Ll - Leaf

So I am definitely behind once agian.  The kid's birthdays rolled around, then Thanksgiving, and then Christmas.  We also had company here and there, so I am taking my last week of Christmas vacation to try and do blog catch up. 

Two units ago we studied the leaf.  I really liked this unit, and if you know me then you probably know fall is my favorite season even though we don't see much of it down here in south Mississippi.  I can still remember the fall up north even though I haven't lived up there in 20 years.  I can remember the smell, and being out playing, and watching and listening to the birds fly over migrating south.  That is what I miss most about the north!

Anyway, our first activity was reading the book Leaf Man by Lois Ehlert, http://www.amazon.com/Notable-Childrens-Books-Younger-Readers/dp/0152053042.  We then went out and found leaves.  We sorted them by shape and color, and sorting is a kindergarten skill, so that worked out nice!  Then we glued our leaves and made our own leaf men.  The boys loved this!  So here are some pictures...

The book...

 Finding leaves and other things...

 

Talking about the leaves...

Starting our leaf men...

The finished product! 

 Our biblical concept this unit was "I will live and grow in Jesus."    

We learned as humans we are like the leaves growing on the plant, and God gives us what we need. We bought a plant to learn a little about the leaves and to compare us and God to the leaves..   

 We learned that some people don't want to obey God, and they want to live without God.  They are like the leaf that is all by itself.  We predicted what would happen to the leaf...it would turn brown and eventually die...

Each day we would water the plant and admire how pretty it was and how green the leaves were.  Each day we also observed how the leaves that were not on the plants looked and how they were slowly dying because they weren't getting any water. At the end of the week we discussed how a leaf needs food and water to grow.  It needs to stay on the plant.  Our spirit, the "real" us, the inside part of us, needs to stay with Jesus to live and grow.  The Bible, God's Word, is like our food.  If we listen to God's word and trust in God, we are like trees with green leaves that never wither and die. 

Here are some of our worksheets for the unit...

  

 

  

One day we did some leaf rubbings... 

  

This was the end of our leaf unit.  Next we move on to Aa-Apple...

Moon Unit

So we had fun this unit too.  I am finally getting the hang of things and so is Caden.  It is nice to be able to say go start doing your calendar board and he can start chaning the color and shape of the week and weather by himself.  We talk about the shapes and count the sides.  We are still working on not trying to change the month and year everyday, but Caden is doing well learning the days of the week song and the months of the year song.  He is also doing well learning his letter sounds song.  I am so glad I made the decision to homeschool!  I stressed over it for a while thinking Caden might fight me enough to where I wished I would have just sent him to school.  Of course he would rather play, but he is learning that it really doesn't take that long.  I was also worried that he would have trouble since he didn't know his letters, but he is doing a great job and I am ready to start speeding things up a little bit.  Even Dax is doing an awesome job!  Here are some of the things we did this unit...

This is Caden changing the date on this 5th birthday...

Adding another candy corn to our number of the week jar...

His "m" handwriting sheet.  He has come a long way and goes to the board and practices on his own some too.  He is so excited he can write a big letter "m" on his own.  I am sure he will catch on to the next letter really quick, which is "L". 

We added another set of flashcards to our box this week.  We take all the "m" pictures and "s" pictures and mix them up and then go through them and place them in the pile they go with.  Caden can do this on his own too and check himself because the cards have the correct letter on the back of them.

 On this sheet he had to circle the pictures that start with the mmmmm sound and x out the pictures that didn't.

 We learned the earth is about 4 times the size of the moon.  So we put one cracker to represent the moon and 4 crackers together to represent the size of the earth.

 We also learned that the moon does not have its own light and that it gets light from the sun shining on it.  We see the moon lit up because the light the sun shines on it reflects it off the moon.  We took a ball and wrapped foil around it and we went in a dark room to see that the ball (moon) didn't have any light.  Then we took a light which represented the sun and shined it towards the ball and saw how the ball (moon) reflected the light.

 We learned last week that Jesus is the light of the world.  This week we learned that we are like the moon, and Jesus is like the sun.  If we know Jesus, his light shines on us and we become a light too.  When we spend time with Jesus and he lives inside us, we are a light to help other people find Jesus.  The more time we spend with Jesus, and the more we obey Jesus, the more light we have.  Other people need to see our light shining brightly!

I decided to start doing each row of our 100 days of school chart (and each month on our calendar sheet) with a patteren because I realized Caden was having trouble with what comes next in a simple pattern.  This row is green orange green...  We have also had to use M&M's and lay them on each box to get the point across.  He is starting to get a little better!

