D is for Dinosaur!

Hayden's favorite week yet.  This is actually a 2 week unit on dinosaurs.  The first week went by great!  We started off the week with making a KWL chart on all the things we know and want to know about dinosaurs.  Hayden already thinks he knows everything about dinosaurs.  Some of the things he already "knows" is: 

• plant eaters walk on 4 legs
• meat eaters walk on 2 legs
• some flying dinosaurs lived in caves and mountains
• Jurassic is one time period (this, I was actually surprised he already knew)
• Velociraptors and Oviraptors lived in the desert (?)

He couldn't think of anything he wanted to learn about dinosaurs (like I said, he already thinks he knows everything).  So, I encouraged a list of things that I planned on teaching him such as where certain dinosaurs lived, when dinosaurs first appeared and when they disappeared, the sizes of different dinosaurs, etc.  The only question he came up with on his own was "How long did it take for dinosaur eggs to hatch?"  Now, if anyone can help me with THAT question, that would be great because so far, I haven't found anything on that one!

The things we did this week to learn (more) about dinosaurs was:

• I made a timeline of the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods, and we hung up 2 dinosaurs each day on the section when they were alive.  We learn where they lived and find it on the globe, what they ate, how big they were, etc.
• We started an experiment with a boiled egg in vinegar.  Each day we feel it to see how it's changed, and after a few weeks, it's supposed to feel all soft and leathery like a real dinosaur egg.
• We made paper machè dinosaur eggs by blowing up balloons with a tiny dinosaur inside it and covering it in newspaper.  I learned a lot about paper machè on this project:  first, it is really messy, and I had to have the boys "assist" me on them.  Second, if you pop the balloon before you paint your project, it will cave in on itself.  One of the boys now has an egg that was "stepped on by another dinosaur".



Painting the dinosaur eggs



• I saved a bunch of chicken bones and cleaned them up really well.  Then, I buried them in their dinosaur sandbox in the backyard.  The boys used hand trowels, magnifying glasses, and big paintbrushes to "clean" and observe the dinosaur bones they found.  Sawyer's attention span didn't last long with this, but Hayden was all over it.  He was determined to find every single bone in that sandbox.  I finally had to help him out or he would've been out there all day!

•  I also found out approximately what the size of a Tyrannosaurus Rex footprint was and drew a big footprint on our back patio.  The boys had to estimate how many of their footprints would fit inside the T-Rex footprint.  Then, I traced their feet on construction paper and cut out a whole bunch of them.  They filled up the dinosaur foot print as best as they could (after a while, I got tired of cutting out feet - it took a LOT more than I realized it would).  We figured out it would have taken between 90-100 of their own feet to fill up that dinosaur footprint!

• And last, but not least, of our dinosaur activities for the week was a Dino Drop Activity (another math lesson here).  I got this idea from another blogger, http://www.thepetersonparty.blogspot.com/.  I enjoy reading her posts because she's got lots of great ideas that she does with her two girls who are around my kids' ages.  This particular activity that she did was the Dime Drop Activity - I just substituted miniature dinosaurs instead of dimes to fit our theme.  For this activity, you get a jar and estimate how many of your dimes/dinosaurs you can drop into the jar.  Afterwards, you record your outcome (how many went in and how many didn't).  With the dimes, you can talk about how much a dime is and count by 10s to 100, but with the dinosaurs, that's not really possible.  So, ours was kind of a dumbed down version of the activity.  Regardless, it was fun, and the boys got some math counting skills out of it.



Let The Art Projects Begin

Okay, so we are really not artists.  Neither of my boys have a lot of patience for it, whether it's coloring with crayons, painting with brushes or fingers (or whatever), or dealing with glue and tiny pieces of paper.  So, it's my goal to come up with projects that they will be willing to do for more than 5 minutes, and hopefully feign some sort of excitement at the prospect of creating something new.

So far, the projects that I have set up for them to do seem to be going well, but I get a lot of complaints from my oldest when a little bit of glue or paint gets on his fingers.  Meanwhile, the younger one insists on making his entire arm a work of art with the purple paint (since that is his favorite color).  So, it's a work in progress!

