Lentil (part 1)

This week, our book is Lentil by Robert McCloskey. It is about a boy who just couldn't sing but used his talent for playing the harmonica to save the day! We started our week by working on our easel. I had J separate the magnetic letters into two sections - those that were in her name and those that were not in her name.

Then, I had her create her name with the letters that we found.

These letters are great. I found them at a "yard sale" here for about 5TL. They are large, large enough for the baby to chew on them and have them not fit in his mouth. The set actually came with two "bought" sets from an education store which makes it nice to create words with them since they have extra letters. The only thing is that they are all lower case, so she is creating her name without an uppercase J.

We are working with rhyming words and today's word was dog. J and I would discuss the word cards and she would determine which ones rhymed with dog. She found the letters to make the word dog and then wrote it.

I found some awesome beads at Wal-Mart while I was in the states. They are letter/number beads that are used to make necklaces and bracelets. I bought two packages in case they didn't have enough of a certain letter (this happened before with my block letter beads). I printed an abc page and gave her some tongs. J had to use the tongs to grab the lettters and put them in the correct place on the abc sheet. While she was doing this, I would ask her to say the sound the letter makes. This is practice for reading.

For math, we are still working on recognizing numbers and one-to-one correspondence. I had J choose a number card and she had to build a tower with some foam blocks that I found in the Target dollar bin-love that place!

For Social Studies, we are still learning about the symbols of America. This week, we are working on the Statue of Liberty. We watched a quick video tour on you tube, read a silly book about Lady Liberty as a child (Little Miss Liberty App), and began painting our own Statue of Liberty.

Here is J with the final product - our Statue of Liberty.

Notice she is putting her arm up just like the statue itself! J also painted two paper plates which we made into the Statue of Liberty headress and a torch made from a paper towel tube.

Isn't she cute? We also finished our tree map of symbols of America by filling in facts about the statue.

We did a simple experiment using pennies from America to understand why the statue is green.

J added vinegar to a paper towel and then placed the two pennies on the paper towel. We will let you know what happens. (As you know, the Statue of Liberty was made from copper like a penny.)

So we are waiting to see.... Our game of the week is Chutes and Ladders. This game actually was bought here. I bought it for J for her birthday. I was lucky to find it in a 2 for 1 package where she also received CandyLand as well. I had not brought this one out before because it can be confusing with which way you should go. But we played and both of us kept getting to the top only to have to slide right down again.

J is sliding - bummer. After school, we spent some time in the kitchen making rainbow cupcakes for Kaleb's birthday.

J wanted to wear her chef hat and apron that I made for her awhile back. We made the cake from a recipe and separated the batter into different bowls. We added food coloring to each of the bowls to make a certain color. We tried to make the color of the rainbow.

Then we added the different color mixes to our cupcake holders and baked. They turn out really good and it is fun to see the different combinations. Of course, we left some pink so J could have a pink cupcake (which she promptly licked the icing off without eating).

Here is Kaleb enjoying his first cupcake ever!

Isn't he a sweetie?