January Week 1: Snowmen

We took most of the month of December off thanks to my brother's wedding, the craziness of Christmas, and my own laziness.

But we got back on the wagon this week! We jumped back into things with a snowman theme. There's a wealth of information on Pinterest, so we did all kinds of fun projects.

I wanted the week to be mostly an overview of what we've learned to date since we took such a long break.

Literacy
We worked again on CVC words by building snowmen. I cut out a bunch of white circles and wrote random letters on them. Well not totally random. I knew we had enough circles for 8 snowmen, so I wrote 8 vowels. Then I wrote "sh" on a couple circles to make sure we practiced the one blend she knows. For the rest of the letters, I did a couple Ts, Ns, Ps, Ds, and Bs because those work with a lot of short vowel words. And then I threw in an S, H, M, and F just to see what she could come up with. I gave Lucy a piece of black paper and told her to pick a vowel to start with and then put a letter above and below the vowel.

She chose "i," put the "f" above it, then played with the other letters until she found one that worked, ending up with "fish." This activity held her attention a lot longer than I expected it to. She actually used all the letters I cut out. Although she had no interest in decorating them to look more like snowmen when we were finished. 

After she built each snowman, I had her write the word down on her manuscript paper. It looks like our next lesson is going to have to be on spacing between words. Haha.

Math
I found this cute free snowman pack download for addition and subtraction review. (I just downloaded the K/1st 1 and 2 packs to get the worksheets I wanted.)

Lucy used some mini alphabet stamps as her counters - especially for the subtraction, which she can't do as easily in her head:

Finished product for our bulletin board:

Literature
I planned this unit at the last minute and didn't have time to order a specific snowman book from the library, so I was thrilled to find a free online edition of "Snowmen at Night." Lucy and I sat down with my laptop and read it, then I had her draw a picture of what she thinks snowmen do at night. She drew three white circles, two dots for eyes, and a carrot nose, then said, "I think they melt" and refused to do anymore. Haha. Ok! Fortunately I had a back-up plan to play in real snow. Unfortunately, it's been frigidly cold around here lately, and while we finally have snow, we also have below zero wind chills. So I filled a couple tubs and brought the snow inside, then let the girls play to their heart's content with cups and bowls and spoons. Truth be told, this activity didn't last real long either because Lucy's hands kept getting cold. Lena actually enjoyed it a lot more than Lucy did.

Sight Words
I found this cute idea for snowman sight word Bingo on Pinterest, and decided to try it out as a review of all our sight words.

As I called out the words, Lucy glued cotton balls over them:

Finished product:

Isn't it cute??

Reading
One more thing of note: I made Lucy read some of Hop on Pop to me on Thursday. She didn't want to, but I bribed her with candy and told her she didn't have to read the whole book. I just had her read the short vowel words and the sight words she knows. It's so awesome to see her actually reading pages of the book! Sure, all it says is "hop on pop" or "Pat sat on the cat," but it's still rewarding to see her hard work paying off! Our library has a bunch of BOB books and Usborne phonics books, so I think I'm going to try to get one out every week and really work with Lucy to have her read them to me - even if I have to bribe her with more candy. How's that for a stellar teaching method? ;-)

Stay tuned next week for Penguins!