Below are some photos (and some with descriptions) of the projects we've done so far. 

The apple mosaic to go with our first week of school.  This was Hayden's.  It didn't turn out too bad.  I cut strips of red and green construction paper, and he got to cut small squares for himself.  This gave him the opportunity to work on his scissor skills.  Sawyer did the same, only keep in mind that at 2 1/2 years old, his scissors skills have a long way to go, and he had enough patience to cover about 1/4 of his apple.  Still, it's hanging on the wall, and he's happy with it.

Binoculars for our 5 senses week.  Obviously, we were talking about sight this day.  This, they enjoyed because all their decorations were stickers.  They had several to choose from, and since Hayden loves superheroes and dinosaurs, that's what he decided to put all over his.  And, of course, his favorite color is pink.  So, we had to have pink binoculars!  Once these were dried and ready, the boys loved using them to "find" objects around the house.  I think because of this project, they think that they can play with every art project they make

Salty the Fish Craft from DLTK's Craft website (noted in Week 3's post).  I printed out the fish and we used kosher salt colored with koolaid to decorate.  Because Hayden was so freaked out about the thought of using his finger to spread glue around his fish, his got a little patchy (see left photo).  BUT!  It turned out pretty well for a kid who's not into art.  Sawyer had no problems putting glue ALL over his fish (see right photo).  I had to help him tone it down a bit.  We could have gone into a lot more detail, using aluminum foil balls to make bubbles, talk about fish living in the water, how they breathe, etc.  But this project was best left finished where we stopped.  We were dangerously approaching their time limit as far as glue and colors were concerned.

This was the best project so far.  Cat in the Hat lifesaver hats.  I bought a bag of the lifesaver candies and let them pick three colors to make a pattern with.  Disclaimer:  I had to also let them suck on one or two throughout the course of making this project in order to keep them from eating their patterns.  Making the hats turned out to be a pretty sticky project, and when we added the glue to hold it all together, it actually slipped around a lot.  So, this one required a lot of Mommy's hands-on help.  For the base of the hat, I used milk jug caps and painted them (well, really, I only had to paint the purple one because the other one was already green). 

These stayed on their desks for the week, and then I threw them out because I was afraid of attracting bugs if they stayed around much longer, but I imagine you can probably spray them with shellac or modpodge or whatever that stuff is that covers food items and gives them that nice shiny look and makes them last forever.

And so ends the beginning of art projects in the Holbrook household for this year.  The next round of art projects ought to be pretty entertaining.  I'm already learning a lot from what we've done so far.  Trial and error, right?

Week Three and Counting

Our third week of homeschool started off with a bang.  The letter Cc was our guide, along with Dr. Seuss and a few of his wonderful books.  I tried to make "Safety" our theme for the week, and for the most part, it worked out, but I feel like I could have done a much better job than I did.  We'll probably do this theme again in the second half of the year.

Monday's focus was Stranger Safety.  Boy, do we have a long way to go on this one!  We read the Cat in the Hat, made a fun lifesaver hat for art, and we talked about what to do when a stranger knocks on your door.  The boys did pretty well with this one, but when I branched out to question, "What do you do when someone you don't know gives you candy?" or "If someone you don't know tells you that your mommy wants you to come with them, do you go?", their answers were scarily wrong.  So, we discussed this a lot throughout the week, and I found another book on the Berenstain Bears that covered the subject of strangers as well.  Like I said, we'll be revisiting this subject throughout the year.

Cat in the Hat lifesaver hats

On Tuesday, we talked about vehicle safety.  The boys soared through this one.  We read The Foot Book which, of course, is all about feet (well, really, about opposites).  We covered crossing the street, other ways to get places besides using your feet, using seat belts, wearing bike helmets, etc.  Since the Foot Book is all about opposites, we focused on that during language arts, and for math we pulled every pair of shoes out of their closet to do some activities with (and boy, do they have a lot of shoes!).  We counted them individually and by two's.  We talked about who had more, who had less.  And they each used a shoe to measure some objects around the house.

