This fun book taught shapes, counting, adding, how to arrange in sets, and subtraction. I think learning to subtract by way of eating was the favorite part of the whole lesson. Mmmm!
Thursday, October 20, 2011
Yummy Math
Who says math can't be fun...and delicious?!
This fun book taught shapes, counting, adding, how to arrange in sets, and subtraction. I think learning to subtract by way of eating was the favorite part of the whole lesson. Mmmm!
This fun book taught shapes, counting, adding, how to arrange in sets, and subtraction. I think learning to subtract by way of eating was the favorite part of the whole lesson. Mmmm!
Friday, October 14, 2011
2011-2012 School Lesson Plan - Noah
As I mentioned before, I have decided to have a little more structured schooling with Noah this year. Last year, he participated in a lot of our craft projects, but other than that, he really didn't have much to do during our school time. That meant that he provided us lots of distraction. There were times that I was ready to pull my hair out because he was constantly wanting attention, I was trying to teach Madison, and she was distracted by whatever Noah was doing. This year, I was determined to not let that happen.
My solution was to make Noah his own box containing things for him to work on during school. It means that I have to be more diligent in finding and providing his work box activities, but so far it's been going really well. A lot of the activities are things that he can do on his own, but there are some things that he needs my assistance with. Since Madison is learning to do a little more independent work, I can work Noah during those times. So what's in the box?
Noah has his own calender notebook. He also has his own box of crayons, his own pencil, and a variety of books and worksheets. My mom got a bunch of school books and worksheets at a rummage sale from a lady who used to be a teacher. I have been using many of those worksheets for Noah because they are very age-appropriate for him.
I have a couple math books that he has been working through as well as some basic number flashcards to help him learn his numbers. I have also been using a number of worksheets from one of my favorite homeschool blogs - Confessions of a Homeschooler.
Also taken from Confessions of a Homeschooler are activity pages to help Noah learn some pre-writing skills...
...and pages to help him learn his letters. The pages you see here he uses Do-a-Dot markers, he traces, and he uses a pushpin to poke holes along the lines of the letter. My parents also gave him a couple of alphabet books as a gift.
Noah doesn't know his letters very well yet, so these books have been very helpful in introducing the letters to him. They have also given him practice in writing the letters, something he is still a long ways from mastering.
Noah is our puzzle-boy, so I usually have him choose a few puzzles from our stash to work on as well.
Along with these work box activities, Noah works on his Awana verses, he participates in our Science lessons and experiments, he watches the music lesson video, does art projects like painting or coloring, and he listens as we read the various supplemental library books. He actually lasts the entire 3 hours that we work on school in the morning, which is something that was unheard of last year. Of course, his attention span is a little shorter than Madison's, so I don't make him sit there all the time. If he gets off his chair to go play with his toys, I'm just fine with that. I realize that he is not even school-age yet so I don't force it upon him. I just have these things planned out for him because more times than not, he wants to do school too.
So there you have it. This should give you some idea of what goes on here during the school week. I'm sure things will be tweaked in the months to come, but for now, this is what works for us.
My solution was to make Noah his own box containing things for him to work on during school. It means that I have to be more diligent in finding and providing his work box activities, but so far it's been going really well. A lot of the activities are things that he can do on his own, but there are some things that he needs my assistance with. Since Madison is learning to do a little more independent work, I can work Noah during those times. So what's in the box?
Noah has his own calender notebook. He also has his own box of crayons, his own pencil, and a variety of books and worksheets. My mom got a bunch of school books and worksheets at a rummage sale from a lady who used to be a teacher. I have been using many of those worksheets for Noah because they are very age-appropriate for him.
I have a couple math books that he has been working through as well as some basic number flashcards to help him learn his numbers. I have also been using a number of worksheets from one of my favorite homeschool blogs - Confessions of a Homeschooler.
Also taken from Confessions of a Homeschooler are activity pages to help Noah learn some pre-writing skills...
...and pages to help him learn his letters. The pages you see here he uses Do-a-Dot markers, he traces, and he uses a pushpin to poke holes along the lines of the letter. My parents also gave him a couple of alphabet books as a gift.
Noah doesn't know his letters very well yet, so these books have been very helpful in introducing the letters to him. They have also given him practice in writing the letters, something he is still a long ways from mastering.
