Dinosaur Week

Sept. 5-11, 2010...

We are onto Lili's list of topics she wants to learn about. This week she chose dinosaurs. We read several books about dinosaurs from the library, made "fossils" in playdoh with toy dinosaurs and leaves/plants. We even had a meat-eater dine on an herbivore and leave his bones there in the play-doh, such imagination. We went outside and measured the size of several dinosaurs for a visual experience of how large they really were.
Tyrannnosaurus Rex- 45 feet
Triceratops- 30 feet
Brachiosaurus- 90 feet
Apatosaurus- 70 feet
Stegosaurus- 20 feet
Lili did a few math worksheets. They are sort of like a paint/color by number but to find the number in each piece of the picture you must figure out the addition problem. The answer gives you the number to know which color to use. Each worksheet/picture was of a different dinosaur. The first one I helped with and then we got out our math manipulative triangles and then Lili started whipping right through it on her own. She was so proud. We also made dinosaur skeletons by gluing different shaped pasta onto construction paper. I need to take a picture of them and post it next week. Lastly we made dinosaur eggs. We blew up balloons and then covered them in newspaper (paper mache) like you would for a pinata. Once they were dry we began painting them. They are currently drying and still need more painting so I will post pictures once they are done. Here are the pictures I took of them today, not quite finished.




In addition to our dinosaur theme we still checked out other books from the library. Lili and Gabi get to choose their books. Gabi has her own library card now and checks out her own books. Lili practiced writing her name, the letter Ff and the number 6. And of course lots and lots of play time with each other and mommy. See you next week!

On the hour...

Aug.22-Sept.4,2010...

Lili is learning to tell time to the hour. I printed her several worksheets, activities and cut-outs to help her understand the clock. After she finished each page we cut some of them up and made a sort of lapbook/clock folder. She enjoyed it all and colored everything after we were done putting it together. She LOVES to color. Now the folder tri-folds shut and holds the worksheets that were not used in making the clock folder. She can now tell time to the hour and is starting to learn the half hour.


The weather is finally cooling off a bit so we planned a picnic one day. I pulled the girls in our wagon to the bike trail and found a shady spot under a tree close to the park. While we ate our lunch we watched everyone on the bike trail. We kept track of how many bikes, people walking, dogs and people running so later we could make a chart or graph of who was on the bike trail that day. Lili made her bar graph of what we tracked on the bike trail. What we saw the most of were bikes and the least were people running.


Mystery Seed.....I came across this idea and thought we would give it a try. We found some dirt in our yard and put some in an empty yogurt container. We watered it everyday for the last week in hopes that there would be a mystery seed of some kind in that dirt. So far no luck. Looks like there wasn't anything in there but dirt.



Scavenger Hunt... both girls searched for, a flower, a small pebble, a rock with different colors, something green, something brown, a pine cone, a large smooth rock, a clover, something rough, something yellow, a Y-shaped twig and pine needles. They found everything. The large smooth rocks we painted. I need to take pictures of those. The items that could be pressed we pressed and are making scrapbook pages with them and some items (other rocks and pine cones) we took back outside. The girls love filling their buckets with "treasures".




Check out our discovery in the garden! Isn't he cute, to bad he is eating the tops of my carrots. I guess I'll let him stay a while so the girls can watch.


In addition to the above activities we also...
practiced writing Lili's full name, writing the capital and lower case letter E, counting by 5's, read lots of books (one on scavenger hunts and one on growing seeds), read some of Lili's level 2 books and learned new shapes (Octagon, Trapezoid, Pentagon and Hexagon).

Next week is....DINOSAUR WEEK!! Lili's choice :)

Our Week :)

August 15th-21st,2010...Here is the run down of our week...
*More practice of writing Lili's whole name. She still has trouble with Louise. It is a tough one.
*Learned what initials are. Figured out her own initials along with many family members initials.
*Lili likes doing our word lists on the board so we made a list of "og" words this week (dog, fog, frog, log, etc...)
*Using our bodies to show opposites. Such as taking giant steps across the living room and then the other person has to do the opposite, take tiny steps across the living room. And so on.
*Started a recipe book. Lili drew a picture on each page of a favorite meal or snack and then wrote the ingredients. I added in any cooking instructions at the bottom. So far we have a page for...peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, hard boiled eggs and pizza.
*We read a stack of books from the library, including one about feelings. So for art day we divided a sheet of paper into 4 squares. In one square we drew something that makes us happy, another square for something that makes us sad, another for mad and the last one for scared. Lili drew...happy-coloring with Gabi, sad-when Gabi is mean, mad- when Gabi is not sharing and scared- when daddy says...BOO!!
*Lili has started speeding through her level 2 reading books. She read one on her own with out any help from me. She sounded out any word she got stuck on and figured it out. AMAZING JOB!! She has been reading to Gabi a lot more lately and helping teach her to sing her ABC's and count to 10. Gabi is doing both but the alphabet is not completely clear yet. But for being 22 months old I think she is doing GREAT!! I guess I'll need to start adding in Gabi's school accomplishments here too. She is getting involved with some of our lessons. She loves painting with Lili too.
*Had a couple outings this week with friends/family that will be going back to school soon. Tuesday we went to Jump Central and inflatable jumpy place. The girls had a pretty good time. Then Wednesday we went to Aunt Robin's house to visit and play with Jake.