Wednesday was Hop on Pop.  There wasn't much I could tie to safety on this one.  So, I talked to them about what to do in an emergency, how to dial 911, and what to say.  We also got lucky with one of our playgroups because they just happened to have scheduled a trip to the police station that day.  The boys got to tour the station, see (and hear) a police car up close, talk to the officers, see where they hold prisoners (there was no one there or otherwise we wouldn't have gotten to see that), and the officers gave all the kids a baggie with police badges, a safety booklet, and several other fun things.  At home, we studied rhyming words and identified some in the book (they popped bubble wrap every time they heard rhyming words said), and we also measured how far they could hop on each foot.



Checking out where the bad guys sit in the police car!


On Thursday, we reviewed everything we had talked about that week before I introduced the last book, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish.  Of course, this was our water safety day, and I am ashamed to say that I didn't finish this lesson because I got hit with a nasty bug that had me down for the count.  It was all I could do to get through language arts where we found more rhyming words/phonograms throughout the book.  We used the feltboard to put together all the words we could find on certain pages with same endings (like -ad, -ish, -ump, etc.).  For the record, we did a similar activity on Monday that I forgot to mention.  Oh yes, and I did manage to get them through another art project for this day which I found on DLTK's Crafts for Kids.  My original plan was to go through a whole lesson of fish in the water, tie it to water safety, etc, but after mixing the salt with colors and working with both of them to get it all done right, I didn't have the energy.  I haven't gotten a picture of the finished products yet, but I will get to that in the next couple of days I hope. 

Rhyming word/Phonogram feltboard activity

So, next week, I'm going to have to make up for this one.  My plan is to have a separate post for all our art projects in addition to the one of the books we have read.

By the way, all my lessons this week came from http://www.readwritethink.org/ and the book, Teaching With Favorite Read-Alouds in Kindergarten.  I probably could have done a whole month on Dr. Seuss alone, and perhaps another year, I will definitely do that.  There were so many books to choose from and so many different activities for every subject available that it was hard to choose which ones to do.

Thanks for reading, and happy homeschooling to you! 
 

Second Week and We're Still Alive!

We started out our second week talking about the letter Bb, and I introduced the 5 Senses as our theme for the week.  The first day was probably the smoothest of our week, probably because that was the only day that I actually reviewed my lesson plans the day before so I'd be prepared!

Monday was fun.  We talked about sight, and I read the book, "Brown Bear Brown Bear, What Do You See?" as our introduction to this sense.  The whole day revolved around this story.  I got a lot of information from http://www.makinglearningfun.com/ for this book.  Just about every activity we did came from this site.  The first thing I did was read the book.  Then we did a felt storyboard with it that I made from this website, and the boys loved it so much, we did it several times so they could take turns putting up the animals.  Sawyer loved the book, and kept reading it to himself out loud over and over again.

For math that day, I printed out a couple of sheets from this same website of the bear with dots labeled
0-20, and they got to cover each number as they told me what they were (or alternately, I would ask,
"Where is the number 16?").  We also did an m&m sorting activity with a few of the animals from the
story, and Hayden graphed the results.  This was probably their favorite thing all week, primarily
because it involved getting to eat candy when they were done!

To further the whole "sight" portion of the lesson, the boys made binoculars from toilet paper rolls and had to search for objects in the house by looking through them, and we also did an Eye Spy Bottle activity (also from http://www.makinglearningfun.com/).  For this, the boys would look for little pictures of the animals in a water bottle filled with rice, and they had to color in each animal on a separate sheet of paper as they found them.

So that was our first day of the week!  The rest of the week, most of my lesson plans came from Paso Partners, a link that I got lucky with searching around for stuff on the 5 senses.  They have a lot of cool plans for grades K-3 that are free:  books to read, science activities, math and language arts, art projects, etc.  It's great! For the sense of touch, we read "Ferdinand the Bull" and we painted with tempera paints that I put extracts into to make them aromatic.  Hayden is not a big fan of free form art, so I let him paint some of his monster trucks.  Whatever works, right?