Noah is our puzzle-boy, so I usually have him choose a few puzzles from our stash to work on as well.
Along with these work box activities, Noah works on his Awana verses, he participates in our Science lessons and experiments, he watches the music lesson video, does art projects like painting or coloring, and he listens as we read the various supplemental library books. He actually lasts the entire 3 hours that we work on school in the morning, which is something that was unheard of last year. Of course, his attention span is a little shorter than Madison's, so I don't make him sit there all the time. If he gets off his chair to go play with his toys, I'm just fine with that. I realize that he is not even school-age yet so I don't force it upon him. I just have these things planned out for him because more times than not, he wants to do school too.
So there you have it. This should give you some idea of what goes on here during the school week. I'm sure things will be tweaked in the months to come, but for now, this is what works for us.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
2011-2012 School Lesson Plan - Madison
It's been quite awhile since I updated this blog! I decided to go ahead and document what we are doing for school this year. I'm doing it to give you all a glimpse into our school days, but I'm doing it mainly for myself, to look back on in years to come.
Our school day typically begins at 9:00am. We start by saying the Pledge of Allegiance and The Lord's Prayer. There are 4 core subjects that we try to do everyday: Bible, Math, Reading, and Spelling. I decided to also have one other additional subject added each day that we focus on. Mondays we do Cursive Handwriting. Tuesdays we do Science. Wednesdays are Library Time and Awana. Thursdays we do Music. And Fridays we do Science Experiments. I have found this to be a nice way of accomplishing a variety of subjects without feeling like we need to do all of them every single day. Most days we are able to accomplish the 4 core subjects and the one additional subject.
Our first subject is always Bible. We are doing My Father's World curriculum again this year and Madison reads out of her Bible Reader and completes the work in her Bible Notebook when there is a page to complete. We read some pages out of our Bible storybook, and we also work on the kids' Awana books/verses. The kids are also learning the books of the Bible and so far know the New Testament books. We are still working our way through the Old Testament. After Bible time, we each pray and then we begin the rest of our schoolwork.
After Bible we do Calendar Time. Our calendar board is mostly unchanged from last year, but we have tweaked things a little bit. We still do the daily weather, determine which day it is (yesterday, today, tomorrow), and we find the correct date on the calendar. However, this year, I alone am in charge of the bulletin board. The kids do their calendar work in their Calendar Notebooks.
The Calendar Notebook was an ingenious idea that I took from Mama Jenn. I absolutely love it! It is a binder that has all the necessary pages in it for completing each task in our Calendar Time.
The first page is their weather graph. As you can see, we have been enjoying lots of sunny days!
The next page is the monthly calendar. The kids tell me the full correct date (i.e. Thursday October 13, 2011) and then they mark it on their calendar. Ha! I just noticed in this picture that Madison needs to fix the date for tomorrow. It appears that she wrote the number 13 twice in a row.
On the next page, Madison gets practice writing out the full date in written form as well as the code date. Noah does not have this page in his notebook.
The next page tells us how many days we have been in school. For Noah, I let him just color in the boxes instead of writing the numbers.
The last page in the notebook is tally marks, and it coincides with the number of days we have been in school. This also provides good practice in counting by 5's.
After Calendar Time, we begin working on our other subjects. I have a few different math workbooks that Madison works through. "The Complete Book of Math" was the recommended book by "My Father's World". The other two books were fun gifts from my parents. All have fun, colorful illustrations and activities for learning new math concepts. Madison has really enjoyed all of them so far.
"My Father's World" has a list of other books to supplement each new concept introduced. I have been able to find these books at our local library. For example, today we read "Lizzy's Dizzy Day" and did some of the suggested math activities that were listed in the book. The kids had a lot of fun with that.
We also do time tests, flashcards, and other math worksheets to help reinforce math facts that we have already learned.
For Reading, we go through the student workbook that comes with our curriculum. However, we do this at a much slower rate than what is actually printed in the book. I have found that introducing a new reading "rule" every single day was too fast for Madison, and not effective. She was becoming frustrated with all the new rules and we weren't getting anywhere. I actually took a break from using the student notebook in reading for a few months, and we are now just getting back into it. Also, Madison is still reading her Bob Books as well as reading her Bible Reader that is shown in the first picture. We read many library books all together and she likes to look at books during rest time and attempt to sound words out in those. Little by little, she is becoming a stronger reader.
