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!
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