I am an Artist

I can't really say that we did a whole lot with this book, although I did have great plans for it.  I plan on getting to the activities soon, but since these pictures will soon be outdated, I thought I'd post what we've done so far.  The book is about seeing art in nature. 

The star in an apple.  This was from a page in the book.  (And I promise you we don't live in a perpetually dark house.  There just isn't enough lighting to make these pictures bright enough.  Augh!)

We went on a nature walk.  We grabbed the red wagon, a bin from the house, and went out to see what kinds of "art" we could find. 

We walked all around our neighborhood, with William frequently asking if "this was nature" and "Can I put it in the nature bin?"   

When we got home we went to the backyard and took everything out of the bin and examined the items closer.  We talked about texture, size, color, etc. 

In the book there was "art" in the clouds.  I thought it would be fun to paint with cotton balls.  Again, this was one of those "good in theory" ideas, bad in practice.  The cotton ball fell apart in the paint and left behind cotton pieces. 

So we eventually gave up on that idea and switched to brushes and painting our clouds on black paper.  Worked like a charm! 

We'll be doing more with this book and the ideas soon. 

Ask Mr. Bear

It's been awhile, I know.  We've been doing a lot of reading, but our activities have been focused on fall and Thanksgiving rather than doing a ton of activities relating to Before Five in a Row.  However last week we did row Ask Mr. Bear.  

 

 

The book is about Danny, who asks the farm animals for ideas on what to give his mom for her birthday.  He ultimately asks Mr. Bear, who gives him the perfect idea!  William had to sequence the book with the story strips.  If you look closely you'll see his little tongue sticking out!  Too cute!
 

He's working on his letter writing.  He's got a long way to go, but as you can see, he's mastered his name!  Yah!

 He sorted words out according to their ending sounds.

 This classification activity was easy but fun.  Really, anytime glue can be brought out and used is an occasion for smiling.

These sheets were fun to incorporate this week.  I'm not sure why I never thought to use the Scrabble tiles before, but they worked perfectly for building the vocabulary words.  I did not have him to the "write" portion of the sheet.

Here he had to circle the correct beginning sound of the picture.  This is too easy for him, but he loves doing them anyway.

We are almost finished with all the books in the Before Five in a Row curriculum.  We will be doing I Am An Artist this week and maybe next, and then we are finished.  I did just place my order for all the books in the Five in a Row series, so I'm excited to get started on those.

Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear?

Jesse Bear, What Will You Wear? is a fun book with lots of rhymes and poems.

Both kids colored a cover page for our lapbook binder.

We made a "fun" paper bear, with interchangeable clothes.  This seemed like a good idea at the time, however a paper bear, with paper tabs that hold the clothes on, and a four year old are not good ideas.  The clothes didn't stay on well and he was thoroughly annoyed at the bear pretty much every time I took him out. 

We talked about eating healthy, just like Jesse Bear does in the book.

We played a fun rhyming words game.

Since it is fall, I found some fun fall activities and printed them out.  He never tires of dot paint.
 

We labeled the parts of a pumpkin.  Who knew a pumpkin had a brain?

After nap time the kids went outside to play.

This was actually borderline science!  He had to describe the pumpkin: how it felt, how it looked, did it smell? etc. and then circle the correct answers.

William has his numbers down!  (Finally!)  Here he had to count the number of pumpkins and circle the correct number.

More pre-writing, which is quite simple for him, but he loves doing these sheets.  When he's finished with them he usually grabs his scissors and cuts along the lines.

Call me slow, but I just figured out that we can use the Scrabble tiles for this activity, instead of me tediously cutting out little squares of lettered paper!  Yah me!

I don't do a lot of patterns with William (I have no idea why not) but this week we did a lot of them.  He gets the whole idea of patterns, but was a little confused as to why I would want to put colored leaves in a line in the first place.

And that's a wrap for this week.

