In the spirit of Halloween, we spent last week studying spiders. I'm starting to get a little lackadaisical with school, as you'll notice in this recap. We're going to do a pumpkin theme
next week, but then I think we're going to take a week off. I need to regroup and get excited again. It's starting to get boring - which isn't good for me
or Lucy. Anyway, here are our spider activities:
We started the week by reading some spider facts via this
free printable:
Alphabet Activities
I introduced word families for the first time, now that we know the vowels. I decided to pick a consonant and then work on all the blends we could make with it. We did "t" so our blends were -at, -et, -it, -ot, ut. I found this great idea on
Pinterest to make a word family spider. Lucy amazed me with how well she caught on. I thought about writing the "at" part on each of the legs, but she ended up writing each word by herself without a complaint! (I didn't want to overwhelm her on the first day, so we only did the "-at" blend.)
At first, I just asked her to think of some -at words, and she came up with a few. After she couldn't think of anymore, we got out the alphabet cards and went through them one by one to see if we could make words. "Bat: word! Cat: word! Dat: not a word." I didn't count ahead of time, but it worked perfectly that we came up with 8 words for the spider's 8 legs. (I know vat is a word, but I didn't think Lucy would recognize it. ;-) )
Later in the week, to reiterate the blends/word families, we got out the Scrabble tiles to make some words. I searched the
Teachers Pay Teachers website for free word family worksheets and found
these ones. The pictures were admittedly tricky. I had to tell Lucy what most of them were. And I think there was a mistake on one of the sheets, but that's what I get for being cheap. ;-)
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The mistake. They're all supposed to be "ut" words, but that last one has got to be "bus." |
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She loved this activity and really sounded out each letter to make the words. |
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Lena loved it too! |
Math
I saw this little diagram on
Pinterest and knew I could turn it into a spider activity:
I loved the idea of seeing how many ways we can get to 8, and identifying patterns in addition. So we made another spider and started adding:
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In case you can't tell, I wrote the first number and the plus sign, and Lucy filled in the number we needed to get to 8. |
She did great with the first few (1+7, 2+6), but started to get confused around 3,4,5(I had her fix the 3 and 4 after I took the picture.) and then took off again with 6,7, and 8. (She surprised me with her knowledge of 0, although I know she's seen the Curious George episode about 0 roughly 16,000 times.) And it didn't really work to include the equal sign once we got to the right side of the spider. I didn't think ahead enough. Haha.
We also did a little spider graphing. I found a packet of multi-colored spider rings for $1 in the dollar bins at Target. There are the same amount of each color, so I just hid a few of each color before giving them to Lucy, so our chart would show some variation. I couldn't find a printable graph that was quite what I was looking for, so I made a very rough one in Excel. Lucy counted the spiders, then filled in the appropriate number for each color.
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I forgot there were four colors when I made the graph, so I drew in another column. Haha. We're high tech around here. |
We talked about which color had the most and which had the least. Then we made a graph out of the spiders themselves for another visual:
Literature
I had a surprisingly difficult time find books about spiders at the library, so we ended up just reading Eric Carle's classic,
The Very Busy Spider. My super-inspired, creative craft was to punch some holes in a paper plate and give Lucy a skein of yarn to thread through it. We added one of the spider rings at the end.
I totally flaked on sight words for the week. She did a couple sight word worksheets, but that was it. Oops! And, in case you've been wondering, I haven't totally dropped Bible lessons from our curriculum. I've just decided to use her Cubbies lessons instead of coming up with my own thing. We do a lesson, she learns a verse, and there's usually one other hands-on activity to go along with it. Perfect!