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.

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...

M: Moon, Mice, and Mixing Colors

We have been spending the last couple days learning about the moon, and we have done several fun activities in our lessons.

Yesterday we made sun and moon snacks out of an orange and a hard-boiled egg. The kids wanted to demonstrate how their moon reflects the sun's light, using a flashlight.


Today we read the story "Little Bear Goes to the Moon" by Elsa Homelund Minarik. In the story, Little Bear makes a helmet and tells his mother that he is going to fly to the moon by climbing a hill and jumping out of a tree. So we created our own helmets...

...and then reenacted the story


The trees on the moon sure look like the trees on Earth!

After reading some information about how the moon has craters, we decided to go make some craters of our own using balls and sand. I discovered after this activity that it would have been far more wise to do this outside. I had quite the mess to clean up after they were done playing in their moon sand...but they sure had fun!

We read this cute book, "Mouse Paint" by Ellen Stoll Walsh, which is a story about 3 little mice who find out what happens when you mix certain colors together. After reading the story, we made our lowercase m into a mouse, and then we had fun painting different colored mice - first in primary colors, and then mixing them to make new colored mice.