Another fun week with the girls!

Another Week of Fun!

August 8th-14th, 2010...
Lili is learning to write her full name. She is learning about estimation. She estimated how many of several groups of objects then counted them to see how close she got. One group she was only one away from estimating the right number.
We went to library of course. Even though the summer reading program is over and there are no prizes the girls are still managing to bring home close to 20 books each week. Although my library bag is quite heavy I don't know if I see any other reason to limit how many books they can get. They LOVE the library so why mess with it :) It has been a relaxed week, we have been playing a lot inside since it has been so hot and humid out. We have been playing tons of board games and coloring, painting, etc... Pretty much having FUN!

Time for Kindergarten!!

August 1 - 7, 2010... We hit the back to school sales on Monday morning. The girls loved picking out their supplies. We bought notebooks, paper, folders, markers, glue, a ruler and a set of math manipulatives. After our morning shopping trip we came home and got started. Gabi got a notebook to draw and color in and she loved playing with the triangle math manipulatives. Lili got a few notebooks (a black one for whatever she wants, a green one for her science/activity journal and a purple one for her writing journal-she writes to mommy or daddy and then we write her back in the journal). She also got a couple folders. She loves worksheets and activity pages so I am keeping some in one of her folders so she always has some available. The rest of our Monday consisted of...writing practice (Lili's name, capital and lower case Bb and the number 2. We also played a rhyming game with color words and made a list of words on the board that we could make with the -ick sound. We also read books from the library.
The rest of our week was filled with...alphabet games, math worksheets, a painted turtle art project, learning to use our new ruler/measuring things/making a graph to show our measurements/which item was the largest? smallest?, lots of reading and we finished it off with a trip to Lili's favorite park in Schererville.

Laid Back Summer School

July 25th - July 31st, 2010... We sort of homeschool year round but during the summer I think it is nice to have some weeks that are not completely free of school but more laid back. Before we get into a lot of new stuff I think Lili needs a review on writing her letters and numbers. She has started writing some of them backwards. So we are taking these last few weeks of summer to practice writing the alphabet (upper and lower case) and numbers. Since we have the time we are also spending a little more time on math. We have been so busy ready and keeping up with the summer reading program at the library I feel more attention to math is due. This week we practiced addition and subtraction of the number 1. We also read...
Alexander and the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day / Judith Viorst
Aunt Minnie McGranahan / by Mary Skillings Prigger
Just a school project / by Mercer Mayer
Arthur's Mystery Babysitter by Marc Brown (we get a lot of Arthur and D.W. book from the library. Both of the girls like them.)
Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin
Dino-Baseball by Lisa Wheeler
Gingerbread Pirates by Kristin Kladstrup
My Food = Mi Comida by Rebecca Emberley (You are interested in learning Spanish. I found a free site online where you can learn
spanish. You have looked at it with me once. More time on Spanish is on our list for Kindergarten this year. This book teaches the names of foods in Spanish.
We also made a list of "at words" on the chalk board and you wrote them all.
We made sound patterns by clapping our hands and slapping our legs.
You learned how to set the table. How many plates, cups, forks, etc... do we need?
We made more sock puppets. Now we have the dog and a new pig. You also want me to make a cat and a priness with long hair.

That is our week. Soon it will be time to hit the back to school sales for supplies for this coming school year.

Z-WEEK!

July 18-24, 2010...This was the last week of our "Letter of the Week" theme. Twenty-six weeks actually went by really fast. For Z-Week we read books about zebras, zippers and the zoo, how to make zero in math a created a zoo in our living room. Lili found every stuffed animal that you could find at a zoo and set them up in the living room like it was a zoo. Then she pretended to be the zoo keeper. She pretended to go around feeding and checking on all of the animals. She even helped Gabi (playing little girl visiting the zoo) feed some of the animals. We also played some new games outside with sidewalk chalk, an alphabet game and another game called "London". It is kind of a cross between hopscotch and hangman. Lili also learned how to play a few new board games. We played Guess Who, Connect Four and Hands Down. She really loves Guess Who! We have been playing it everyday.

Time to move on to new topics to learn about and Kindergarten work.