Week 9: Pilgrims

We took last week off of school as a chance to regroup. Not much regrouping was done and I was kind of a homeschooling failure this week. I decided that working up to Thanksgiving, we're going to do three units: Pilgrims, Indians, and Turkeys. This week was Pilgrims. I didn't do nearly enough prep work, so this is what we ended up with on the fly:

Literature
I usually save literature until the end of the week, but Lucy doesn't really know the story of the first Thanksgiving, so we started out with this book:

The First Thanksgiving by Linda Hayward

Math
I found this cute printable and decided it was time to start working on ten frames with Lucy. We've never tried them before, but we jumped right in and she did great! I've been trying to think of a good way to reinforce the teen numbers and this fit the bill. There were two sets of cards: the marked ten frames and a number. She counted the dots in the ten frame and matched it with the number.

We also did a pilgrim puzzle from this free download to review the skip counting we learned two weeks ago. And finally, we made our own Mayflowers out of tin foil and put them in the bath tub ocean. I gave Lucy a jar full of pennies and told her to pretend the pennies were Pilgrims. We learned that there were 102 Pilgrims on the Mayflower, so I told her to see if she could fit 102 pennies in her boat. Her first boat capsized within seconds, so I showed her how the one I made with higher walls kept the water out better. So she tried again, and started counting pennies as she threw them in the boat. She made it to 41 before the boat went under.

I could not get a good picture of this whole process. Haha.

Alphabet Activities
I severely lacked in creativity and printed off a few worksheets from this printable pack.

I also pulled a couple of pages out of a workbook I had laying around, not really sure if Lucy would be interested/ready to do it, but she did really well!

Crafts
And here's my super creative craft of the week:

A strangely orange Pilgrim! Haha. I combined yellow, red, and white to try and get that lovely flesh-color, but apparently failed. Inspired by this.

Field Trip
The one fun thing we did was a spontaneous field trip to Presley's house. My friend Kelly is homeschooling her daughter Presley, who is Lucy's age, so we decided to get together and re-enact the story of the first Thanksgiving. It was hilarious and adorable. Kelly has the pictures on her phone, though, so you're just going to have to take my word for it.

First, we made a pilgrim hat and bonnet for the girls to wear (which stayed on their heads for about four seconds). Then we talked about why they wanted to leave England and how crowded and awful the long boat ride was. To illustrate how crowded it was we put Presley, Lucy, and both of the little sisters in one laundry basket. Haha. Then we talked about the gross food the Pilgrims had to eat: hardtack, smoked meat, and moldy cheese. We gave the girls crackers, salami and [non-moldy] cheese to eat, and emphasized how sick they would get of eating the same things for 66 days! We also discussed how boring it must have been on the ship with no toys, and how the Pilgrim kids used to sing songs to pass the time. I asked the girls if they wanted to sing a song and they decided on "Let it Go." Lol. So the girls and both us moms belted out "Let it Go." Finally, our ship made it to land and we talked about how the Pilgrims had to work so hard building their houses, and only took breaks on Sundays to worship God. We pretended to build our houses, then stopped to sing Jesus loves me, then went right back to building.

We discussed the many hardships the Pilgrims faced: sickness, lack of shelter, lack of food, and fear of the Indians. But then we talked about Samoset and Squanto and how they proved that the Indians weren't scary at all, but rather wanted to be their friends! At this point, we made Indian vests out of paper bags and headdresses out of construction paper.

My stellar photography skills back in action.

Finally, we talked about how the Indians saved the Pilgrims' lives by helping them, and how the Pilgrims wanted to thank them - and God, so they had a big feast. At which point we ate macaroni and cheese and called our lesson complete! Thanks Kelly for inviting us over!

P.S. Our entire lesson was based around this book:

If You Sailed on the Mayflower in 1620

It got rave reviews on Pinterest, so I ordered it from the library. I was surprised to see how incredibly long it was. I didn't actually read it to Lucy. I just read it myself to refresh my memory and have a jumping off point.

Week 8: Pumpkins Galore!

Alphabet Activities
We're continuing our work with word families, to drive home sounding out letters and using vowels appropriately in CVC words. I made up this little pumpkin patch activity for our pumpkin theme.

The word family work is serving its purpose. I was looking through some old books today and found "Hop on Pop." I flipped through it with Lucy and had her read the parts I knew she could sound out. She did great! It was also cool for her to read the sight words she's been learning in actual sentences in an actual book. She was so proud of herself! As was I!

Math
Lucy is a stellar counter, but until this week couldn't make it farther than 49. I realized it's because she doesn't know the numbers 50, 60, etc. So this week we learned to count by tens and identify those bigger numbers. I printed out the "10s" chart from this free printable pack:

Courtesy of blessbeyondadoubt.com

First, I had her dab the numbers 10, 20, 30, etc. with a Bingo dabber. I counted in a sing-song voice as she dabbed. Since she already knows 10-40, I explained that 50 is the last tricky one she's just going to have to memorize, but then the rest are easy. You just look at the first number and add a "dee" to it. Six-dee, seven-dee, and so on. She caught on in no time. Then, I labeled 10 pumpkins 10-100 and had her arrange them in numerical order.

