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...

Vegetables

We took a break from homeschooling for Christmas, as I'm sure many of you also did. I decided to start back up again with school today as it seemed like we all needed more of a structured routine again after being away from it for awhile.

We began our unit on vegetables about a week before Christmas, and didn't finish it until today. In our lessons, we talked about how "God gives me all that I need". Just as he created the plants, and gives rain and sunlight so they can grow, we discussed specifically how he provides all that we need in life as well.

"He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for man to cultivate - bringing forth food from the earth." Psalm 104:14

There were a number of suggested activities in our curriculum that we didn't do. For example, it isn't the ideal time of year for planting a garden around here, and I just couldn't convince myself to buy a bunch of vegetables, only to cut them up and use as paint stamps. (Groceries are expensive these days!) We did go to the grocery store a few times and we looked at the variety of vegetables in the aisle. But mainly, we read a bunch of books about vegetables and kept our lessons simple. Like I said, we started the unit just before Christmas, and at that time, my creative juices were lacking due to the brain power being used to accomplish everything else on my Christmas To-Do List.

Here is what we did accomplish though...

Our carrot badge

The two nonfiction books we read were "Vegetables" by Nicola Edwards and "The Vegetables We Eat" by Gail Gibbons. I especially liked the latter of those. The book described and gave examples of the eight groups of vegetables, how they are planted, how they get to the stores, and how to plant and tend your own vegetable garden. It had great illustrations as well. I'd highly recommend it!

We read "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" by Beatrix Potter. As I read the story, the kids had to raise their hand each time I read the name of a vegetable. Then we made a list of all the vegetables mentioned in the story and Madison drew a picture of Mr. McGregor's garden based on our list.

We read "The Carrot Seed" by Ruth Krauss and Madison illustrated her own pictures from the story.

We read "From the Garden" by Michael Dahl, which is a counting book about growing food. A fun feature about this book is that on each page, you can search for the hidden number in the picture. It also had some fun facts about vegetables at the end of the book.
We also made our foam, lowercase "v" in the shape of a couple vegetables (a pea pod and a carrot).

We read a fun book titled "Scarlette Beane" by Karen Wallace. It's a story about a little girl named Scarlette, who possesses the power to grow huge vegetables in her garden. Scarlette decided to grow a big vegetable castle for her parents to live in, so for our snack, we had a variety of vegetables in the shape of a house.

Madison also drew her version of the vegetable castle.

In the book "Frog and Toad Together" by Arnold Lobel, we read the chapter titled "The Garden".
We also read "The Vegetable Group" by Mari C. Schuh and reviewed The Food Pyramid, with an emphasis on the vegetable group of course.

Letter V Word Search
(http://www.first-school.ws/t/word-search/alphabet/v.htm)
Letter V Tracing Page
(http://www.dltk-teach.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/image/btracev.gif)

I found these vegetable pictures on www.makinglearningfun.com, and we used them to play a game of "Go Fish".

From Caterpillar to Butterfly

This week was crazy busy around here with so many non-homeschooling activities going on. We did manage to accomplish school most of the days, but not all. However, I feel like we accomplished what needed to be accomplished, and we had a lot of fun learning about butterflies.

The theme for this lesson was "God can make me new". Just as God makes a new creation when he forms a butterfly from a caterpillar, he also makes us new creations when we are in Christ Jesus (2 Corinthians 5:17). We talked about what that meant and ways that we can demonstrate that concept in our lives.

My printer was out of ink all week so I was unable to print off any extra butterfly-themed worksheets/activities, except for one. I felt like we had enough activities to do without them, even though there were several other great ideas I had found online to do.

Butterfly snacks made from apples, carrots, grapes, and raisins

This was the one page I had printed prior to my ink depletion.
One side of this butterfly was already drawn and Madison had to draw the other side to look the same.
(www.tlsbooks.com)

We read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle and Madison created her own version of the book.

Showing the egg on a leaf

A caterpillar is born, and he eats through one strawberry...

...two blueberries and three watermelons...

...four ice cream cones and five chickens...

...six apples, and then he builds his cocoon.

In the end, a beautiful butterfly emerges.

"Fancy Nancy Bonjour, Butterfly" by Jane O'Connor

"The Butterfly Alphabet" by Kjell B. Sandved - an AWESOME book where we could see each letter of the alphabet hidden in the patterns of real butterfly wings.

We made our lowercase "b" into a butterfly.
(the idea for the letter "b" butterfly was from http://totallytots.blogspot.com/2010/06/now-i-know-my-abcs-b-is-for-butterfly.html, but I did modify our version a little)

All great books that talked about the life cycle of a butterfly:

"Bella: A Butterfly's Story" by Joanne Randolph
"The Life Cycle of a Butterfly" by Colleen A. Sexton
"Caterpillar to Butterfly" by Camilla de la Bedoyere

We made a craft depicting the life cycle of a butterfly.
Egg: I cut out some leaves and the kids glued hole-punched pieces of paper on them.
Caterpillar: I cut an egg carton in half and the kids painted it. We added pipe cleaners for the antennas.
Pupa: I cut an egg carton into a section of three, and glued two of those sections together. The kids painted them brown and we hung them from a tree branch.
Butterfly: Another three-section from an egg carton, painted and glued onto construction paper wings.

Madison's life cycle of a butterfly craft

One final activity that we did to demonstrate the life cycle of a butterfly was a reenactment. I had the kids curl up in a tight ball for the egg stage. Then when they became caterpillars, they slowly unfolded and crawled around on their bellies pretending to eat a lot. They made their cocoon out of a blanket and covered up with it. When they emerged from their cocoon, they wore my daughter's dress-up butterfly wings. They absolutely loved this game and we played it many times over. Even today, having moved on from our butterfly lesson, they still asked if they could play the "butterfly game". They definitely have a good grasp on a butterfly's life cycle now!

Rockin' It

Continuing on with our unit study on rocks and minerals...


One of the features we discussed about rocks was that they are not alive. We talked about what it meant to be alive, gave examples of things that were alive and things that were not alive, then I had Madison draw pictures of both categories.

Not Alive
The things she came up with were a pencil, paper, a shirt, pants, shoes, a volcano, a car, a house, rocks, a chair, a dresser, and a TV.

In her Alive category, she drew pictures of girls, a flower, grass, a dog, a duck, and a bird.

For a fun art project the kids painted rocks, then I painted the letters of their names on them.

We are attempting to make rock candy. I realize that this project takes some time, and as you can see, our string only has a few little candy crystals on it. Hopefully they will grow larger because my kids are really excited about this!

The recipe we used for the rock candy came from this site: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Rock-Candy

We talked about crystals and about the various things that are made from crystals.

I found this crystal growing kit at our Family Dollar store, and like our rock candy, we are still in the process of seeing our crystals grow.

Here is what they look like as of today.

We spent one day discussing volcanoes in depth. We read through this book, "Volcanoes" and talked about how volcanoes are made of rock, and lava (magma) is hot, melted rock.

I really wanted to show the kids how a volcanic rock floats, and my husband thought he might have found a volcanic rock for us. It definitely looked like one, however, when we put it in water, it sunk. I guess looks can be deceiving.

We created our own volcano out of homemade play dough. We put baking soda inside it, then we poured tinted vinegar into it. The kids really had fun watching our volcano "erupt".

Here is the video of our volcano erupting.

One final rock-themed activity that I wanted to accomplish was reading the old folk story "Stone Soup" and then making our own stone soup for supper one day. I requested the book from the library quite some time ago but it still hasn't come in, and we are ready to move on from our rock lesson. I think what I might have to do is find the story online and read it to the kids, because I just don't know how much longer the book is going to take to come in at the library.

Our next theme is Jewels/Gems, so it should be a pretty easy transition from rocks and minerals.

P is for Penguin

We have begun our P/penguin unit, focusing particularly on the Emperor penguins. Our words to remember are, "I show love to everyone, especially my family" and a key verse we talked about was Romans 12:10: "Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honor one another above yourselves."

We talked about our families and how God wants us to be kind to everyone in our family. He wants us to always love them, even though sometimes it may be very hard. An example of this is the Emperor penguin father. After the mother lays the egg, the father puts the egg on his feet to keep it warm with his body. For two months, the father stands on the ice and snow in Antarctica, with the egg on his feet, and he doesn't eat a single thing that entire time. We all decided that we wouldn't do very well as an Emperor penguin!

Here are some penguin-themed activities that we did today:

"The Emperor's Egg" by Martin Jenkins is a great children's book that describes the parental behavior of Emperor penguins. It focuses on how the male keeps the egg warm until it hatches, and it describes how the parents care for the chick after it is born.

After reading about Emperor penguins and how the male penguins are wonderful fathers, taking care of the egg in the blistering cold, the kids made a card for the wonderful father in their lives. On the front, they drew pictures of an Emperor penguin father with the egg on its feet. We wrote "A Wonderful Father"

and the inside says "That is what you are!"
Madison also drew a picture of her and Noah on the inside of the card. Nate sure loved the cards!

Penguin coloring pages

A penguin number game. I said a number on the page and Madison had to find the number and put a little colored chip on it.
(www.makinglearningfun.com)

Letter P Word Search and Handwriting Tracing Page
(http://www.first-school.ws/t/word-search/alphabet/p.htm)
I have also began teaching the basics of monetary values. Today we learned about the penny and what it is worth.

We talked about where penguins live, in Antarctica. We looked up Antarctica in our Children's World Atlas, found where it was located on the globe, then labeled it on our world map picture.

We also read a book called "Icebergs" by Jenny Wood that described many iceberg facts, stories, and activities.

I demonstrated with ice cubes how a large portion of an iceberg is actually unseen, under the water. We talked about how icebergs can be very dangerous to ships because so much of them can't be seen.

Our penguin treats, made from raiding the Halloween candy! Snicker bars (with vanilla cake frosting on them) for the bodies, a couple different types of chocolate Tootsie Rolls for the wings and the heads, orange Tootsie Rolls for the feet and beaks, and Smarties for the eggs. The kids really enjoyed these for dessert after lunch!

More on penguins tomorrow!