I purchased the "All About Spelling" curriculum to use for Madison this year. I figured it would also help out in the Reading area as well. We aren't too far in it yet, but I know this will be a good fit for Madison because it appears to be a very hands-on type curriculum.
As I mentioned, Mondays we work on cursive handwriting. Madison wanted to learn cursive and I figured, why not? I found some cursive handwriting worksheets online at www.superteacherworksheets.com. Madison has really enjoyed learning cursive writing and she is doing really well at it too.
Of course, she still gets regular handwriting practice in as well. One day she had to write a letter to someone (she chose her friend Abbie). Here she had to write out the weekly Proverbs verse.
Tuesdays we have a Science focus. We read the science topic out of the book "Things Outdoors" (which came with our curriculum) and I also find library books to supplement the lesson.
After we read, the kids each illustrate the lesson in their science notebooks.
Wednesdays are our busy days. We have library story hour in the morning, Madison attends a kids after-school program at our church called Kids for Christ, and then both kids attend Awana in the evening. Another homeschooling mom gave me the good idea to have the kids bring their backpacks to the library each week. That way, they can carry the books instead of me trying to juggle the stack of books/videos while carrying the baby in his car seat. Brilliant! Plus, they love bringing their backpacks.
Thursday is music day. Right now all I'm doing for this is having the kids watch a music course video series. It teaches the very basics of music in a kid-friendly way. Eventually I will start teaching the kids some of the fundamentals of reading music, and I would love to get a piano and have the kids learn to play.
Friday is Science Experiment Day. I purchased the book "How To Do Science Experiments With Children" and so far, the kids are loving it. There are 73 various experiments in the book and it has detailed teacher instructions as well as student sheets. I had both kids make a science experiment folder in which they keep all their worksheets from the experiments.
Before we conduct the experiment, the kids try to guess what the outcome will be. After the experiment, we answer some questions and then they draw a picture of what happened during the experiment on the back of their page.
We are typically done with our formal school day around 12:00 noon (with a short 5-10 minute recess/snack break done around 10:30 am). Madison is still in gymnastics this year, the kids help me with various household tasks, they have a lot of "Phy Ed" time playing outside, they do various art projects and hands-on activities like play dough, and we spend a lot of time reading books before bedtime each night - all which I count as school time.
And that is what Madison's school week looks like. Noah's school is different, tailored to his age of course. I'm going to do a separate post to show you what I do for him. He does more structured school this year than he did last year, and it is really working out well so far.
Our school day typically begins at 9:00am. We start by saying the Pledge of Allegiance and The Lord's Prayer. There are 4 core subjects that we try to do everyday: Bible, Math, Reading, and Spelling. I decided to also have one other additional subject added each day that we focus on. Mondays we do Cursive Handwriting. Tuesdays we do Science. Wednesdays are Library Time and Awana. Thursdays we do Music. And Fridays we do Science Experiments. I have found this to be a nice way of accomplishing a variety of subjects without feeling like we need to do all of them every single day. Most days we are able to accomplish the 4 core subjects and the one additional subject.
Our first subject is always Bible. We are doing My Father's World curriculum again this year and Madison reads out of her Bible Reader and completes the work in her Bible Notebook when there is a page to complete. We read some pages out of our Bible storybook, and we also work on the kids' Awana books/verses. The kids are also learning the books of the Bible and so far know the New Testament books. We are still working our way through the Old Testament. After Bible time, we each pray and then we begin the rest of our schoolwork.
After Bible we do Calendar Time. Our calendar board is mostly unchanged from last year, but we have tweaked things a little bit. We still do the daily weather, determine which day it is (yesterday, today, tomorrow), and we find the correct date on the calendar. However, this year, I alone am in charge of the bulletin board. The kids do their calendar work in their Calendar Notebooks.
The Calendar Notebook was an ingenious idea that I took from Mama Jenn. I absolutely love it! It is a binder that has all the necessary pages in it for completing each task in our Calendar Time.
The first page is their weather graph. As you can see, we have been enjoying lots of sunny days!
The next page is the monthly calendar. The kids tell me the full correct date (i.e. Thursday October 13, 2011) and then they mark it on their calendar. Ha! I just noticed in this picture that Madison needs to fix the date for tomorrow. It appears that she wrote the number 13 twice in a row.