We also did this worksheet, to practice counting by 10s, and show how you can use counting by tens to add.

I pretended the candy is all a part of the pumpkin/Halloween theme. ;-) Worksheet from education.com.

Today, for the first time, she sat down with her 10s chart and pointed to every number, counting aloud to 100. Mission accomplished!

Sight Words
On Monday, we did this sight word game that I forgot to do during our spider theme last week.

I got the free printable from education.com, and wrote sight words randomly throughout the web. We used a regular die (instead of the one you can print from the website) and identified sight words as we landed on them.

And today we did Bingo again. I'm running out of creative sight word ideas . . .

Literature
We read the following pumpkin-themed books:

The Pumpkin Mystery - this one was long, but had a fun surprise about how new pumpkins grow from old pumpkin seeds.

Pumpkin Cat - this had nothing to do with pumpkins, but was a cute story about a cat living in a library. I love any book about libraries. 

Pumpkin Jack - the pumpkin book favored by preschools across the nation. A fun look at a pumpkin's life cycle. Lucy loved that the pumpkin had a name. 

While I was reading the books, Lucy sorted through my bag of tissue paper squares to find all the orange ones. She does so much better with listening to books when she has something to do with her hands.

Then we made a totally un-original tissue paper pumpkin on a paper plate. (Whew! Points for alliteration!) I forgot to take a picture of the finished product, but it looks a lot like this:

Source

Pumpkin Fun!
It wouldn't be a pumpkin unit without some pumpkin carving and seed roasting.

I used this genius tip from Pinterest that is probably common sense to most people: put trash bags on the table before you start so you can just scoop up all the goop and mess in one fell swoop.

I used this recipe.

We also made these fun jack-o-lantern quesadillas:

And today, while I was prepping our activities, the girls had a blast simply drawing on the pumpkins with pens. Who knew that'd be so entertaining?

We're taking next week off from school. (We'll just call it fall break. ;-) ) But I'll be back in two weeks with more wit, wisdom, and delightful pinspiration for all your homeschool needs! ;-) 

Week 7 Recap: Spiders!

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. ;-)

The mistake. They're all supposed to be "ut" words, but that last one has got to be "bus."

She loved this activity and really sounded out each letter to make the words. 

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:

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.

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!

Make a Tree: Short Vowel Review

This is our 6th week of school, so we're finally done learning vowels. I was going to move right on to consonants, but decided we better spend a week reviewing the vowels. I'm glad we did. Lucy needed the review.

Since we're talking about fall this week, I came up with this fall vowel activity.

I bought two packages of leaves at Sparta Variety, then printed off this set of short vowel word pictures:

Free Printable

I laminated the page, cut out the pictures, and put each one on a leaf with poster putty.

I wrote the names of some of the trickier pictures with a dry erase marker.

I was originally going to cut tree trunks out of brown paper, but decided that was too much work and just used the wood beams we have laying around the house. I attached a vowel to each beam, then told Lucy to match the pictures to the correct vowels in order to make trees. 

She loved it, did the project in its entirety (which is unlike her), and really had to think to figure out each vowel sound. She really struggled at first, but was getting the hang of it by the end!

Week 5 Recap: Monster Mania!

Letter: o
Number: 5
Sight Words: the, and, in
Verse: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8)

Alphabet Activities
I made these adorable monsters, then had Lucy draw an "o" mouth on each of them. We pretended that the monsters were screaming "ahhhh!" like the sound "o" makes. Lucy thought my drawings were hilarious and was much more willing to write an "o" when it was disguised as a monster mouth instead of a plain ol' letter o.

Math
We didn't do much for math this week. Just a number 5 worksheet, and this "roll-a-monster" dice game. I don't think Lucy learned much, but she had fun. :-)

Literature
Lucky for me, our library has a display of monster books out right now in anticipation of Halloween, so I just picked a bunch that I thought Lucy would enjoy. Here's what we ended up with:

Creepy Monsters, Sleepy Monsters by Jane Yolen

Monsters Munch Lunch by Abigail Tabby

Big Monster, Little Monster by Mary Tillworth

Go to Bed, Monster! by Natasha Wing - This one was our favorite because the little girl's name is Lucy. And there's a part in the story where the monster has to go potty. Lucy is obsessed with all things potty-related. And potty has a short o in it! ;-)

Our literature activity was making monster stomping feet. Lucy painted a couple empty tissue boxes on Tuesday, then we added eyes and teeth on Wednesday.

Sight Word Activities
We combined our Bible lesson with our sight word activity this week. We read the story of Jesus' temptation in our Jesus Storybook Bible, then talked about how Satan is the worst monster of all. But I assured Lucy that someday Jesus is going to stomp Satan's head (Genesis 3:15), and we were going to pretend to stomp him today too. I made a bunch of mean monsters with sight words on them, then she put on her monster stomping feet and stomped the words as I called them out.

Next week: All things fall!