Katy No-Pocket

This book was...interesting.  First, let me air my hang-ups with the book, just to get them out of the way.  The book is about a mother kangaroo who has NO POCKET for her baby.  Seriously?  How in the world did the baby even come to be, without that necessary pocket?  Kangaroos are marsupials so the pocket is, well, important.  Another issue that just got to me was the poor grammar.  Oh my.  There were times when I had to re-read sentences just to get them to make sense.  The poor grammar had nothing to do with the style of the book, either.  It was just bad.  Moving on.

The kids, however, loved the book!  This is our first book where the main character is a kangaroo, so they thought that was quite neat.

We learned where kangaroos live - Australia.  And yes, I do know that he is pointing to the ocean.  There were several other pictures of him actually pointing to the continent, but the smile wasn't as good.  I went with a good smile.  We learned what kangaroos eat and that they are marsupials.  We also talked about what other animals are marsupials.  I was even able to find a short video online about kangaroos.  The kids' favorite one was of two male kangaroos having this horrific fight.  I have to admit, they do have impressive kicks.

Poetry
The brown kangaroo is very funny.
She leaps and hops and runs like a bunny.
And on her stomach is a pocket so wide
Her baby can jump in and go for a ride!

The kids love learning poems!

Our October poem, that we sing while doing calendar time is:
(Sing to the tune of Found a Peanut)
Spell October!
Spell October!
Spell October now with me.
OCT-O-BER
OCT-O-BER

We have another very fun October poem/song that we are learning, but I'll share that another time.

Animal Classification
We learned more about animal families and classification.  Did you know that a female kangaroo is called a Flyer and that a male kangaroo is called an Old Man?  Me neither.  I love it though!

 

The Runaway Bunny

Oh, I loved this book so much!  Its about a baby bunny who tells his mom he wants to run away.  But his mother loves him so much, that wherever he runs, his mother is there to catch him in her arms and love him. 

We talked about cause and effect.

And...well...I guess that is all the pictures I took on this book!  Ha!  I will say that I did buy a Fold & Learn for this book.  What a colossal waste of money.  I didn't feel that I really got much for the high price.  There are so many resources out there on the internet that are free (I was having a hard time finding some for this book, though) that I was very disappointed in the Fold & Learn.  I will not be buying again. 

Caps For Sale

I'm a bit behind in writing these posts, but for the most part I have been doing our rows.  A few weeks ago we did the book Caps For Sale.  The book is about a peddler who wears his goods, in this case, caps, on his head.  One day he has a particularly hard time selling his hats so he goes to the country to rest.  After his nap he notices all his caps are gone!  You really must read this cute story to find out the rest.

I simply love these activities from Homeschool Creations.  They are great for introductory phonics, and they incorporate the book and theme we are doing. 

I forgot that a long time ago I bought a sticker book for Abby.  She has a great time playing with it while William does his work. 

William is continuing to work on his number recognition.  His letters and sounds are great, and with the help of these fun number mats his numbers are coming along quite nicely. 

We took some time to make several fall art projects.  William is showing off his pumpkin mobile. 

We go through A LOT of construction paper in this house, so I decided to put some of the scraps to good use!  I cut out the trunk of a tree and cut up bits of paper and the kids made fall trees.  William has his hanging in the upstairs window.

 I LOVE this picture of William!  It is so hard to get him to smile his natural smile for the camera so when I get one, I must post it.  Here he was showing his money cards.  In the story the peddler sells his caps for 50 cents each, so we learned about the various coins and what they each were worth.

This was a fun hat activity that kept Abby busy for, oh, 10 seconds...maybe.  It took a long time to cut out each hat that and for so little interest...not sure I'd do this one again.

I did make fun cake pops for the kids this week, in hopes of turning them into monkey heads.  Yeah, that didn't really happen.  But the pops were still good, plain and all.

Goodnight Moon

I know, I'm a little behind in blogging about our book reading, I mean rowing.  We had company over this past week and we weren't able to do any of our preschool work, so we went a few days over into this week finishing up the activities I had planned for this book.  It was a simple book, but surprisingly both kids really loved it.

