Revisit: The Very Hungry Caterpillar

We love this story for so many reasons. We love the art and we love the idea to grow into something wonderful.  This revisit was mainly a review for Benji  and an opportunity to extend higher learning for Jacob. 

We read the book and went over all the stages of the caterpillar and then learned our really big word Metamorphosis. We talked about other things that go through a metamorphosis.

We used our story helpers from Kizclub to help retell the story and to let Benji work on sequence. After that we worked on summarizing the story and used this wonderful worksheet to record our summery. 

We also did some fun crafts. We cut out a simple set of wings for a butterfly and then used a craft stick for the body. We used sponges to paint.

We did some recycle art for the caterpillar. We reused egg cartons and painted them and used some left over scraps from the art bin to make them special.

Here is the final product. Don't forget to display the art in the classroom or in your home. 

Extensions and Resources:

• The Eric Carle Web Site
• Sparkle Box- free printables and lesson ideas
• Homeschool Share - tons of printables and ideas for a full unit of learning
• Scholastic - Lesson plans

Chapter Book: The Little Prince

I like to take the time to read to the children a chapter book. I think it helps them in their desire to read and bring the characters to life. I don't ask questions of the academic nature during this time. We just read and let our selves join the characters in their world and let our imaginations soar. This is considered a sacred time in our house. If you wanted to punish the kids you would simply say "no story tonight then" and the children would immediately straighten up! Beyond that, the American Library Association has twelve wonderful reasons to read aloud to kids and they are as follows:

• Children's self esteem grows as they experience the security of having a parent or other caring person read aloud with them.
• Children experience increased communication with parents and other family members.
• Children are introduced to new concepts such as colors, shapes, numbers, and alphabet, in a fun, age appropriate way.
• Children build listening skills, vocabulary, memory, and language skills.
• Children develop imagination and creativity.
• Children learn information about the world around them.
• Children develop individual interests in special subjects like dinosaurs, cats, or cars.
• Children learn positive behavior patterns and social values.
• Children learn positive attitudes towards themselves and others.
• CHILDREN LEARN THE JOY OF READING!

From time to time, I will ask the children to illustrate their favorite parts of the story. I won't however, ask questions about comprehension, vocabulary or any other questions that might diminish the love of just reading for the sake of reading. 

   So far the children are loving The Little Prince. They love the concept of a little boy being so wise to a grown up. And they roared with laughter at the idea of a boa constrictor eating an elephant. This book would make a great story to do a lapbook for but, I must restrain my self from that unless it becomes the idea of the children to do it. 

Unit studies for 2011-2012

We do a great deal of unit study in our classroom. I spent a great amount of time finding them or creating them and this is what I came up with for this year. The boys do the unit studies as a group lesson, but obviously will have different objectives and learning outcomes.


Science

• Weather
• Food pyramid and Food groups
• Animal Families
• Matter(solids liquids gasses)
• Magnets
• Famous Scientists
• Our Systematic Body
• Cells
• Dental Health
• Plants
• Sound

History

• Where We Live
• Our Continents
• The New World
• Explorers
• Nations of the great Continents

Literature

• If You Gave a Mouse a Cookie / If You Gave a Pig a Pancake
• Frog and Toad All Year
• Dr DeSoto
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit
• Little Bear
• A House For a Hermit Crab
• Corduroy

One reason I like unit study is it allows us to study something in depth and allow it to overlap our other subjects. I will post all the projects or link to the lesson plan online so that those who wish to follow along can.

Animal Classification: Enrichment and Extensions: The Jungle Book

We are extremely privileged to have a very elaborate pop up version of the classic story The Jungle Book.

 The boys looked through it and enjoyed all the pop ups that really made the story come to life. 

Jacob thought the tiger was really cool, but really fierce. So we colored a picture of one to add to our animals bulletin board.

As a family we also watched the Disney cartoon The Jungle Book, which was a big hit

Animal Classification: Enrichment and Extensions

We have been working very steadily on our animal classification and adding to our bulletin board(which is really the bi-fold doors to the closet)

Up to now we have learned

• the difference between living and non living things
• kingdoms of living things
• vertibrates and invertabrates and how to tell the difference. 
• we have also subdivided the animal kingdom into mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish

At this point we are having fun adding extensions to our learning with lots of fun activities.

We played with puzzles to learn all about the different animals

We played folder games. The top folder games I made from Primary Partners and the bottom one came from File Folder Fun.

These were the selections pulled for silent/independent reading.

