April Showers Bring May Flowers

Except in our neck of the woods apparently.  We saw maybe 5 days total of rain this month?  So, the last week and a half of schooling almost didn't make sense.  Thank goodness for the gardening aspect of it.

Here is the lowdown on what we accomplished these last 2 weeks:

Color the Rain Boots:

Hayden had to read the color word over each rain boot and color the boots that color.  While he worked on that, Sawyer put together a mini book of different colored umbrellas.

Handwriting:
Sawyer worked on prewriting skills by tracing lines that went from the watering can to the flowers on one page while Hayden did a Rainbow Roll and Write similar to one of his previous handwriting assignments.

Hayden traced his flash fluency card words with glitter glue one day,

and he also used the scrabble tiles to spell them out another day.  This activity is a double bonus because he can work on his addition as well.  

Reading:

The boys took turns figuring out the first letter sound of the pictures on this page and coloring it in.

Most of the letter sounds we worked on involved short vowel sounds.  On this activity, Hayden had to stamp the middle sound of each word.  While Hayden did this, Sawyer stamped a bunch of letter F's on raindrops.  

Hayden also completed his very first word search!

I used another day to let them play with playdoh while working on the short vowel sounds.  Sawyer made the letters A, E, and I while Hayden made words that had the short vowel sounds in the middle.

This was another opportunity to utilize my new pocket chart.  Hayden sorted out picture cards according to their middle sound.  I quickly learned that he confuses the short A and short I sounds a lot.  But for the most part, he did a pretty good job.  

Math:

Hayden worked on patterns and filled in the missing part at the end of each one while Sawyer did a size sequencing activity and put flowers in order from smallest to biggest.

Hayden also made fraction flowers.  Each flower center gave an example of a fraction (i.e. 1/2 yellow and 1/2 blue), and he would have to make each flower with that fraction of petals.  There was a worksheet that went along with it where you had to color in and fill in the blank of each fraction flower, but it made the activity too complicated and drawn out.  So, we just stuck to making the flowers.

Raindrop Money Sorting:  the boys flipped over cards to reveal either a penny, nickel, dime, or quarter.  Then, they had to put that coin in the correct umbrella.

Another Big and Small activity for Sawyer.  He had to circle the biggest item in each row and cross out the smallest item.  I think he's got this concept down pat.

Science:

Our science these last two weeks involved finishing up a couple of past projects as well as beginning the new one which is gardening.  We'll start with the past projects first.  The main one was the naked egg experiment.  After the one week stay in vinegar, this is what our naked egg looked like:

Look how HUGE it is!!

And this is what it looked like when we shined a flashlight behind it:

The other past project we were working on was a lizard lap book.  I don't have any pictures of this one.  It wasn't one of our most interesting lap books, but it was good enough to show what he had learned.

So, moving on to our new science unit: gardening!  One of my favorite things to do is gardening.  I love it, especially when everything grows the way it's supposed to!  Usually, I do this kind of thing on my own, but Hayden was interested in it.  So, we decided to incorporate it into our homeschool day.  Here is what we've accomplished so far:

We began our garden on the side of the house.  We did a combination of plants and seeds.  So, in our garden are eggplants, cucumbers, corn, peas, and okra.  These are the vegetables that Hayden specifically wanted to grow.  Honestly, we should have started this a month ago because it's so hot now already in Florida, but being 9 months pregnant and then having Riley join our family mid-March made it pretty impossible to get down and dirty (us being me, that is).  BUT!  We will see how it goes, right?

The next thing we did was plant some of those same seeds in clear plastic cups so Hayden could see the process of a see sprouting.   That was fun.  One of the cups got knocked down and broken one day before the seed really had a chance to germinate.  I figured it was a goner and just ignored it, but we were all surprised to see that it still sprouted.

Preparing the cups

These are the cups with the vegetable seeds that we planted in our garden:  cucumber on the left, corn on the top right, pea on the bottom left, and okra on the bottom right.  You can see that the pea is the one that fell off the table and busted, and yet, it still continued to grow.  Go peas!

Art:

I think our love of science is getting in the way of completing more art projects.  We really only did one art project these last two weeks.  The boys painted terra-cotta pots that they later planted flower seeds in.  Hayden has a lot more patience for this kind of thing than Sawyer, but Sawyer did request a fingerprinting activity.  So, I'm going to make more of an effort to incorporate art into our daily lessons.  And we will definitely be doing fingerprinting next week!

We also took a field trip to the Smith Family Farm in Hastings, Florida with our homeschool group.  The pictures from this field trip are in a separate post.