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!