We sang Kindermusic songs about the creatures in our backyard

We played with animals and their habitats

We sorted mini animals into their different groups

We did our math using a barrel of monkeys(besides who says you have to count beans!)

We played fish games. (These came from Nana!)

We read the book Froggy gets Dressed. (The boys love these books, they are simple and sweet and fun)

We used the materials from Kizclub to add to our reading experience.

These activities were so fun and my kids really enjoyed them. It was also a nice way to step away from worksheets for the day.

I like to look for rainbows.....

This year for Sunday school/primary, one of the songs the kids are learning to sing is called "When I Am Baptized". The song is as follows:

I like to look for rainbows when ever there is rain

and ponder on the beauty of an earth made clean again.

CHORUS:

I want my life to be as clean as Earth right after rain

I want to be the best I can,

and live with God again.

I know when I am baptized my wrongs are washed away,

and I can be forgiven and improve myself each day.

CHORUS

I love the sentiment of the rainbow and how just like it was God's promise to Noah, it can be a promise unto us that if we can be clean and good "like earth right after rain" that we can live with God again. 



With this song in my heart I decided to make this the theme of today's learning.

I got a wonderful flip chart from sugardoodle. I used the one by Jolly Jen, but both of them work and both are filled with beautiful pictures to help your child learn the song.

We will sing along with this wonderful version I found on youtube:


We will read two books about rainbows:

We will hunt for letter Rr's *

We will sort upper and lower case Rr's*

We will line up the rainbows largest to smallest, smallest to largest and learn 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.*

We will learn how to spell the word rainbow*

We will color the number 24 Car from Nascar which is traditionally in a rainbow theme.

We will do-a-dot the letter R*

We will also graph rainbows*

We will also have centers set up so they can find how many different ways they can make rainbows using different materials.

• little vehicle counters
• buttons
• bottle caps
• play food like ice cream and the felt fruits and veggies
• beads
• legos
• linking cubes

We will also have this lesson on preparing to be baptized. I don't do a lot of "theme" lesson days, but this one left an impression on me that we should do this lesson at this time.

*All of these activities can be found at confessions of a homeschooler

What's in the book bin this month?

March Book Bin: This month I chose books about spring time, bugs and animals and other creatures. I kept some standbys that my kids love like Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, The Gummy Counting Book and the lovable story Who will be my friend.

What are your kids reading this month?

The Ugly Duckling- A literature Lesson

For literature we read the story of The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Anderson. This story is very dear to me and am so glad my children loved it too. I love how my kids understood that everyone needs love and that everyone is special.


We read the story together(I found some really neat printable visual aids here)
After the story we did a story map, drawing pictures of what happened at the beginning, middle and end.

We learned about grammer. I chopped up some sentences and then had the children put the words into the right order with the sentence starting with a capital letter and ending with a period.

We made a "literature word wall". We picked words from the story and put them on to a folder. And then practiced writing them. We will continue to add new words with each story we read.

Other activities we did:

• play duck, duck goose
• sing the song "six little ducks"
• we talked about feelings and about how it isn't ok to tease others.

Sight Word Palooza!

So are you looking for some fresh ideas to get those new words into your kid's vocabulary? I've got some great ideas here for either little or no cost at all

The very first thing I did was take all the sight words and write them on craft sticks, I got a bag of 100 at Hobby Lobby for about $1. Once that is done you can do a lot of activities to learn the sight words.

1. You draw a stick and make the word using letter tiles. Don't have letter tiles? You can make your own by printing off letters in a large font onto cardstock and laminating them. Want something fancier? You can make some really cool letters here.

2. Sight Word Matching: as simple as that, print the words on flashcards and start making matches.

3. ABC Order: give your child an ABC chart and have them draw ten and put them in ABC order.

4. Sight Word Steps: I used laminated feet and wrote the sight words on them. Then, just read and step. If you make it to the end of the path and you get a prize. Don't have cool feet or want to "create" them? You can go here and they have a game like this in color and black and white ready to print and play.

Other activities we have done that aren't pictured here

• We use the printable sight word booklets from Hubbard's Cupboard to color and read
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• We've used worksheets from Kids Learning Station to write and read sight words
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• We've used the word wheels and flash cards from Super Teacher Worksheets to do reading and writing activities.

This is really the tip of the iceberg of activities from just drawing words and writing them on paper or making sight word bingo, there are a lot of options to make learning these words fun for you child or classroom of kids. These activities can also be used as workboxes or centers.