Summer Studies

I decided this summer I would focus on reading & writing since it's the foundation for all future learning AND just happens to be what Michael dislikes most. So just know that for June, July, and August we did lots of that :) Hope you enjoy your summer as much as we will!

Week 5/30 - 6/04 ART

I need to do more art throughout school, but I've been quite neglectful at times and haven't covered some of the basic concepts are art as of yet. So this week I make amends! We talked about how when we think of a color certain things come to mind. For example, when I think of red I think of an apple and a fire truck. So for fun we changed the natural color of our lunch. Our tuna fish we put purple food coloring in & our milk was blue. The kids loved it, but I have to say it totally grossed me out! Weird how the mind works :)

We talked about warm and cool colors and how those colors make us feel accordingly! With warm colors, Michael drew a sun & spewing lava rivers. With cool, he had wind, oceans, and ice chunks.

We also made collages. This is my 4 year old, Lizzie's. If you knew my daughter you'd smile when you see what she picked out for herself. Sums up her personality in a few, colorful pictures :)

We also worked on drawing shapes and making a picture from different cut out shapes. Michael made a rocket blasting off into space with a couple rectangles & a few triangles. Genius ;)

Week 5/23 - 5/28 Misc.

Thumbing through my Kindergarten books, I saw that I missed some things I still wanted to teach Michael before moving on to 1st grade material. One of those things was graphs. So we did a pie chart, tally chart, and number graph. Michael loved doing that.

I was determined to teach Michael how to read a clock before the summer, but counting by 5's still eludes him. So we made clocks & started with the basic 10 o'clock, 2 o'clock, etc. Another good lesson. There are other things in the book we discussed, but unfortunately I'm doing this entry a few weeks after the fact & can't remember what we worked on besides the usual reading, writing, spelling tests, etc. Oh well. That will teach me!

Week 5/16 - 5/21: READING

Since reading & writing are the core to all Kindergarten learning, I decided to dedicate one week to getting Michael pumped up about it again. The initial, "I know all my letters and sounds!" euphoria has wore off & reading & writing is becoming drudgery. So we painted some tote bags for each of the kids to have their own library bag. Adds more fun to going to check out books!

It's difficult to find books that are at the level Michael's at, using 50 or so sight words primarily. A couple we found that were great are: Ten Apples Up on Top, and Green Eggs and Ham, both by Dr. Seuss. We also added 20 more sight words for Michael to add to his vocab which is still a work in progress.

Week 5/02 - 5/07 THE ENVIRONMENT

We first discussed what the environment was. How without trees & other natural habitats, animals would have no where to live, we would not have beautiful places to hike & explore, and how plants produced oxygen for us to breath. We also talked about how these resources were given to us by God to use, but we needed to use them wisely & respectfully.

The kids were very fascinated with recycling. I got a pile of things out of the recycle bin & we identified them all & how these things came from the environment & how we take less from the environment when we reuse them. We got some neat books from the library about what happens to items once they are recycled. Michael especially loved the idea that paper we recycled became products like paper towels, kitty litter, and toilet paper. And I had no idea that fleece was made from recycled plastic bottles! And of course we made crafts from recycled materials like the above tp tube snake.

Planting trees & flowers is a great way to help the environment and so we tied that into our lesson by transplanting the flowers we planted from PLANT week into a bigger pot. Lizzie also planted a flower for mothers day at preschool and that was a nice surprise :)

This is a horrid pic of Michael, but what can ya do! While I went to Time Out For Women (a women's conference through my church) for the weekend, Daddy took the kids to a light house & old military fort. They had a great time riding the ferry and enjoying the environment & world around them.

Week 4/25 - 4/30 HUMANS

To start our human studies week off, we talked about the 5 senses. I've never had all 3 kids' attention so intensely before we explored this topic. They liked touching different textures of dry foods we had around the house. Above is sugar, oatmeal, & barley and I used chinese noodles as well. Sight allows us to see all the colors around us. We use hearing to detect danger or identify familiar things like moms voice, dogs barking, airplanes over head. We tried different spices & talked about taste buds, and the different sections of our tongue that identify sweet, sour, bitter, etc. And finally smell is wonderful to know when mom was baking cookies, if clothes were clean, and even when Alaina needed a diaper change.

Michael and I later talked about what it might be like to not have one of our senses. I remembered there were signs for the primary song "Love One Another" and we did that together, which was fun. We talked about deafness, blindness, and a story I heard about a little girl who did not feel pain.

We spent a day talking about what we can do to keep our bodies healthy. We did some exercises for fun (push ups, sit ups, jumping jacks, etc.) and talked about good foods to eat. Michael had just had a similar lesson at church & his teacher had cut out good & bad foods from magazines. So we used those props again and discussed each food (including an intro to drugs & alcohol) and how these effected our bodies.

We checked out a lot of books at the library about the heart, blood system, bones, and health. The kids favorite was the Magic School Bus "Inside The Human Body". After learning about these systems we traced our bodies on paper & drew in our inside workings. It was a lot of fun. First thing my 4 yr old daughter did after making her face, a few bones & heart, was to color her finger & toe nails pink. The things I would miss if my kids went to public school!

Week 4/18 - 4/23 ANIMALS

This week we moved on to animals. I had the kids each pick a few stuffed animals & then we talked about characteristics of each of them, their habitats, what they like to eat, etc. We also talked about how each would take care of their young.

We talked about pets & how they differ from "wild" animals and what they need to live & be happy & how people take care of those things for them.

It's also Easter week so we did some combining of Easter & animals w/ these bunny bags that we then later used for a shape Easter egg hunt for the preschool aged girls.

We colored eggs which is a first for me since childhood. But my kids all like boiled eggs so I figured why not! They had already eaten 3 before I remembered to take a pic of their creations. We talked about what kinds of animals come from eggs. What kind of animal would these eggs have been if they were kept warm under their momma?

And of course we ended the week with Easter at Grandma's where the kids hunted for jelly bean filled eggs w/ their cousins. It was another fun week :)