For the sense of hearing, we made a "telephone" out of paper cups and fishing string, and we listened through paper towel rolls at certain sounds.  For a math activity on that one, the boys would have to listen to me tell them a pattern (i.e. "purple, purple, orange..." "triangle, square, circle...."), and they'd have to tell me what I should say next.

For the sense of touch, we had 3 bowls of water - cold, room temp, and pretty warm - that they boys had to stick their hands and then their feet into, and we talked about how it felt (temperature and texture, etc).  I also blindfolded the boys and let them grab objects out of a bag one at a time.  They had to compare and contrast what they were holding, or tell me if it was the same or different item.

And finally, for the sense of taste, we did an activity to help them learn the four main taste centers of the tongue (salty, sweet, bitter, and sour).  Hayden was NOT cooperative with this activity because he did not like the idea of tasting things he knew he wouldn't like (i.e. banana peel and lemon) or things he just wasn't sure of.  I had plates for both of them with a couple of samples of each taste center.  Of course, brownies and m&m's were the favorite.  They had to taste each item and describe whether it was salty, sweet, sour, or bitter, and they had to describe where on the tongue they tasted it, etc. 

We also made patterned fruit kabobs for a math activity.  They enjoyed that, but didn't follow directions too well because they were only concerned with getting as much fruit on their stick as possible.  Not so much with making a pattern with them. 



For the record, we also read lots of books on the five senses which I have listed in the "Books We've Read" post.  We also did other letter Bb activities such as the mini book which comes from First-School Preschool Activities, Sawyer also had to make the letter Bb with marshmallows (I didn't have any dried beans in my pantry) as well as a hidden letter coloring activity.  Hayden had to practice writing the letter, and he worked on his ABC magazine cutout book where he chooses a certain number of pictures I have cut out from magazines and he glues them on the appropriate page that the picture's word begins with.  Then I write the word for him in the book next to the picture.

All in all, it was another very productive week.  I think I crammed in way more than I probably should have, but we still had fun with it, and hopefully, the boys retained a smidgen of what they learned!

August Books We've Read

The majority of the books I plan on posting here are books we read during the homeschool day.  We actually read dozens of books a week during quiet time, before bedtime, first thing in the morning, or basically whenever the boys pick up a book they want to hear read to them.  But for now, I am just listing the books that we focus on for our homeschool themes.


Week 4-5
For these weeks, we studied dinosaurs.  This is one of Hayden's favorite subjects.  I don't think he could ever learn enough about the dinosaurs.  The books we read this week varied in reading level.  That way, Sawyer wouldn't get too bored with them.  Hayden prefers nonfiction, analytical type books when it comes to learning about a particular subject, but Sawyer can only handle the easy reading picture books that hopefully have lift-the-flap type interaction to keep things interesting!

Dinosaurs! by Gail Gibbons
Eye Wonder Dinosaur by Sarah Walker and Samantha Gray
Let's Look at Dinosaurs by Frances Barry (this was the flip-the-flap book that Sawyer liked)
Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte (from our personal library - a GIGANTIC lifelike photo book with great         descriptions of all kinds of dinosaurs)
I Wonder Why Dinosaurs by Judy Allen and Tudor Humphries (another flip-the-flap, but better for Hayden's age)
Velociraptor by Daniel Cohen
Dinosaur Food - Unearth the secrets behind dinosaur fossils by Rupert Matthews


Week 3
Dr. Seuss was our inspiration this week.  Most of the books we read were by him this week!

The Cat in the Hat
The Foot Book
One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish
Hop on Pop
The Berenstain Bears Learn About Strangers by Jan and Stan Berenstain
Carmen and the Letter C by Klingel and Noyed

Week 2
The second week's theme was the five senses.  Most of the books we read focused around that, but we also began reading individual books on letters of the alphabet and their sounds.

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? by Bill Martin
Ferdinand the Bull by Munro Leaf
The Sense of Sight by Mari Shuh
How Sight Works by Sally Morgan
The Sense of Hearing by Mari Shuh
How Smell Works by Sally Morgan
How Touch Works by Sally Morgan
How Taste Works by Sally Morgan
Anna and the Letter Aa - Alphabet Friends by Cynthia Klingel and Robert Noyed
Bernard, Me, and the Letter Bb - Alphabet Friends by Cynthia Klingel and Robert Noyed

I really enjoyed the books on the five senses because they encouraged interaction for the children.  It wasn't just a "sit and read" book.  It had things for you to do throughout the course of reading the books which made it even more fun.

