It's All About Me and Playing Games

This week I started an All About Me unit.  I actually started one of these last year, but ended up doing so much of it myself, that I decided to put it on hold until the boys were willing and able to complete a lot of it themselves.  I know this is a unit that is typically done at the beginning of the school year, but this seemed a good time to do it because I can segue into types of families, the new baby coming, caring and loving individuality in our friends, etc.

To start with, we are making All About Me books.  This seemed like a good time to introduce parts of a book to them as well.  So, we had book vocabulary this week:  cover, title, author, etc.  The boys each made a cover for their book with their photos, and they decorated them with stickers and coloring.  The pages they did for their book this week included:  Name and age page, Address page, I know my telephone number page, and a Height & Weight page.  For each page, I glued photos that pertained to the topic, and they each traced what I had written down.  In addition, we read two books about a little boy (tiger in one, Mercer Mayer's Critter in the other) growing up.  It talked about what they couldn't do and what they could do, and what they would be able to do when they got older.  After those books, we did a page on "When I Get Bigger" in which each boy would help me fill in the blanks of a paragraph I had written.

Sawyer's paragraph (his answers in green):

I can watch Barney and pet Sparky, but I can't mess with the remote control.
I still can't light the fireplace or climb up the slide, but I can hug Mommy.
I wish I was fourteen years old because then I could do P.E.
I am big enough to play Sonic & Sega, but not big enough to work out.

Hayden's paragraph (his answers in red):


I can play cards and cars, but I can't light the fireplace.
I still can't drive a car or cook dinner, but I can play with playdoh.
I wish I was nine because then I could play a different game system.
I am big enough to do puzzles, but not big enough to do some board games.

Tracing our address 

Learning our address by playing "Pizza Delivery"

Picking out the numbers for our telephone number

Once we have completed our books, I will post more photos of the books themselves.  This is a really fun unit, especially for this age.  

We also played a lot of board games and puzzles for our math and language arts this week.  I was trying to make a week of games because I knew it was going to be one of those weeks where sit-down work was just not going to cut it for us.  The pizza delivery game that I found for learning your address was loads of fun for the boys.  I was blown away by how much they enjoyed it.  I think we all took turns ringing the doorbell and/or answering the door and/or shouting out, "Pizza delivery for blah blah blah address!!" for at least 15-20 minutes.  

The other games we played were:

Match it Math Puzzle

Scrabble Spelling - Hayden spelled out his spelling words with the scrabble
tiles, wrote them down, said them, and then added up their sums.

Super Why ABC Board Game

Dominoes (Our Way) - We built off each other's dominoes by matching
the same number of dots.  The only rule was you couldn't have two different
number of dots touching each other in any way.

After the domino game, Hayden picked out two dominoes to copy onto this worksheet.  Typically,
you'd pick just one domino out and write the four problems in the fact family, but since we haven't
discussed negative numbers in detail yet, I had him  do one addition and one subtraction problem with each.

And finally, we finished up Hayden's magnet lap book.  The lap books require a lot of work on my part since Hayden is not completely writing independently yet.  He traces a lot of what I write, or he colors pictures.  Plus, I make sure he can answer certain questions before we put a new mini book in it, even though, I'm the one who makes the mini books at this point.  However, he's seeing how they're done, and he's enjoying the completed project.  So, I think that once he's able to start doing these on his own without my assistance, I'll start seeing a lot more individuality in his lap books.

Front of the Magnet Lapbook

Inside the lap book.  From top left to right:
Types of magnets mini book, My Experiments photos, Compass mini book
From bottom outside flaps to inside:
Magnetic vs. not magnetic experiment, Vocabulary flagbook, North & South poles pull-out.

Inside lap book with mini books opened.