They love doing Do-A-Dot painting, and we hadn't done it in awhile, so I got some printouts of the letter "M" and they went to town painting the letter. 

They also did a poke pin page of the letter "M".

Abby got a new pencil box from Grandma and she's addicted to the glue stick.  It's purple, and she's in love with it.  Here she's not really gluing anything...just "painting" with the purple stick.  Oh, and that Mod Podge in the corner?  Oh yeah!  I found the neatest craft, pinned it on my Pintrest board, and actually did it.  I know, I know...you're aching to see it, but that craft has nothing to do with moons and the letter "M".  You'll have to wait for another post.  

I struggled with finding activities for this book, so we learned about the different phases of the moon.  Since finding activities that corresponded with this book was hard, we did more work in his Abeka K4 book and his Kumon workbooks. 
***********************************************
I know you all are wanting to know about the worms.  It was brought to my attention that they are probably not tomato worms but tobacco worms.  I agree.  Either way, they like eating tomato plant leaves and stalks, and within hours their little habitats that we set up for them were completely bare of foliage.  What remained were humongous piles of frass.  (That's scientific language for "poop".)  By my calculations they were going at a rate of 1-1.5 PPH.  You know, Pellets Per Hour.  I won't even go into how bad they smelled, after only several hours (and many, many pellets later!).  Simply put, they are gone.  To worm haven.  And I don't think the kids have even noticed. 

Angus Lost

The last two weeks have been spent on the book Angus Lost.  I'll be honest.  I'm not sure why it is is such a highly recommended book.  Maybe I'm just tired from all the heat we've been having, but after such a fun row with We're Going on a Bear Hunt I found this book a tad dull.  The kids did enjoy the book, and I was able to pick up several other Angus books, Harry the Dirty Dog books, and other fun dog books.

This dog sorting activity proved way too easy for him, so Abby soon took it over.

Both kids did this pets activity page.  Abby loves her glue.

 She also loves pink marker.  And this was after I washed her face off.  Washable...whatever.

In the book Angus follows the milkman back to his home.  So we learned about the milk-making process.  We even watched a Reading Rainbow video of how milk and cheese are made.

I made dirt cups for the kids' snack one day.  A favorite book was Dirty Harry so I thought this was a great tie-in!  Oh, my creativity astounds me some days!

 

They were a huge hit with the kiddos! 

The last two weeks were quite busy, with preschool activities (again, I'm forgetting to take pictures of a lot these days, however their Before Five in a Row lapbook binder is quickly filling with some really cool activities!), a trip to a neat park to explore the lake, a trip to the beach, a birthday trip to Disney, canning English relish, canning pickles, and some fun backyard projects.  I'll more more about that later.  Good things are happening over here!  

Happy weekend everyone!

We're Going on a Bear Hunt

Oh!  Was this book ever fun!  I'm sure most of you know the synopsis of the book, but the actions and motions that went with this book just made it come alive. 

We watched the author, Michael Rosen, do a great reading of his book.  The kids absolutely loved this video!  Each time we watch it we end up talking with a similar accent! Ha!

 We read books about other bears and their habitats.

Here he had to trace the bear to his cave.  These are great pre-writing activites.  I got this activity and more from this site. 

 We did more practice with patterns.  Abby is getting quite good at these!

This is a K4 book I bought from Abeka book.  They had a book preview (not really sure what they call those things, since you can't buy the books but only order) but I went because I could get free shipping.  I ordered this ABC 123 book, along with a k4 writing book that we won't be starting for awhile, and lots of little readers.

We had a full week of activities, but alas, I didn't take that many pictures.  We made of book of all the places the family had to go through, practiced with sequencing cards, did math graphing and more.   

This upcoming week I am hoping to do Angus Lost.  I think with everything I have planned it will take us two weeks to get through everything.  We shall see!