Week 1
Week 1's theme was about patriotism, the pledge of allegiance, and back to school.  Not much went on in the way of books this week, but here are they are:

The First American Flag by Kathy Allen
Eyewitness Books:  FLAG by William Crampton (this one was good just for the boys to see different examples of flags in general)
The Flag We Love by Pam Munoz Ryan
Meet Our Flag, Old Glory by April Jones Prince

Our First Week of Homeschool

We started off the month of August with our first official week in homeschooling.  I've gotta say that it was a little rocky, but we are at least off to a good start.  My goal is to make this blog a part of our homeschool portfolio, to help me keep track of what we've done, and to show others who may be interested what my boys are learning (and how they are learning it). 

So, I guess I will start off with giving a brief description of what our family is like and how we plan to do things (for this year, at least).  I have two boys: Hayden and Sawyer. 

Hayden will be 5 years old September 27th.  He loves math, and he LOVES science.  If we did nothing but science experiments all day, every day, he would be the happiest kid on earth.  Hayden does NOT like writing or reading at all.  However, he loves to be read to, and I am continually shocked by his ability to remember things he learns from having books read to him. 

Sawyer will be 3 years old September 12th.  He loves music in every form.  He was singing his ABCs before Hayden, and he attempts to sing songs along with me the first time he hears the song by watching my mouth and following along as best as possible.  His memory with songs is amazing.  He even sings along to "Defying Gravity" from the musical, Wicked, when it comes on the iPod in the car!  Unlike Hayden, Sawyer LOVES to read.  He can't yet, but he sure does try.  He remembers short books that are read to him a few times, and he will "read" them to himself or to Hayden (and Hayden loves to have Sawyer read to him).

So, with all that said, let me tell you a little bit about what we did for our first week of homeschool!

For our first week, I focused on teaching them about the Pledge of Allegiance and the American Flag.  They learned about the first flag vs. today's flag, what the stars and stripes stand for, how many there are, the colors of the flag, where to place your right hand, rules and etiquette of the flag, etc.  Hayden is working on putting together a lapbook of the United States flag.  I was hoping it would only take the first week, but I have learned that this is obviously not going to be the case! 

Each day we start off our school day by saying the pledge of allegiance.  After that, we go to the calendar and add another day, talk about the month, the days of the week, and the weather and season.  Then we focus on the nursery rhyme of the week.  The first week's nursery rhyme was "Mary Had A Little Lamb".  Each day we do something different with it (Find the letter of the week in the rhyme, clap to the syllables, listen for rhyming words, etc.).  Then we move on to a short rhythm instruments activity.  I'm using the book "101 Rhythm Instrument Activities for Young Children" and the boys love it.

Using the Pledge of Allegiance theme, we focused on the letter A this week in language arts.  Sawyer began putting together the first of his mini books, and Hayden traced the letter Aa's in the mini books he already put together last year.  We also used pretzel dough to form the letter A (and of course, eating it was the best part).  Other random things we did was play ABC Bingo and worked on matching lower case letters with their capital letters.

For math, we focused on the numbers 13 and 50, and came up with as many ways to add 2 numbers to get to the number 13 as we possibly could using toy cars as our visual aids.  Hayden became obsessed with one of my calculators and insisted on playing with it.  So, I let him use it to check our work.  We did AB, ABC, and AAB patterns with the colors red, white, and blue.  We also put together a venn diagram of America's first flag and the American flag today, talked about shapes (particularly the rectangle and triangle since those are the main shapes of flags), and we touched a little bit on the concept of symmetry.

So that's the main gist of our first week of school.  We did do a few art and music activities that I didn't post, but will post some in the future.  This is my first time ever creating a blog, and I'm hoping I will get better at it as I go along.  Thanks for reading, and happy schooling!