Easter Theme in Review

The last two weeks in March were all about eggs, the life cycle of chickens, and Easter.  I'm hoping that even though I am posting about it a month after the fact, that I will be able to recount our studies accurately by way of my photos.  I'm going to stop apologizing for my tardiness in keeping up with this blog.  At least the kids are learning and I'm getting around to documenting it eventually, right?  That's what counts.  I have learned that trying to be super thorough with the blog is an unrealistic goal for now, and I'm just going to get what I can, when I can for you to see.  :)

So!  To get back to the Easter theme weeks:

Reading:
Hayden's book for the two weeks was "It's Spring, Dear Dragon!" by Margaret Hillert.  Using this book, we worked on /spr/ and /str/ blends and had an egg comprehension hunt.  We also did a shared reading activity and made our own emergent readers with oviparous animals which we found from Mrs. Wills' Kindergarten site.

Working on the /spr/ and /str/ blends

Sorting the words into the correct column.

Egg Comprehension Hunt

Sawyer helped figure out some answers, too, since he listened to the story.

Our shared reading

Sawyer's Oviparous Animal reader

Hayden's Oviparous Animal Reader: on the last two pages of the book, they
each had to draw a picture of an oviparous animal and a viviparous animal
and write a little something about it.

An egg word family activity for Sawyer to do.  We spun one half of the egg
around and read aloud each word that it made.

An Easter  egg word hunt that Hayden did.  I found
these eggs at the Dollar Tree, filled them with pom
poms and sight words.  He had to write down all the
words he found.

Books We Read:

Life Cycle of a Chicken by Angela Royston

How an Egg Grows Into a Chicken by Tanya Kant

Horton Hatches the Egg by Dr. Seuss

Mary Veronica's Egg by Nethery and Yalowitz

Last One in is a Rotten Egg by Diane DeGroat

The Easter Egg by Jan Brett

Writing:

Folding a pear

All the fruits and vegetables we folded!

Learning to grasp the concept of adding more sounds to words.  If told to write
the word, "stray", he would have written it, "say", not sounding out and writing
each individual sound.  I came up with this idea to help him break down the words
better.  

In Hayden's writing journal, he made an acrostic poem for spring.

Spring Acrostic poem by Hayden

Drawing a chicken from our Draw Write Now Farm Animals book.

Hayden's Draw Write Now chicken also included writing the 4 descriptive
sentences that went with the picture.

I Hatched Writing activity.  I wrote very lightly on his egg the words he
needed to trace.

Sawyer worked really hard on his.  You can tell he was really thinking about
the right thing to put down!

Hayden was able to write a little more than Sawyer.

Hayden's finished product

Sawyer's finished product

Math:

Math was a combination of Easter activities and RightStart lessons for Hayden.  Sawyer got more of the actual Easter themed activities, but fortunately, it didn't seem to bother Hayden at all.  I'm really trying to gain ground on the RightStart lessons because we are so far behind from all the holiday themed lessons I keep doing.  I can't help it - it's so much fun.  How can you NOT do holiday themed activities??

Here, Hayden had to mentally add 1 to each number on the first row, 10
to the number in the second row, and 100 to the number in the third row.

Sawyer got to do a little Easter pattern activity with Easter shaped erasers
and ice cube trays.

Two of several patterns that he made.

Easter Egg Addition.  I would ask Sawyer addition problems such as, "What
is 4+2?" and he would pull out 4 eggs, then 2 eggs and add them together.
I wrote the problem on the white erase board.  He soon decided he wanted to
do that part as well.

Sawyer started getting carried away with his number sizes.  He was also very
overzealous in his addition problems.  Go Sawyer!

Hayden continued adding 1, 10, and 100 to a number.  

Another day, we did the same egg activity, but changed it to subtracting
instead of adding.  Again, Sawyer was all too happy to do his own writing.

Hayden began learning about the hours on a clock.

And, of course, what would an Easter theme be without jellybeans?
Thanks to Teach Love Laugh for this activity!
Here, the boys worked together to come up with Jellybean Fact Families.

Music & Art:

Holidays are the best time for music and art.  There are so many opportunities for both!  Here is what we had time to squish into our days:

The first thing here could really be categorized under math as well.  The boys had to shake the Easter egg and guess what was inside.  Then, they opened them up to see if they were right.  After all the eggs were opened, they counted the amount of stuff inside each egg, identified which egg had the most contents, the least, the same, etc.  I found this idea from Teach Preschool.

Shaking the eggs

Identifying and counting the contents of the eggs.

The following activity we did after reading "The Easter Egg" by Jan Brett.  The boys had to each watercolor their own Incredible Egg and write (or in Sawyer's case, dictate) why it was so incredible.

Sawyer's Incredible Egg

Hayden's Incredible Egg

One of the best art projects this year for these guys were Tissue Paper chicks.  I was so impressed with their diligence and desire to do such a good job!  They are really starting to enjoy art more and more.  It's so fun to see this change in them.

Sawyer's Tissue Paper Chick

Hayden's Tissue Paper Chick

And finally, a little more music to add to our week.  This time, Riley got to join in.  We sang songs and played music while using our egg shakers along with it.

Science:
Yay! We LOVE science around here.  And I am always super excited when we are able to do it.  It wasn't the most exciting weeks of science we've had, but the boys still had a fun time.  Last year, we did a lot of "eggs"periments around Easter.  We did a few more this year as well, but we also focused on the life cycle of the chicken (hence the books noted earlier).  We also took a little "field trip" to a friend's house to see her chickens and let the boys gather the eggs.  They had so much fun.  Of course, for the field trip, I forgot my camera.  Boo.

After reading Life Cycle of a Chicken (noted above in books read), the boys watched a couple of youtube videos.  One was of a chicken laying an egg.  That was weird.  It was extremely up close and personal for that poor chicken, and the boys thought it looked a little painful.  Then, we watched the hatching of twins.  That was pretty cool.  Had to do some fast forwarding on that one though.  It took a long time for them to hatch, and the lady who had them had to help them out some.

Watching the twin chickens hatching.

Completing a cut-and-paste-reorder of the life cycle of a hen.

 We also did an Easter egg activity to correlate with our oviparous animals emergent reader and shared reading.  The boys really enjoyed this activity.  They took turns picking out an egg.  Each egg had a picture of an animal.  They had to determine whether the animal came from an egg or not.

Choosing an egg.

Hmmm.....do chickens come from eggs???

Hayden adds the last of the animals to the pocket chart.

Riley gets in on the action.  ;)

 We didn't get around to all the science experiments that I wanted to do, but below are the couple that we were able to accomplish.  The first was an egg floating experiment.  The boys had to hypothesize whether an egg would float in fresh water and if it would float in salt water.

Fresh water vs. Salt water

It floats!  Sawyer keeps trying to push it back down.

And it sinks in the fresh water.

 The other activity we did was really more of a diversity learning experience.  So I guess this should actually be labeled as social studies and not science.  The boys are always wanting me to get the brown eggs from the grocery store instead of the white ones.  For some reason they think they will taste/look better?  So, I got some brown eggs this time and we broke them open side-by-side so they could see if they looked different or the same.

Outside looks different....

......but the inside is the same!

Lesson learned:  We are all alike on the inside (physically) even if we may seem different on the outside.

And so ends our Easter lessons!