Holbrook Heroes: Buffalo Before Breakfast

As the title of this post suggests, our Magic Treehouse book this week was about buffalo and the Native Americans in the Great Plains area. In addition, we threw in a few math lessons and some language arts stuff for Sawyer.

Language Arts:
Sawyer read more through his Dear Dragon book this week. Since we are reading the Magic Treehouse books, I'm not spending as much time on this, but I still want him to have his own read alouds. So, I'm doing what I can with it in the little time left that we have after our treehouse activities.

This is actually completely off topic, but the boys wanted to look through their
writing journals. This is Hayden reading Sawyer's journal aloud to him. They
were cracking up over half the stuff that was written.

After reading Dear Dragon Goes to the Library, we worked on physical science/force words,
"push" and "pull". He had to draw things that could either be pushed or pulled in the correct
column, and then we labeled them together.

Kind of hard to see, I know. But his ideas turned out to be WAY different than
the examples given in the book. I thought they were hilarious.
"Person pushing a giant egg."
"Person pushing another person."
"A pig is pulling King Pig on a sled."
"A little pig pulling its stocking."

Math:

Working on being able to visualize numbers less than 10.

Review: Hayden mentally adding numbers in the tens and checking work on the abacus.

More mental adding.

Finding the missing addend.

Playing a game of memory where the two cards flipped over have to add up to 10.

Magic Treehouse:

We read Buffalo Before Breakfast this week, and we had a lot of fun with it. I've decided to do just one week per book for this one and the next two since we are trying to finish out the school year by the end of May. Plus, the boys are wanting to explore the world some more with the Little Passports again. So, we'll be starting that back up next week as well.

The first thing we did after reading the book was to make our own winter counts like the Lakota Indians would have done. I found this lesson idea off the Magic Treehouse website.

First the boys ripped along the line I drew on paper bags to form a buffalo shaped "hide".

Hayden wrote his yearly events down while Sawyer dictated to me for his own.

More paper ripping. :)

Hayden's yearly events with the pictograph he plans on using next to each one.

They drew their yearly events in pictographs starting in the middle of the "hide"
and circled outwards in a spiral-like fashion till they finished all the events.

Then, they got to crumple up their work.

They got a lot of satisfaction out of this....

I spritzed them with water to help give them the worn look. Then we laid them out
so they could dry.

In the end, this is what they looked like. I liked them better when they were wet.
Also, I think that if they had drawn their pictographs larger, you would've been
able to see them better. It's hard to tell from the photograph, but the pictures ARE
still visible. Just not quite as well as before. Still, a fun project.

Hayden filled in a worksheet that we started with the first of the four books, Tonight on the Titanic. It's a chart of sorts for comparing books, and at the bottom, he can rate the book 1-5 stars on how well he liked it.

Filling in the blanks.

Then, the boys did a prairie biome diorama after reading some books on prairies and grasslands. They learned about some of the different animals that live on the prairies (besides prairie dogs and buffalo), and they worked together to make the diorama.