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:

MOOre on Cows

So what was our science experiment yesterday? Well, I put some whipping cream in a jar, spent a whole lot of time (and hopefully a whole lot of calories!) shaking it up...

and what did we get?! Butter!

Of course, we had to do a taste test. It passed.

Then today, despite having this going on outside,

the kids and I braved the weather and headed to the library for Story Time. The roads were horrible, and that was just the in-town roads, driving the 7 blocks to the library. In fact, I almost got stuck in our driveway, so we almost didn't make it to the library. I can't imagine what the country roads look like today! All the kids dressed up in costumes for Story Time, and my daughter, being the true girl that she is, tried on 3 different outfits before deciding on what she wanted to wear. See, I'm not one to go out and buy a $35 Halloween costume for my kids (because Halloween just isn't that big of a deal to me), so instead, we tend to dig through our box of dress-up clothes, add a little creativity, and see where that takes us.

My point in all this is that our entire morning was spent getting ready for, and actually trying to get to, the library. No school was accomplished at all this morning. By the time we got home from the library, it was lunchtime. So here is where we pick up on our lesson theme.

We had a dairy lunch today, to go along with our cow lesson - grilled cheese sandwiches, what my kids like to call "cheese chips" (a.k.a. Doritos), yogurt, and milk.

We made our cow-shaped badges with our words to remember written on them: "God's Word helps me grow."

We read "The Story of Ferdinand" by Munro Leaf and discussed how Ferdinand was different from the other bulls, and the ways that we are unique compared to others. Madison then illustrated the story and I love how her pictures turned out!

We also read "Farm Alphabet Book" by Jane Miller which describes a different feature of a farm for each letter of the alphabet.
We completed a cow dot-to dot as well.
(Dot to dot page from www.makinglearningfun.com)

We have a couple more things to try accomplish later today after naps, but since they are more general items and don't really follow our theme (i.e. practicing numbers, handwriting, reading Bob books), I'm not going to post them. So I guess this about does it for C/Cows! Next up, horses!

Down on the Farm

Our goat lesson, as well as the next two lessons we will be doing, have a farm theme to them. Since my husband just so happens to be an ag lender at a bank, I'm trying to get him to set up a visit to one of his client's farms to go along with these lessons. Hopefully that will work out because I know the kids would love it!

For our snack today, I made chickens out of hard boiled eggs, cheese, ham, and bacon bits.

Both these books were great, but I especially liked the first one - "Farming" by Gail Gibbons. It described a farm and the various farm activities that take place during each season of the year.

We created a farm animal book. Each page had the sentence "In the barn there was a _____" and Madison wrote in the name of the animal that she had colored and glued to the paper. The book had a cow, a pig, a horse, a chicken, a duck, and a goat.
(the barn and animals templates were from www.abcteach.com)

Madison completed an ABC dot-to-dot picture of a duck, a matching worksheet where she had to match the baby farm animal to the adult farm animal, and a Barnyard Color worksheet where she had to follow the directions and color each item in the picture the color that was specified.
(www.makinglearningfun.com)
(http://www.alphabet-soup.net/farm/farmmatch.html)
(http://www.tlsbooks.com/barnyardcolors.pdf)

First Letter on the Farm worksheet
(http://www.tlsbooks.com/firstletteronthefarm.pdf)

Label the Farm Animal worksheet - great practice in handwriting!
(http://www.tlsbooks.com/labelthepicturefarmanimals.pdf)

G: Goats, Gumpy, and Goose

We just finished up week #8 in homeschooling, and along with that, we just finished up Lesson 12 in the "My Father's World" curriculum we are using. That means we are nearly halfway through our book. I'm not sure what our plan is once we finish the book, because I can pretty much guarantee that we'll be done with it long before the end of the school year! But I guess I'll just cross that bridge when I get there.

Anyway, Lesson 12 dealt with the letter G, goats, and other farm-related topics. We started off by talking about how back in Old Testaments times, people used goats (as well as other animals) as sacrifices when they sinned. We also talked about how we no longer need to sacrifice animals because Jesus was the ultimate sacrifice. Our words to remember for this lesson were "Jesus died for my sins".

We made goat badges with those words on them.

One of the books we read was "Mr. Gumpy's Outing" by John Burningham. It is a story about Mr. Gumpy and how he has an eventful boat ride with children, a rabbit, a cat, a dog, a pig, a sheep, some chickens, a calf, and a goat.

While we read the story, we acted it out using some toys as the characters.

We also read "G is for Goat" by Patricia Polacco and "Goats on the Farm" by Mari C. Schuh. Both provided information about goats in a fun, easy-to-understand manner.

Another book we read was "Duck & Goose" by Tad Hills, and we made our foam lowercase "g" into a goose.
(idea from http://totallytots.blogspot.com/2010/07/now-i-know-my-abcs-g-is-for-goose.html)

I'm going to do a separate blog post about the other farm-related activities and lessons that we did. They didn't start with the letter "G" though, so I decided not to include them in this post. :-)