Holbrook Heroes: More About Me

This week we pretty much finished up our All About Me unit. We read several books about families and made a big family tree. This could have become a lot more complicated than I made it because we have some crazy branches in our family tree. However, I kept it simple for them, and we came up with a somewhat leafy tree.

We tried to make a house out of blocks and a family out of playdoh, but that project didn't work out so well. The point was to discuss the roles of each family member (in our family) using the playdoh as models. I had no idea how Ungifted my children are at playdoh creations. All they know how to do is pick it apart into a million pieces and combine colors to the point of turning it all a reddish brown. I foresee a day of playdoh in our future just to teach them how to mold it like normal children!

A portion of our "family". The boys got as far as making flattened images of themselves
in blue. I had to help them mush the body parts together because they kept falling off.
The small blob of blue on the left is supposed to be their baby brother-to-be. And, of course
they didn't want Sparky left out (who needs Mom and Dad, right?), and insisted I build the dog.

The boys also did a "Me Glyph" and learned that a glyph is kind of like a graph, but can show several variables about a person. If you had the legend to their glyphs, you would know by looking at their glyphs: if they are boys or girls, how many people are in their family, what kind of books they like to read, if they have pets, what their favorite color is, and how old they are.

Sawyer and his Me Glyph

Hayden and his Me Glyph

Last, but not least, in the About Me unit was a measuring of body parts using crayons. They had little worksheets that they filled in the answers to (how many crayons is....your arm....your finger....your foot, etc), and then they attempted to draw a picture of each body part. This will go in their About Me books.

Gotta love the "thumbs up" from Sawyer.

Since Groundhog's Day was this week, Hayden did a full day of just groundhog stuff. This made for a pretty fun day. We measured his shadow three times: at 9:15am, 12:15pm, and 3:15pm. He got to see how the length of his shadow changed, as well as the angle. The other math activity he did was rolling two dice, adding the sum, and then coloring in the spot on the groundhog picture. Toward the end of this activity, I allowed him to either add 1 or subtract 1 to from the sum to see if it gave him an answer that could be colored in because he kept rolling the same numbers over and over for some reason.

The real fun part of this activity was watching Hayden's position change a million times. I can't imagine how bored and inattentive this guy would be if he had to sit in a desk all day long. Here are a few pictures of what he did during this 15 minute math activity:

Position 1

Position 2

Position 3

And, please note, it's not like I don't provide a chair for him to sit in. He just chooses to not use it. It stays tucked neatly under the table pretty much all the time.

We also did a rhyming word activity on the chalkboard. I wrote Groundhog Day on the board and then wrote a bunch of short sight words down below. After circling "hog" in one color and "day" in another, I had Hayden circle the words in the right colors that rhymed with each of the words. Afterwards, he decided he wanted to cross out the words that didn't rhyme with either.

For a fun art activity, we made groundhog thumbprints. I had another art activity planned as well, but we didn't have enough time to do it. So, we'll save it for next year.

The rest of the week, we did a lot of our regular activities for each of the subjects as well as a few new activities. I began these Flash Fluency Cards with Hayden to help him with learning his sight words. This is working out great for him! There are 4 levels to this testing, the first being Tide Pool. To each level, there are 10 cards to read through. If you click on the link, you will see the full instructions on how to perform the testing. For Hayden, if he passes a card, I give him a star sticker on that card to indicate he has passed it as well as a sticker in his treasure box sticker book. When he goes on to the next card, I still have him read the cards he has passed so he will not forget what he has learned. In one week, he has made it to card 3 in the first level. It's very exciting for him which, in turn, makes it very exciting for me!

In addition to the Flash Fluency Cards, I've also started him on his first emergent readers. I don't think that I mentioned it in last week's post, but he has now read 2 books! Last week, he read Puppy Dog by Sue Graves, a book we used to read to him when he was younger. It's very simple to read, and he was familiar with it. So, I thought it'd be a good book to start with. This week, he read I See, You Saw by Nurit Karlin, an easy reader with a lot of repetition and homonyms. We read through these books once each day, and by the end of each week, he was able to read it on his own. For each book he reads on his own, I've made an "I Can Read!" caterpillar that gets a new body segment with the book written on it. When he reaches 10 books, he gets to pick out a book from the book store to buy.

Other fun stuff we did this week: