  frequent (regardless of my protests). We started the week with a trip to the local zoo and ended the week with Friday school. There was no breathing room in between, we just seem to keep going and going. I am not sure how we got to be so busy, I think it is 'Merica in general. We are always busy with appointments and place to go, people to see. Don't get me wrong, I love being here but I feel like I need a vacation from the "doing". I just want to sit still and relax with no places to go. So what did we do this week?

We made fall wreaths from paper plates. I gave the kids fall colors of paint, a paper plate, and some brushes/sponges. I let them create their own wreath. When they were dry, they added some fall stickers. We also used the extra painted paper to make leaves. On the leaves, we wrote what we were thankful for and we hung it up on the wall.

Our animal of the week was the tiger. J is working on her notebook page, writing about tigers. 

We read several books about tigers and made a few mini books to add to the notebook page. The mini books can be found at Home School Share.

Then she created a pair of tigers for her notebook. I had intended for her to paint these but she decided she wanted to color them with markers. She made all the stripes.

She loved her tigers. She has enjoyed learning about all of the different animals this year.  The tiger pattern came from Learn Create Love.

After reading about the tiger, we watched a video on Netflix about them. It talked about how the tiger numbers are dwindling and we may loose them forever. J informed me that she wanted to help the tigers when she grew up. She just might do that. Hope your week wasn't as busy as mine ;)

Happy Birthday Sweet Boy!

My sweet baby boy is three years old today. I can't imagine our lives without him. He completes us. Happy Birthday, Sweetie Pea!

Wetland Learning Pages

This year, J is learning about different habitats and animals. We are currently using Winter Promise's Animals and Their Worlds. Each day, we read about different animals and weekly, we focus on one particular animal. Winter Promise supplies a notebook page for the animal of the week but I felt like J needed more. Not necessarily more to do but I wanted to increase her comprehension while we were reading. So I created my own notebook sheets for J to work through each week.

Week 8 concentrates on reading about Wetlands and reptiles. I added a fact sheet for wetlands. As J learns about the wetlands, she will add to the notebook page. I included animals, plants, and interesting facts to write about.

We will also be reading about reptiles. I will have J read about the characteristics of reptiles and write/draw what she has learned. Because we use many different resources (not just the ones from the program), she will be able to choose what she would like to add to her notebook page.

Another day, we will be reading about turtles and tortoises. It seemed only natural to add a Venn diagram to compare and contrast the features of both.

Lastly, the focus animal of week 8 is alligators. I created several printables to work with while learning about alligators. Above is an alligator math mat. J will use teeth printables to work through addition sentences. I also included a poem by Dennis Lee about Alligator Pie. I decided to use this poem for spelling practice and added some language arts activities as well. 

Download Wetland Learning File HERE.

This printable is my creation, it is not created to replace the program we are using. It was created to compliment it. Please use it accordingly. I have had the idea of creating printables to compliment what we are learning for several weeks. I know that I have started with week 8 of Winter Promise and I have plans to go back and create printables for the earlier weeks. But right now, I will probably focus on the following weeks of our learning. If you have any suggestions or problems, please feel free to contact me. Enjoy learning about the wetlands.

The clipart alligator is from KPM Doodles.

Tot School

Kaleb begs to play the iPad.

 After a long day of tot school, library toddler time, and swimming. I found this....

While playing on the iPad, he fell asleep. It was too much! It must be nice to be able to sleep anywhere. :)

Wheel School - F is for Firetruck

Week 6 of Wheel School is ready for download. F for firetruck is complete with several games, chants, rhymes, and fun things to do.

Download F is for Firetruck HERE

This week's plans contains several free printable games. The first is number game. Print and laminate the fire houses and your child can use counters to practice his numbers/counting for each house. I love these homemade dalmatian counters from Little Learners Lounge.

The next game is a target practice game. I have included both the alphabet and numbers up to 20. You can laminate the flames or just place them into plastic baggies. Give your child a spray bottle and have him "put out" the fires with water. If water play is not in the cards this week, attach them to paper cups and use bean bags to knock them down.

The last game is a fire station with an upper and lower case F's. I would cut out the garage doors, add a stand (attach it to some blocks or cups), and label some firetrucks or cars with the letters. Have your child "park" the vehicle in the correct door of the station. Enjoy week six of Wheel School. 

Winter Promise Week 6

This week was a whirlwind of activity and fun places to go. We were able to visit the local museum of Science and Industry as a free benefit from being aquarium members. So, for an impromptu school trip, we headed to the museum for some fun. J also studied owls this week and dissected an owl pellet, after much begging on her part. She worked on time and word problems in Math and action words for grammar.

J is playing a reading game with printable eggs. I love this photo with Kaleb in the background. He is never too far away from what we are trying to do.

Her independent story of the week was I Went Walking. We work through a story a week from an old school reader.

We finished our forest/woodlands unit for Winter Promise and ended it by making a diorama of spring and autumn in the forest. Here she is coloring the diorama pieces.

J's finished diorama of the forest. We will be working through the wetlands next.

J is working on her owl page for her animal notebook.

I always try to add items to her notebook. We listened to different sounds that owls make and J drew an owl on her notebook page.

This was the activity that J was so excited about - dissecting an owl pellet. She begged to do this all week. A small note about the owl pellet - this pellet is actually a fake owl pellet that contains only one skeleton of a bird. I know some of you may not think this was a great learning experience but I think it was. A real pellet would have had too many bones for her to process as well as the gross factor of it being kinda smelly (done this before). I will wait a few more years before we actually dissect a real pellet.

Last activity of the week, an owl bead project to finish it off. Not too bad for a busy week, I think. I hope your school week went well.

D is for Dump Truck

We are slowly working through the alphabet and the many vehicles that we can work with. Kaleb is having a blast with a new truck or car to play with/learn with every week. I have not been able to accomplish EVERY activity that I have planned for each letter so I can definitely see re-visiting each vehicle in the near future. Any activity that I have planned for but didn't accomplish gets placed in a ziplock bag (one for each letter) and then filed away for later. I can get pretty bummed about not finishing the unit I schedule but I have to learn to be flexible. There are just times when he wants to focus on one thing and I am okay with that. I am following his lead, not forcing the activities on him. He just gets so excited to see a new set up for each letter and possibly a new car or truck to go along with it. School sometimes gets put to the wayside so he can play with his new treasure. So don't be discouraged if you are not finishing what you planned. Just know that your child is having fun and still learning in the process. Here are a few activities that we did get to this week....

As you can see, I am still using the black beans in our sensory bin. He loves scooping them and pouring them that I just don't have the heart to replace them yet. This week, I added a toy dump truck, D letters, and, as a surprise, plastic pumpkins that I found in Michael's. That was pretty much it - something new to load and dump. He played with those all afternoon...well, pretty much all week.

I found this dump truck at a thrift store and added some number/shape blocks. He would dump them out and start all over again. This was another hit for the week.

The only crafty thing that I could get Kaleb to do was to color the dump truck with markers. He really just wanted to play with the new items in his sensory bin and his new dump truck. That pretty much made him happy. So, I packed the letter D items into a ziplock and will pull them out at a later date. We are off to Excavators and the letter E. Have a great week.