Holbrook Heroes: 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.