This week was a rather frustrating one.
It began with a sick child and ended with another!
Regardless, we got a ton of school work done.
I'm not sure how that happened.
It probably had to do with the fact that we were stuck at home ALL week and kids have this way of still needing to be occupied even when they feel terrible.
Quite frankly, I needed the distraction too!
Now that you've heard about the nasty part of our week, here is the happy, fun part...
We started something new this week:
Up until Christmas we were doing a circle time with calendar on a bulletin board.
It was fine but all three of us got bored of it.
So it was time for a change!
At 1+1+1=1 I saw these calendar notebooks and I thought they were worth a try!
Piper loves it especially since she gets to practice her printing every day now!
The printing is obviously beyond Tait at this point but I plan to add more toddler friendly pages in time and for now she is content to draw pictures all over her pages!
I'm finding that using the notebooks takes up far less of our learning time while still enabling us to review the days of the week, date and chart the weather.
I'm sure eventually we'll get bored of this too but for now it is working out wonderfully!
We've gotten back into our Beginning with God Bible studies.
The activities they suggest to accompany the stories are so simple yet fun for the kids and really good at helping them to understand certain aspects of the story.
For example, this week we read about Joeseph and how he worked to save food for when the seven years of famine came.
Afterwards, I gave the girls a cup of mini chocolate chips.
I told them they could eat some now but then had to save the rest for after lunch.
I was surprised with how easily they agreed to doing this!
Piper and Tait tried a new food this week - jello!
So exotic, right?
This came about as we were learning the phonetic sound for J.
As part of the All About Reading program, I was giving them riddles for things that started with the the J sound.
One was a riddle for jello and I totally assumed Piper knew what it was despite the fact that I never make it.
She guessed ice cream and pudding and finally I gave her the correct answer.
I got a blank stare from her in return!
She had no idea!
So that evening they made jello together with Daddy and had it for snack the next day.
Tait had no trouble downing it but Pipe was a little weirded out by the fact that her snack jiggled! Haha!
This week we 'rowed' Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown for our BFIAR book.
Each morning as I read the story, the girls would take turns finding and putting up pictures of the things the little bunny says good night to.
They loved doing this!
The only problem was that they woud fight over who got to put up the kittens!
In the story, there is a picture on the wall of the room of the cow jumping over the moon.
So, of course, we had to learn the rhyme 'Hey Diddle Diddle'!
Piper made her own book by assembling the parts of the rhyme correctly.
Both girls colored a page with the rhyme on it so we could post it on the wall and practice it each day.
Piper quite enjoyed this rhyme.
Here she is reciting it.
I think its adorable when she gets stuck remembering part of it!
You can see her struggling to think of it.
Too cute!
Also, in the room where the story takes place, there is a picture of the 3 bears.
The girls were familiar with the story 'Goldilocks and the 3 Bears' but hadn't heard it in a while so we used felt board pieces we had to tell the story!
They absolutely loved this!
Later I set the felt board out for them to play with and it was so neat to watch Piper tell the story all on her own to Taitum, mimicing what I had just done!
Taitum later did a three bears size sort in which she had to identify the big, medium and large things in the story.
We learned some things about the moon, too!
First, I explained to Piper about the different phases of the moon and had her color them accordingly.
Then we had a blast making the phases with Oreo cookies!
Mmmmm! Such a yummy way to learn!
Then I cut out the moons she had coloured and together we assembled a moon phase wheel.
Both girls enjoyed painting the night sky with water paints.
Before painting, they drew on their paper with crayons.
I added stars so they could see them appear when they painted over the crayon drawings!
Daddy was home one day this week due to a snow day and he helped them make 'a bowl full of mush' just like the little bunny says goodnight to!
Taitum worked on her colours by finding the right colour crayon for each balloon colouring card.
I layed out all the colours she needed then would tell her what colour to find for each balloon.
I layed out all the colours she needed then would tell her what colour to find for each balloon.
This is something that is suggested in the BFIAR manual.
For each book we 'row' we will be sorting the animals we find in the story into the following categories: Fur, Skin, Feathers, Scales.
It's very simple but an important skill to learn and practice.
Piper loved it because 1 - she loves anything to do with animals and 2 - she got to tack the animal cards to the board all by herself!
;)
The pair of mittens in the story lead us to talk about what a pair is and about left and right.
The girls each painted and printed their left hand and right hand.
Being allowed to paint a part of their body is pretty much the best thing ever as far as they are concerned!
Goodnight Moon was such a fun book!
It's no surprise that it's a classic!
The girls adored looking for the mouse in each illustration of the room and Piper was very intrigued by the change in lighting that you notice happening as the story progressed.
This made for some interesting questions and conversation!
This week we also completed a science experiment that Piper used to participate in a science fair!
She had a blast doing this!
I'll share it all with you soon!
Next week we are 'rowing' The Runaway Bunny by Margaret Wise Brown.
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