Happy Valentines Day!

Last week, I tried to make a good part of our lessons focus around Valentine's Day.  It didn't go as planned, but we managed to get some lessons done that way.   It was kind of a short week for us, but it was filled with lots of stuff to do!

Reading:
We had a few Valentine themed books to read this week, including Hayden's early reader, "I Love You, Dear Dragon" by Margaret Hillert.  We also read Minnie and Moo Will You Be My Valentine by Denis Cazet and The Sweetest Valentines by Jane E. Gerver.  Hayden's spelling words this week were Valentine related as well(and unfortunately, we are going to have to extend these words for the next couple of weeks because he hasn't had a lot of time to study them).

L is for Loooove!

ABC Heart Match Up activity
This turned out to be a bigger activity than I had anticipated.  He did a really good job matching all the upper case to lower case letters, but putting them in order was a colossal task.  I had to help him do it since he got bored with that idea very quickly.  Fortunately, he turned it into a game and didn't even  realize that he was making it even more challenging for himself by doing so!  He became stubborn, not wanting to tell me where the next letter was.  Instead, he got "sneaky" and tried to look at it without pointing, and he would say, "Ummmm...3rd row, pink heart, 4th one down".  Then I had to "find" it and say, "Whoa!! You're right!!"  

Hershey Kisses Similes and Adjectives
Because I like to torture my children, I gave them Hershey kisses at 9:30 in the morning and made them LOOK at them and describe them to me as if I had never seen a Hershey's kiss before.  They unwrapped them and described the sound of the wrapper crinkling.  They described the color, the smell, the feel, and FINALLY, they got to describe the way it tasted.  And just in case they couldn't remember, I let them try a second piece.  

Writing:
Writing was nothing short of torture this week.  So, it was kept pretty short and sweet (ha!).  Instead, we used our manual dexterity skills to work on valentines for Daddy and some friends, and we did a few other art activities as well.

Trace-Copy-Recall Spelling words for the week

Hayden's copywork this week:  Roses are Red poem.  He wrote it on a heartshaped piece of paper
and then we glued it to a red construction paper for a frame.

Writing a message on a valentine card.  "You make my heart flutter!"
(Awwwwwww....!)

The boys in their finished Valentine Hats and valentine bugs for Daddy.

Look how much we love each other!

Math:
Math was also slightly uneventful until we got to the end of the week.  Mostly, we stuck with Hayden's Right Start Math curriculum.  We worked with teen numbers, Hayden began making his own calendar, and......we finished the Cotter Ten Fractal!!!  Yayyyyy!!!

Sawyer making patterns with heart stickers

Hayden working on putting his calendar together

Game we played on Valentine's Day.  The boys built candy necklaces with
the candy they won.

Stringing up the goods.

Putting together the last of our ten triangles.

SUCCESS!!!!  1000 teeny tiny triangles!!!!!

First Week of February

School is rolling right along.  This week was pretty basic.  I fell back to some workbook activities for writing and reading (more with Sawyer than Hayden).  We had some fun art activities this week as well and a lot of outside playtime since the weather is so nice right now.

Reading:
Hayden learned about contractions this week.  The title of his reader was "It's Groundhog Day, Dear Dragon." So, using the title as the first example, we went from there.

Bee Contraction Match-Up activity 

Ice Cream Contractions.  I used the backside of our feltboard Ice Cream Addition.

For Sawyer, I've decided to take him back to reviewing the letters of the alphabet and their sounds.  He also colored and put together an early emergent reader which we read through (and will probably read through again next week.  I tried doing some Hooked on Phonics with him as well, but he wasn't entirely cooperative with it.  So, that didn't work out.  We'll go back to BOB books next week.  That seemed to work out better.

The Bee Book (pure coincidence that Hayden had the Bee Contractions)!

One of 3 letters that Sawyer reviewed this week.

Writing:
Our writing this week was mostly from workbooks, but we also did some activities to work on Sawyer's prewriting skills and his name.  Hayden also had his spelling words to work on that we did something different with and he ended the week with a test.

Spelling word stamping.  Each letter is traced with it's letter stamp.

Yarn Name.  What I thought would be a fun activity for him, actually turned
out to be a very challenging one.  He could not grasp the concept to start at
the end of a piece of yarn and follow along the letter line with it.  He kept
trying to put the whole piece of yarn on the letter at once.  He finally figured
it out by the end of his name.  