On the next page, Madison gets practice writing out the full date in written form as well as the code date. Noah does not have this page in his notebook.
The next page tells us how many days we have been in school. For Noah, I let him just color in the boxes instead of writing the numbers.
The last page in the notebook is tally marks, and it coincides with the number of days we have been in school. This also provides good practice in counting by 5's.
After Calendar Time, we begin working on our other subjects. I have a few different math workbooks that Madison works through. "The Complete Book of Math" was the recommended book by "My Father's World". The other two books were fun gifts from my parents. All have fun, colorful illustrations and activities for learning new math concepts. Madison has really enjoyed all of them so far.
"My Father's World" has a list of other books to supplement each new concept introduced. I have been able to find these books at our local library. For example, today we read "Lizzy's Dizzy Day" and did some of the suggested math activities that were listed in the book. The kids had a lot of fun with that.
We also do time tests, flashcards, and other math worksheets to help reinforce math facts that we have already learned.
For Reading, we go through the student workbook that comes with our curriculum. However, we do this at a much slower rate than what is actually printed in the book. I have found that introducing a new reading "rule" every single day was too fast for Madison, and not effective. She was becoming frustrated with all the new rules and we weren't getting anywhere. I actually took a break from using the student notebook in reading for a few months, and we are now just getting back into it. Also, Madison is still reading her Bob Books as well as reading her Bible Reader that is shown in the first picture. We read many library books all together and she likes to look at books during rest time and attempt to sound words out in those. Little by little, she is becoming a stronger reader.
I purchased the "All About Spelling" curriculum to use for Madison this year. I figured it would also help out in the Reading area as well. We aren't too far in it yet, but I know this will be a good fit for Madison because it appears to be a very hands-on type curriculum.
As I mentioned, Mondays we work on cursive handwriting. Madison wanted to learn cursive and I figured, why not? I found some cursive handwriting worksheets online at www.superteacherworksheets.com. Madison has really enjoyed learning cursive writing and she is doing really well at it too.
Of course, she still gets regular handwriting practice in as well. One day she had to write a letter to someone (she chose her friend Abbie). Here she had to write out the weekly Proverbs verse.
Tuesdays we have a Science focus. We read the science topic out of the book "Things Outdoors" (which came with our curriculum) and I also find library books to supplement the lesson.
After we read, the kids each illustrate the lesson in their science notebooks.
Wednesdays are our busy days. We have library story hour in the morning, Madison attends a kids after-school program at our church called Kids for Christ, and then both kids attend Awana in the evening. Another homeschooling mom gave me the good idea to have the kids bring their backpacks to the library each week. That way, they can carry the books instead of me trying to juggle the stack of books/videos while carrying the baby in his car seat. Brilliant! Plus, they love bringing their backpacks.
Thursday is music day. Right now all I'm doing for this is having the kids watch a music course video series. It teaches the very basics of music in a kid-friendly way. Eventually I will start teaching the kids some of the fundamentals of reading music, and I would love to get a piano and have the kids learn to play.
Friday is Science Experiment Day. I purchased the book "How To Do Science Experiments With Children" and so far, the kids are loving it. There are 73 various experiments in the book and it has detailed teacher instructions as well as student sheets. I had both kids make a science experiment folder in which they keep all their worksheets from the experiments.
Before we conduct the experiment, the kids try to guess what the outcome will be. After the experiment, we answer some questions and then they draw a picture of what happened during the experiment on the back of their page.
We are typically done with our formal school day around 12:00 noon (with a short 5-10 minute recess/snack break done around 10:30 am). Madison is still in gymnastics this year, the kids help me with various household tasks, they have a lot of "Phy Ed" time playing outside, they do various art projects and hands-on activities like play dough, and we spend a lot of time reading books before bedtime each night - all which I count as school time.
And that is what Madison's school week looks like. Noah's school is different, tailored to his age of course. I'm going to do a separate post to show you what I do for him. He does more structured school this year than he did last year, and it is really working out well so far.
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
Concluding With Y
Our final unit in My Father's World Kindergarten was the letter Y for yellow; however the lesson was on all the colors. Our words to remember were "Thank you God, for this beautiful world." and we talked about how God created our world with many beautiful colors for us to enjoy. We had done a little bit of color mixing back in our M lesson, but it was fun to revisit some of that again. We did a number of fun activities dealing with colors...