This sheet is using our number jar...He had to draw a picture of two objects in the first box and practice writing the number 2...then in the second box we practiced with the number 1...as the weeks go by he will practice with the number of the week and them pick one of the other numbers to illustrate. 

Caden practicing cutting...on this sheet he cuts out the letters and then looks at the pictures and glues the correct letter that the pictures starts with...this week it is practicing "m" and "s" because those are the only two letters we have done.  Each week it will build and have more letters.

 Another moon activity...we drew on flashcards 4 moon phases (full, half, crescent, new)...we used the flashcards to practice the moon phases...then we got to eat the icing off the oreos for each moon phase...this, of course, was my favorite activity!  Dax liked it too!!

 Here we learned about the size of the sun, moon, and earth.  We made each of them out of paper so they were in proportion to their actual sizes...the sun was 4 foot 4 inches, the earth was 1/2 inch, and the moon was 1/4 inch.  I don't think I realized the sun was that much bigger than the earth...

 We then hung the sun on the gate and had to walk 461 feet away from it with the Earth and the moon so they were in proportion to their actual distance from each other in space.

Half way there...

 461 feet...if you look really close to the left of the boat you can see the sun there on the gate.   This activity shows that the sun looks as small as it does because it is so far away from the earth.  It looks small, but it really isn't.

This was our last sheet practicing out letters for the week.  We had to draw a picture, or in most of the squares we used stickers, to represend a letter we have learned and then practiced writing it 3 times. 

 At the end of the unit we took our moon flashcards and glued them to a sheet that we can keep for our records of what we learned for each letter. 

We also read a ton of books this unit.  It is so nice because I can go online and reserve books from the library (really about 8 libraries in our system) and they call me when they come in and I run in and pick them up.  I think we probably read 10-15 books, fiction and nonfiction, that had to do with the moon.  The kids love reading before bed and I love that we can connect it with our school units!  Now on to learning about the letter "L"... leaves/trees/plants!

"S" Sun Unit

 So the second day of our unit I made "s" pancakes and bacon.  The kids got a kick out of this.  I did the bacon by putting it on a cookie sheet in the shape of an "s" and broiling it in the oven.  That is how I do my bacon most of the time anyway because it is less messy and takes less time.

This is their letter puzzle.  They love to do it.  As they put the letters in it I tell them the name and sound of the letter and have them repeat them so they can learn the names and sounds of the letters. 

 With each unit we work on a new number too.  They make a card for the number and put in an object representing the number.  We decided to use candy corns since we had a lot of them left over from our creation unit and what better candy to use in the fall.  As the units go on they pick out a random number and write the number on a worksheet and then illustrate that number by drawing that many of objects of their choice.  When they do this activity they pick 2 numbers and illustrate each of them.  I forgot to take a picture of that activity this time, but will try to get it next unit.

 We have a Cuisenaire Rods Alphabet book that has activities for each letter (http://www.etacuisenaire.com/catalog/product?deptId=&prodId=030030).  This is what they were doing.  It also helps them differentiate between sizes of the blocks.  They loved this activity!

This is our grape experiment...We took grapes and put them on a plate in the sun in the window to see what would happen.

This is what Caden  thought would happen.

This is what the grape looked like the 1st day.  We ended up not drawing a grape picture every day because there wasn't a tremendous change.  We did it every couple of days.  Caden was excited when they changed into raisins...just realized I haven't taken another picture of those yet either!

One day we reviewed our Bible verse and painted a sun...

Another activity we did was take a globe and put a sticky note on where we live and then put a sticky note on the opposite side of the world.  We went into their dark bedroom and shined the light on the globe and I showed them how the earth turns every day and why sometimes it's light and sometimes it's dark.  They also saw that when it is light in some places it is dark in other places. 

We finally got to the 10th day of school this unit...and rubber banded out 10 sticks together.

Our last experiment was testing the heat of the sun.  We put an ice cube in the sun on the gate...and one in the shade on the porch rail to see which cube melted faster.  Caden decided the one in the sun melted faster, so we talked about how the sun gives us heat and what it is used for. 

First pictures

  



After they started melting...

 On this worksheet we had to pick letters and draw a picture that started with that letter.  Since this is our first letter we drew 4 pictures of things that started with the letter "s".

 One night we had dinner over the fire and hot dogs and made "s"more's.  We talked about the stars, smoke, and s'mores all starting with the letter s...Caden also thought smarshmellows started with s.   

We also went into the bedroom one night and played with the light and made shadows...we learned that the closer the light go to the object the shadow got bigger and the farther away it got from the object the shadow got smaller. 

So, overall we learned the sun starts with the letter "s"...the sun gives us light...Jesus is the light of the world...the sun gives us heat...the sun dehydrates things...the sun makes shadows...more to come later!