Life As We Know It: Africa!

I can see that my intent to post weekly is off to a great start... ha! After our week of Chocolate Challenge, we spent a week learning about lizards. We worked our way through a really neat (and long!) book called, Lizards: Weird and Wonderful. We learned so much about God's amazing creation! Did you know there is a lizard that can squirt blood from its eyes to defend itself? Or that one type of lizard squeezes itself between two rocks, then blows itself up like a balloon so its predators can't yank it out of its hiding place? If I was really on top of things, I'd remember the names of both of those lizards. But the truth is, we've already returned the book to the library and we covered so many lizards that their individual names now escape me! Anyway, my goal for the kids at this point is simply to explore and appreciate the world around them, not necessarily memorize all the details. :)

I didn't manage many pictures during lizard week, but here is what I have since I last posted:

In art, we revisited the primary colors song we learned last year. In case you missed it, it goes like this:

Red, yellow, blue.

I love you.

Red, yellow, blue.

You are the primary colors.

You make all the other colors.

Red, yellow, blue.

We talked about how the primary colors are sort of like superheroes since they create all the other colors. For the project, Adeline used the primary colors to create a superhero. Then she drew in the rest of the details with crayons. Her superhero is flying over a castle. If you're interested, we get our art ideas from 1st Grade Art with Mrs. Brown. I'm so thankful for her website!!

We also completed a color wheel art project using modeling clay.

We mixed and kneaded and mixed and kneaded until we had all the colors of the rainbow and grey/brown.

Then Adeline chose to use her clay to make an elephant drinking water. Cute! Little did she know, we would be spending the next week learning about Africa and elephants!

We LOVE our Write Shop Primary curriculum! Each "Step" takes us two weeks to complete and it culminates with a writing project. The theme for step 1 was Animals. Together we wrote lots of short, three line stories about animals. At the end of the first step, Adeline drew a picture of our cat, Tuffy, and dictated a few sentences about the picture. Then we "framed" it with construction paper and hung it on the wall.

The theme for step 2 is "All About Me." The focus is on personal writing. Each day we write a bit about things that are happening that day or things that are important to Adeline. During our writing time, I give Adeline prompts and she dictates the sentences. We are working on making sentences that are a complete thought. We also discuss capitalization and punctuation.

Her project for this step is to create a 5-page book about herself. It's coming along nicely and will be done by the end of this week. She's pretty proud of this project! Pictures will come when it's completed.

Every time I pull out our All About Spelling curriculum, I fall in love with it all over again! I cannot say enough good things about this material! It's definitely intense, but Adeline is making leaps and bounds in her ability to spell and write. We are about 2/3 of the way through Level 1 and I'm embarrassed to admit that I am learning things right along with Adeline! Yesterday and today we practiced spelling words that begin with the /k/ sound and we learned how to know whether a word begins with a "c" or a "k." I expected this step to take Adeline most of the week, but she caught on right away and we will move on to the next step tomorrow (which covers how to tell when a word ends with a double consonant, like "ff," "ss," or "ll.").

This is our All About Spelling board. During the lesson, Adeline initially spells the words using the tiles. Then we move on to writing dictated phrases with the dry erase marker. This phrase is "Shut that shed." We're still working on giving each word it's own space!

I think what I love most about this program is its emphasis on memorizing all the sounds in the English language with the letter or letter combination that makes the sound (for example, I will hold up the letter "y" and Adeline says the four sounds the letter "y" can make, or "ch" and the three sounds "ch" can make). I also love that we spend a fair amount of time memorizing spelling rules (for example, "c" says /s/ before "i," "e," or "y" and says /k/ before all other letters), then implementing those rules with a spelling list and dictation.

Moving on! We spent last week learning about Africa. We read and read and read about the animals and people of Africa. You certainly can't cover an entire continent in one week, but we had a good overview!

Here are a few of the books we enjoyed.

We played mancala, making our board from an egg carton, two CLEAN pans the clinic sent home with me after I had my wisdom teeth out and popcorn kernels. Adeline won this game.

We wrapped up our week with a trip to the zoo! We specifically went to see the African animals. Turns out, the zoo has a LOT of animals from Africa! We didn't see them all, but we definitely saw our fill!

This "little" guy is 5 months old!

Of course, we had to ride the train!

Did you know that zebras' stripes are actually brown and not black? Their stripes confuse predators when they are grouped together in a herd because their attacker can't single out just one animal.

We had a picnic in the beautiful garden area. It was so nice there! We had one pesky peacock that wanted to join us for lunch, but we kept shooing him off. Did you know that only the male peacock is actually called a "peacock"? A female is a "peahen" and a baby is a "peachick."

We visited the Expedition Madagascar exhibit and watched a bit of the movie they had playing. I think really the kids were less interested in the movie and more interested in sitting in the air conditioning for a while!