Hayden did the same thing with yarn for his spelling words.

Working in the workbook!

Line Mazes

Cutting out the line mazes

Math:

Sawyer didn't do much math this week.  He did mostly reading, writing, and art.  However, he did do MathSeeds on the computer.  It's a new element added to the Reading Eggs program that the boys do.  Hayden worked using his abacus differently to make large numbers. 

Building the number 4900

Art:
Since Valentine's Day is coming up, we did a couple of Valentine art projects.  The first was a heart painting in the style of Jim Dine.  The boys loved this one so much that they both asked to do a second one!  The second activity was handprints on a heart on a woven mat.  This was not as fun since the weaving was a bit difficult for their fine motor skills, but they came out nice anyway!

Oil pastels for the heart

Watercolor painting the background

Weaving away!

Sawyer's finished handprint

Hayden's finished handprint

Weeks 2 & 3 of our Winter/Snow Theme

Our snow/winter theme continued on throughout the whole month of January.  We also all took turns getting sick with colds, and then mine turned into the flu.  So, I was pretty much useless for almost the entire two weeks.  We missed out on a lot of things we had planned which was a real bummer, but we managed to make the most of it, and we are now in the clear (Yay!) and ready to venture out into the world again!

So, I'm combining the last two weeks together (this is becoming a habit, I think) to conclude our winter/snow theme.

Reading:
Both boys got through a couple of books on their own and were able to add to their "I Can Read" caterpillars.  Hayden's has grown so long!  Since the beginning of the school year, he has read 15 books on his own, and Sawyer has read 7!!  Granted, Sawyer's may be slightly memorized, but hey.  Whatever.  He's reading!  Hayden's last book read was Up, Up, Up, Dear Dragon by Margaret Hillert, and he's now working on It's Groundhog Day, Dear Dragon which we started the Friday before Groundhog Day and will continue it through this next week.

Sawyer started reading BOB books and has gotten through three of them so far: Mat, Sam, and Dot from Set 1: Beginning Readers.

These are the books I read to them for our winter/snow theme:

Sneezy the Snowman by Maureen Wright
Snowballs by Lois Ehlert
Snowball by Nina Crews
Polar Bear Night by Lauren Thompson
Froggy Gets Dressed by Jonathan London

Our reading activities were a lot of fun these last few weeks.  We used the pocket chart to arrange pictures/words into alphabetical order.  The boys worked together on this since there were quite a few words with the same beginning letter, it was a little over Sawyer's head.  Talking it out and visually being able to move the pictures around was very helpful (for both of them).

Winter ABC Order

 We also had a "snowball fight" with CVC words that both boys were able to sound out and read.  

Then, there was "Build a Snowman Face" with sight words.  Sawyer didn't participate so much with this one.  This was more for Hayden because the words were a little harder.  He drew a card from the stack, and if he read it correctly, he got to add a piece to the snowman head.

 The first day of the last week was REALLY nice outside.  So, we did our reading in the backyard.  Even Riley got to be a part of the schoolday!  Crazy how in the middle of January, we are wearing shorts and t-shirts, isn't it?

Venn Diagram of how snowmen and people are alike and different. 

Writing:
I'm trying to work more with Sawyer on his pencil grasp.  He's determined to hold it like a 2-3 year old, and I don't want to push him too hard, but I don't want him to have to break a really bad habit either.  It's a little bit of 1 step forward, 2 steps back kind of thing because he's so hard-headed and stubborn (where could he possibly get that from?).

Hayden's writing is still his spelling words, plus I'm giving him more copywork to do each day.  I'm hoping he will become a little more independent with this because it will allow me to do some one-on-one with Sawyer or Riley during this time, but for now, if I'm not hovering over him, reminding him to stay on task and stop staring off into La-La Land, it takes him FOREVER to complete a writing assignment.  Not kidding.  It took him one hour to write a little poem that should have taken no more than 15 minutes because he would stare off into outer space or get interested in something Sawyer said. Even moving him to another room and setting the timer doesn't help speed things up.  So, the hovering will continue for awhile, I suppose!

Winter Fun writing assignment.  First, Second, Third, and Last reasons I like Winter

Tracing circles working on that pencil grasp!