In our toy room, I had the kids go on a color hunt. I called out a color and they had to find items of that color.
Practicing writing the letter Y/y with a letter tracer page and using pretzels.
(http://www.dltk-teach.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/image/btracey.gif)
The kids had to color the gumballs in the first picture using the colors red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. They could color how many gumballs of each color that they wanted. Then on the second page, they had to determine how many gumballs of each color they colored, and it made a graph. Then they had to write which color they had the most number of, and which color they had the least number of. As you can see, Madison had the most orange and the least blue.
(www.makinglearningfun.com)
"What Color Is It?" by Bobbie Kalman - This book introduced all the colors in nature.
"Color" by Ruth Heller - This was a book about mixing colors. It was a lot of fun because it had some transparency overlay pages that had various colors printed on them, so when you would turn those pages, you could see the colors on the previous page turn different shades and colors.
"Red Green Blue" by Alison Jay - A book about various nursery rhymes that incorporate colors into their stories.
"Colors" by Michel Blake - A very simple and basic board book that showed various nature items in all the different colors.
"Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Eric Carle - One of my children's favorites. They both loved reciting this book many times after we read it. My 3 year old son was even reciting it from memory while we were at the grocery store yesterday afternoon.
After reading "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" I had Madison illustrate the book in a little accordion-style booklet.
This book was a great resource, and I wish I would have found one like it for all of our topics this school year! It's "The Best of the Mailbox Theme Series" and this particular issue was on colors, of course. To quote the backside of the book,
"We've compiled the best thematic unit and related ideas from The Mailbox and Teacher's Helper magazines in one handy resource just for your level. Whether you need an entire unit or just a few creative activities to energize your current lessons, this timesaving collection of ideas can meet your needs."
I found a number of fun activities and worksheets to go along with our unit on colors and the book gives permission to reproduce those worksheets. The next 3 pictures show the pages I copied from the book.
Print the missing letters from the color words
Color the hats the color printed
Color the umbrellas the color specified
A little book compiled of pictures listing specific colors to color each item
A rainbow book where she had to trace the color word and then color the stripe the appropriate color
We worked on learning to read the color words and I'm proud to say that Madison has earned this little award page.
This idea also came from that magazine booklet. I made the kids lemonade and added some yellow food coloring to it to really make it look yellow. I then made red and blue ice cubes by putting food coloring into water and then freezing it in cups. (Since we have an ice maker built in to our refrigerator I don't ever use ice cube trays anymore. This was the easiest way I could think of to make ice cubes without having to go on a massive hunt through boxes in order to find our ice cube trays.)
When the ice cubes were solid enough, we put them into the yellow lemonade and discovered the results of mixing red and yellow, and blue and yellow. The kids loved this!
Her writing assignment. She did much better this time around, not getting so worked up about having it be perfect, unlike last time. In case you can't figure out what it says:
My favorite color is pic (pink)
I like it because...cuz it iz mi favit culr ('cause it is my favorite color).
(page from www.makinglearningfun.com)
We made our foam lowercase "y" and decorated it with assorted yellow stickers.
In our toy room, I had the kids go on a color hunt. I called out a color and they had to find items of that color.
Practicing writing the letter Y/y with a letter tracer page and using pretzels.(http://www.dltk-teach.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/image/btracey.gif)
The kids had to color the gumballs in the first picture using the colors red, orange, yellow, green, and blue. They could color how many gumballs of each color that they wanted. Then on the second page, they had to determine how many gumballs of each color they colored, and it made a graph. Then they had to write which color they had the most number of, and which color they had the least number of. As you can see, Madison had the most orange and the least blue.(www.makinglearningfun.com)
"What Color Is It?" by Bobbie Kalman - This book introduced all the colors in nature."Color" by Ruth Heller - This was a book about mixing colors. It was a lot of fun because it had some transparency overlay pages that had various colors printed on them, so when you would turn those pages, you could see the colors on the previous page turn different shades and colors.
"Red Green Blue" by Alison Jay - A book about various nursery rhymes that incorporate colors into their stories."Colors" by Michel Blake - A very simple and basic board book that showed various nature items in all the different colors.
"Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Eric Carle - One of my children's favorites. They both loved reciting this book many times after we read it. My 3 year old son was even reciting it from memory while we were at the grocery store yesterday afternoon.
After reading "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" I had Madison illustrate the book in a little accordion-style booklet.
This book was a great resource, and I wish I would have found one like it for all of our topics this school year! It's "The Best of the Mailbox Theme Series" and this particular issue was on colors, of course. To quote the backside of the book,"We've compiled the best thematic unit and related ideas from The Mailbox and Teacher's Helper magazines in one handy resource just for your level. Whether you need an entire unit or just a few creative activities to energize your current lessons, this timesaving collection of ideas can meet your needs."
I found a number of fun activities and worksheets to go along with our unit on colors and the book gives permission to reproduce those worksheets. The next 3 pictures show the pages I copied from the book.
Print the missing letters from the color wordsColor the hats the color printed
Color the umbrellas the color specifiedA little book compiled of pictures listing specific colors to color each item
A rainbow book where she had to trace the color word and then color the stripe the appropriate color
We worked on learning to read the color words and I'm proud to say that Madison has earned this little award page.
This idea also came from that magazine booklet. I made the kids lemonade and added some yellow food coloring to it to really make it look yellow. I then made red and blue ice cubes by putting food coloring into water and then freezing it in cups. (Since we have an ice maker built in to our refrigerator I don't ever use ice cube trays anymore. This was the easiest way I could think of to make ice cubes without having to go on a massive hunt through boxes in order to find our ice cube trays.)
When the ice cubes were solid enough, we put them into the yellow lemonade and discovered the results of mixing red and yellow, and blue and yellow. The kids loved this!
Her writing assignment. She did much better this time around, not getting so worked up about having it be perfect, unlike last time. In case you can't figure out what it says:My favorite color is pic (pink)
I like it because...cuz it iz mi favit culr ('cause it is my favorite color).
(page from www.makinglearningfun.com)
We made our foam lowercase "y" and decorated it with assorted yellow stickers.And that brings us to the end of our Kindergarten curriculum. I loved using My Father's World, and I am looking forward to beginning their 1st Grade material. I'm still waiting for it to come in the mail, so while we wait, we'll probably just do some general studies and maybe some review of the things we have learned so far.
I have decided that once we begin the 1st Grade material, I am not going to blog every lesson we do. I really enjoyed doing that for our Kindergarten lessons, but I also found it to very time-consuming. I am discovering that between homeschooling and all our other outside activities, I just don't seem to have the amount of time in my day that I would like! So that means that I need to find certain areas to cut back on, and I'm afraid that blogging is one of them.
I hope you found some inspiration from the things I did post here, and even though I won't be posting every single lesson we continue to do, I will post things from time to time if I find them to be a really fun idea to share.
Thanks for reading! Until next time...
I have decided that once we begin the 1st Grade material, I am not going to blog every lesson we do. I really enjoyed doing that for our Kindergarten lessons, but I also found it to very time-consuming. I am discovering that between homeschooling and all our other outside activities, I just don't seem to have the amount of time in my day that I would like! So that means that I need to find certain areas to cut back on, and I'm afraid that blogging is one of them.
I hope you found some inspiration from the things I did post here, and even though I won't be posting every single lesson we continue to do, I will post things from time to time if I find them to be a really fun idea to share.
Thanks for reading! Until next time...
Thursday, January 6, 2011
Ssssssssnakes
I'm actually still waiting for some books to come in at the library before we can finish our final unit in My Father's World. In the meantime, we've been learning about snakes, something that I promised my little boy that we would do. He has been asking me for quite some time when we were going to learn about snakes, so I just created a lesson on my own. We learned a lot about reptiles in general, but did a lot of emphasis on snakes specifically.
We first read a couple Bible stories that talked about snakes. The first one found in Genesis 3 talked about Adam and Eve's fall into sin as a result of the serpent's deception. This passage also went along with Madison's new Awana verse: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) so we have been working on memorizing that verse.
The other passage we read came from Numbers 21, which told of the Israelites being bitten by poisonous snakes in the desert. After Moses prayed to the Lord on their behalf, he was told by God to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole. When the people were bitten by the snakes they could look at the snake and live. We talked about how this story was referenced later in John 3:14, symbolizing Christ being lifted up.
I found a number of books on snakes at our library and the kids really enjoyed reading and learning about them.
"Amazing Reptiles and Amphibians" by Brian Williams
"Reptiles" by Sue Malyan
"Snakes: Long, Longer, Longest" by Jerry Pallotta (I especially liked this one because it brought in comparison concepts as well as various types of measurements.)
"Snakes" by Gail Gibbons
"The Life Cycle of a Snake" by John Crossingham
"Snakes and Other Reptiles" by Deborah M. Alexander
"I Need a Snake" by Lynne Jonell
"Miles and Miles of Reptiles" by Tish Rabe (This was a fun, Cat in the Hat book with rhymes that told about various types of reptiles)
In the book mentioned above, "I Need a Snake", the little boy in the story creatively comes up with various household items to be his pet snakes. After we read the book, I had the kids look around and see what they thought would make good snakes. This picture is all the things they came up with.
Snake themed dot to dot
(http://www.coloring.ws/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.coloring.ws/ctd/connectsnake.gif)
Snake Bingo Dauber page
(http://www.dltk-kids.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/image/bdauber-snake1.gif)
I decided to have Madison try a little creative writing activity. I found a picture online and she had to look at it and come up with a story about it. I think her story said something like
"Once upon a time there was a girl and a snake. The snake is tired and the girl was sad."
There was some resistance from Madison to write a story because she was so concerned with wanting to spell everything exactly right. But I wanted her to just write like she thought the words sounded. After much prodding (and I'll admit, even a few tears) I managed to get this much out of her. I want her to have more practice in writing, so I think I'm going to try more of these types of assignments in the future. Hopefully my little perfectionist will become more comfortable with the idea the more she does it.
We made these spiral snakes. We glued the templates to some tag board to give them a little more strength.
(http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/mspiralsnake.htm)
After they are cut out, they are all nice and spiral-y.
We first read a couple Bible stories that talked about snakes. The first one found in Genesis 3 talked about Adam and Eve's fall into sin as a result of the serpent's deception. This passage also went along with Madison's new Awana verse: "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) so we have been working on memorizing that verse.
The other passage we read came from Numbers 21, which told of the Israelites being bitten by poisonous snakes in the desert. After Moses prayed to the Lord on their behalf, he was told by God to make a bronze snake and put it on a pole. When the people were bitten by the snakes they could look at the snake and live. We talked about how this story was referenced later in John 3:14, symbolizing Christ being lifted up.
I found a number of books on snakes at our library and the kids really enjoyed reading and learning about them.
"Amazing Reptiles and Amphibians" by Brian Williams"Reptiles" by Sue Malyan
"Snakes: Long, Longer, Longest" by Jerry Pallotta (I especially liked this one because it brought in comparison concepts as well as various types of measurements.)
"Snakes" by Gail Gibbons"The Life Cycle of a Snake" by John Crossingham
"Snakes and Other Reptiles" by Deborah M. Alexander
"I Need a Snake" by Lynne Jonell"Miles and Miles of Reptiles" by Tish Rabe (This was a fun, Cat in the Hat book with rhymes that told about various types of reptiles)
In the book mentioned above, "I Need a Snake", the little boy in the story creatively comes up with various household items to be his pet snakes. After we read the book, I had the kids look around and see what they thought would make good snakes. This picture is all the things they came up with.
Snake themed dot to dot(http://www.coloring.ws/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.coloring.ws/ctd/connectsnake.gif)
Snake Bingo Dauber page
(http://www.dltk-kids.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/image/bdauber-snake1.gif)
I decided to have Madison try a little creative writing activity. I found a picture online and she had to look at it and come up with a story about it. I think her story said something like"Once upon a time there was a girl and a snake. The snake is tired and the girl was sad."
There was some resistance from Madison to write a story because she was so concerned with wanting to spell everything exactly right. But I wanted her to just write like she thought the words sounded. After much prodding (and I'll admit, even a few tears) I managed to get this much out of her. I want her to have more practice in writing, so I think I'm going to try more of these types of assignments in the future. Hopefully my little perfectionist will become more comfortable with the idea the more she does it.
We made these spiral snakes. We glued the templates to some tag board to give them a little more strength.(http://www.dltk-kids.com/animals/mspiralsnake.htm)
After they are cut out, they are all nice and spiral-y.
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