Hello Horses!

We have been learning about horses for the past couple days, and with that, the concept of obedience. We talked about how a well-trained horse obeys right away when his master gives a direction. In the same way, we need to obey God and listen to Him in order to go down the right path in life. I taught the kids the chorus of the song "Trust and Obey", and it really made me smile hearing them sing it!

We also emphasized the need to obey our parents right away when asked to do something. Colossians 3:20 says, "Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord." This is a lesson that I'm sure we'll continue to revisit for quite awhile!

In learning about horses, we talked about how horses were used in the past for much more than they are today - particularly in the areas of transportation and farming. We made a list comparing horses to cars, and a couple of my favorite comparisons that Madison came up with were:

Similarities
- Both can be washed when dirty
- We keep them both dry
- Both can be different colors
- We can ride in/on both

Differences
- A car doesn't have hair, but a horse does
- A car doesn't eat food, but a horse does
- A car can be the color blue, but a horse can't
- A car needs gas, but a horse doesn't

We made our horse-shaped badges with our words to remember written on them: I obey right away.

For our snack, we enjoyed horse food: hay bales (Frosted Mini Wheats) and apples. But there was one condition: they had to eat their food like a horse. No hands!

To learn a lesson in obedience, I hid these treats and then gave the kids directions for finding them. I explained that they had to follow my directions exactly, otherwise they wouldn't find the treats. After they found their prize, we talked about what would have happened if they wouldn't have listened and obeyed my directions. We also talked about how God has an eternal prize for us as well, if we listen and obey Him.

James 1:22 says, "Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says."

The kids sorted animal pictures into piles: first, they sorted the farm animals from the non-farm animals; second, into piles of animals they had seen and animals they had never seen.

For an art project, we made toilet paper roll horses
(http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/mhorse.html)

Just for fun, I had the kids do a horse-shaped maze and a horse coloring page
(maze found on http://www.printactivities.com/Mazes/Shape_Mazes/girl-riding-horse-maze.html)

Madison did her first word search and did really well! Once she knew what she was supposed to do, she was able to find all the words on her own. I have to admit, I was quite impressed!
(http://www.first-school.ws/t/word-search/alphabet/h2.htm)

The books we read for this lesson:
"Obedience" by Jane Buerger
"The Story of Jonah" by Juliana Bragg
"Farm Animals Horses" by Cecilia Minden
"See How Horses and Ponies Grow" by Kathryn Walker

We read, yet another horse book, "Horses on a Farm" by Abbie Mercer, and we made our foam lowercase "h" into a horse.
(idea from http://totallytots.blogspot.com/2010/07/now-i-know-my-abcs-h-is-for-horse.html, although I modified it a little)

This really doesn't have anything to do with our theme, but I thought I'd share the pictures anyway. We've been playing a game lately to help the kids learn their numbers. I got the basic idea from Confessions of a Homeschooler. She calls it Number Hopscotch, and uses large floor numbers that she has printed off.

I scatter various flashcards on the floor and when I call out a number, they have to jump to the card with that number on it. So far, we are up to number 35. We usually play a couple rounds of the game, doing half the stack of cards at a time since now we're getting so many. They love playing the game, and it has really improved their ability to recognize numbers. Especially for Madison. Right now, she has the tendency to get hung-up on the teen numbers (And rightfully so, in my opinion. But that's a rant for another time!), and this has really helped reinforce those numbers for her. For Noah, I just put down the numbers 1-9 and he's definitely getting better at jumping to the correct number:


Madison, well, she likes to get a little more creative, so she does cartwheels to the numbers I call out: