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...

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.

Q: Quail

Our letter Q unit dealt with birds, particularly quails. We read the Bible story from Numbers 11 about how the Israelites wailed and complained because they didn't have the kind of food they wanted. God was very angry with them and even though he sent them quail to eat, he also sent a plague on them where many of them died. We talked about how God does not like complaining and that we need to learn to be thankful and content with whatever God gives us.

Our words to remember were "I don't grumble or complain; I am thankful" and we made quail-shaped badges with those words on them. We also read the following verses from the Bible:

"...I have learned to be content in whatever the circumstances. I know what it is to be in need and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want. I can do everything through him who gives me strength." Philippians 4:11-13

"Do everything without complaining or arguing." Philippians 2:14


We weren't able to do all the activities recommended in the curriculum for this unit, such as going outside and looking for feathers and listening for different types of birds. Most of the birds around here are gone for the Winter, so that makes it a little difficult. We were able to do a few fun bird-related activities though...

We talked about how feathers have a protective oil on them. To demonstrate this, we made two feather out of construction paper. With the green feather, we just put water on it and watched the water soak into the paper. With the red feather, we first coated it with cooking oil and then dropped some water on it.

See how the water on the red paper feather beaded up? We discussed why this would be beneficial and helpful for birds.

A letter Q dot to dot page
(www.makinglearningfun.com)

A letter Q/q tracing page
(http://www.dltk-teach.com/t.asp?b=m&t=http://www.dltk-teach.com/alphabuddies/image/btraceq.gif)

We read "The Biggest House in the World" by Leo Lionni, which was a sad story of a snail who was not content. After reading the story, Madison painted two pictures of the snail. One of the little snail and his house (the one on the right side), and another of the little snail with the biggest house in the world (the one on the left side). We talked about which snail was content and what happened to both snails.

"Even an Ostrich Needs a Nest" by Irene Kelly was a fun book describing all the various types of nests that birds build, and the various materials they use to build them. There were so many fascinating and interesting nests that I never knew about. Look up sometime how a female tailorbird sews a leaf together to make a tiny pouch for her nest. It's amazing!

In "Yertle the Turtle and Other Stories" by Dr. Seuss, we read the story of Gertrude McFuzz. Gertrude has only one feather and is not happy. She eats greedily from a pill-berry vine and ends up with so many feathers that she can't fly. Therefore, she learns to be content. After reading the story, we compared it to the story we read in Numbers 11 and then I had Madison illustrate the story of Gertrude McFuzz.

Madison's illustrations.

The Eyewitness Book "Bird" by David Burnie had a great deal of information about birds (and every aspect pertaining to them). It was a bit wordy so we just looked through some of the pictures and talked about them.

We read "Birds" by Kevin Henkes and attempted to make our foam lowercase "q" into a quail. (See? It's a quail. Really it is. Just squint a little. And maybe tilting your head slightly will help.)

The kids really enjoyed playing a Name-the-Bird game together. We sat in a circle and one person had a ball. That person had to say the name of a bird and then throw the ball to someone else. The person who caught the ball had to say the name of a bird and throw it, and so on. It was fun hearing the various types of birds that they came up with, and it was a game they wanted to play for several days. (It worked well to do this game after we had read some books on the different types of birds.)


We only have one more lesson in this curriculum and then we will have reached the end. We have decided to move on with 1st Grade material, even though the school year is only half over. I know it seems crazy to have moved through Kindergarten in just four months, but in our defense, Madison already had a jump-start on a lot of the things emphasized in this curriculum, so we ended up skipping much of it. I have a feeling that the 1st Grade material will be a good level for her to be at, and I honestly doubt that we will make it through 1st Grade in as fast a time that we did Kindergarten. We'll be continuing on with My Father's World, and I look forward to seeing my daughter continuing to excel in school. I'm so proud of what she has accomplished and learned, and I definitely consider our homeschooling journey a success, thus far.

So stay tuned for our final Kindergarten lesson to come!

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".

Exceptional X

Our "X" lesson dealt with foxes. We talked about how in many stories, the fox is typically portrayed as sneaky and tricky. He tends to lie and isn't someone to be trusted. We discussed how we can always trust God's Word to be true. If we listen and obey his Word, God makes us wise. Our words to remember with this lesson were: "God's Word makes me wiser than my enemies."

"Your commands make me wiser than my enemies, for they are ever with me." Psalm 119:98

We read "The Gingerbread Man" by Sue Graves and made little stick puppets of the characters from the book.
(the stick puppet pictures came from www.makinglearningfun.com)

We then put on a puppet show (several times, actually) of the story, using our stick puppets.

A Gingerbread Man dot-to-dot and drawing grid page
(Both pages from www.makinglearningfun.com)

I had forgotten that we had a bingo dobber until the kids found it one day recently. The dobber has now found its way into our school supply drawer and I discovered that a great way to keep Noah entertained during school time is to let him use it with these great alphabet printable sheets from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

The two nonfiction books we read:
"Fox Magic for Kids" by Judy Schuler
"Foxes" by Mary Ann McDonald

After learning that foxes are in the same animal family as dogs, we compared and contrasted the two.

We discussed where foxes live in the world, and also about dens in general.
After reading the nonfiction books shown above, Madison colored areas on a world map, showing where the various types of foxes (Kit Fox, Red Fox, Gray Fox, Arctic Fox) live.
(http://www.homeschoolshare.com/docs32465/fox/map.pdf)

Madison drew a picture of a den on the second page. She was also practicing writing some of her letters in fancy-form, in case you were wondering about that!
(http://www.homeschoolshare.com/docs32465/fox/dens%20%282%29.pdf)

A fox math worksheet
(www.homeschoolshare.com)
and a fox/letter x dot-to-dot page
(www.makinglearningfun.com)

We read "Three Aesop Fox Fables" by Paul Galdone, which included The Fox and the Grapes, The Fox and the Stork, and The Fox and the Crow. We discussed each fable's lesson and what it meant.
To go along with The Fox and the Crow, Madison did a word search using words from the storyline.
(Word search found on http://pbskids.org/lions/cornerstones/pdf/foxactivities.pdf)

We read "Rosie's Walk" by Pat Hutchins, which actually had easy enough wording for Madison to sound out the words and read to me.
We made our foam lowercase "x" into a fox.