More circles, but we're coloring in, and we resorted back to the whole hand. 

Painting Spelling Words

Chalkboard Spelling Words one day...

Then, tracing them with a wet sponge the next day.

Tracing lines and then cutting them.  There were a few different sheets like this.
This was actually a Groundhog Day activity that we did on Friday.

The poem that took a whole hour for Hayden to write!  

To Hayden's credit, I will say that he did a marvelous job with the poem that he copied the second week.  It was Snowball by Shel Silverstein.  Not only did he copy it, but he memorized it as well and presented it to his Classical Conversations class for his oral presentation.  He did a pretty good job, and even though there was a lot of distractions going on (including Riley pitching a fit since I passed him off to someone else to hold so I could videotape Hayden), he kept right on going.  I wanted to upload the video, but for some reason, it's not letting me do it.

Math:

For Hayden's math, we continued with his RightStart Math.  He took his test, and got 7 out of 10 answers correct.  I think that two of those answers he got wrong, he could've answered correctly had he paid closer attention to what he was circling.  He is now working on adding numbers in the thousands, but using base 10 block cards and place value cards instead of writing down and carrying the numbers over, etc.  More of an abstract way of thinking.  He learned about the Cotter Tens Fractal, and we are working on building our own.  The Cotter Tens Fractal is a large triangle built from 1000 little triangles.     You start by building small triangles out of 10 smaller triangles, and you combine these triangles to make a hundred, and 10 hundreds make a thousand.

Cutting out the itty bitty triangles (Yes, I'm helping!)

Assembling ten-triangles

The first of the hundred triangles completed!

Working on adding numbers in the thousands.

Partitioning review of 6's and 7's.

Sawyer's math was more winter themed and mostly came from this preschool pack:

Putting snowmen in order from smallest to largest.  We also worked on ordinal
numbers: first, second, last, etc.

Learning the basics of the clock and counting by 5s.

Snowman Add-it-Up Dice Game.  We took turns rolling the dice and would
dot the number on the snowman that matched the dice.

The one non-winter themed math activity.  Sorting more and less into baggies.

And, of course, on Friday, the day before Groundhog Day, we traced and measured our shadows at different times of the day.  We figured out at what time they were the longest, shortest, which direction they faced, and what time of day the groundhog would most likely see his shadow.  I also found several little activities in this Groundhog Day Mini Unit, one of which the boys tallied and graphed what 6 people said about whether the groundhog would see his shadow or not.

Comparing our shadows from the morning to the afternoon

Riley getting in on the action

Other activities:

We had several art, music, and science activities planned, a few that we actually accomplished!  

White crayon winter drawing with blue watercolor over

Sideways, but a finished product

Snowman Hokey-Pokey!

 Our one science project was pretty much a failure, but it was fun anyway.  We were trying to make snow dough, something we found off of another website, but the quantities listed in the recipe must have been wrong because when we first measured it all out, it turned out to be this big wet mess:

Not exactly something you can make a snowman or snowball with.

 So, we started messing around with adding a little bit of baking soda here, a little bit of cornstarch there, and eventually we ended up with something like this:

Finally!  Something we can work with!

Our snowball

However, in the end, it would slowly "melt" into a chunky glob in the bowl.  Plus, it was really hard to work with, and it was HEAVY!  So, it sat on our kitchen counter for the better part of a week and a half before I finally decided to chuck it.  Oh well.  That's part of working with science experiments I guess!

On the last Friday, we did an art project for Groundhog Day.  I found it on Pinterest and we were able to put our own little version of one together pretty quickly.

Gluing pom poms to a craft stick for the groundhog's head.

Cutting the grass to wrap around the "hole"

Peek-a-boo! I see you!!

Last but not least:

A few fun snack ideas that we did these past couple weeks.....

Mozzarella snowman with strawberry hat and pretzel arms for Sawyer
(because he doesn't like peanut butter sandwiches)

Peanut butter and honey snowmen (for Hayden because he doesn't like cheese)

Snowmen donuts with hot chocolate

Watching "The Snowman" while eating the snowmen donuts and drinking hot chocolate.

Snowman Mix: marshmallows, pretzels, chocolate chips, and candy corn

My poor excuse for a groundhog on Groundhog Day.
Chocolate pudding with oreo crumbs, a Nilla wafer head and graham cracker ears.