Easter Unit Study - Week 4

We completed our fourth and final week of our Easter unit study on Friday!  We had a fun week - starting with Easter!  This was the first year we were at home for Easter.  It was so nice to be in our own church.  We had a big, yummy dinner at home, then spent the rest of the afternoon playing.  The kids got kites in their Easter baskets.  It was the perfect day to fly them, too! 

Our little strawberry plants enjoyed the warm, sunny day.  I haven't checked on them since last night's storm, but they did have lots of buds on them!

It was so warm on Easter, the kids put on their swimming suits and ran through the sprinkler.  Kids are tough!  It wasn't anywhere close to warm enough for me to join them!
 

When they got cold, we went inside and dyed Easter eggs.  We tried a new "tye-dye" method this year from the Family Fun website.  Pour a little vinegar over your eggs, then drop a little food coloring on them.  Roll them around in a colander, drop another color or two, roll some more and rinse.  My colander will never be the same, but the eggs were really pretty!

We tried both brown eggs and white.  The white were the prettiest, but the brown eggs turned out neat, too.

Later in the day, Adeline brought me a picture.  Sorry, Jessica!  I don't know what we'll do with those two!  :)  On another note, I'm glad my daughter realizes there is more than one form of "to."  Apparently we need a lesson in grammar, though!  

Speaking of writing, we started the sixth and final unit in Language Arts this past week.  It began with r-influenced vowels.  The character our curriculum gives this concept is Bossy R.  He likes to boss the vowels around and make them say a different sound.  Adeline was very excited to spell Sparks because that is her club name at AWANA.  Side note - Adeline finished her extra credit book this past week at AWANA!!  She was disappointed that there wasn't another book to do until next year.  :)

We practiced spelling one day, too.  

Ok, so on to the actual Easter study.  We completed our word wall.

And Adeline finished her lapbook.  The lapbook shows at a glance everything she learned this past month.  I've already explained the John 3:16 scramble and the Last Supper section, so I will skip that.  The pocket with the Bible has a note inside that Adeline wrote to Jesus.  It says, "I love you.  Adeline"

The "Life of Christ" pocket has several strips of paper that chronicle Jesus' life on earth.  You mix them up and put them in the right order.    

"Old Testament Prophecies" is an accordion book.  I read each verse in the Bible, then Adeline picked out the matching blurb.

"Jesus' Miracles" is a flip book that records 5 of the miracles Jesus performed.  We read each story, then Adeline wrote a sentence or two about the story.  This one says, "Jesus healed the man on the bed."  

Although there wasn't a section for it in the lapbook, we spent a lot of time this week learning about Jesus' appearances on earth after He rose.  We concluded Friday with His ascension and promise to return.

And that's a wrap!  What a great study!

I don't usually post much about Braxton and Sadie since they aren't as heavily involved in school work, but tonight I wanted to share some of the things they are learning.

Braxton recognizes all the letters in his name and loves to point them out in words.  It makes Adeline's flash card time incredibly long (example:  I hold up "chore" for Adeline to read, but Braxton interrupts with, "Mom!  I have that letter and that letter and that letter in my name!  But I don't have that letter.")  I'm thrilled to see that he's making some connections, even if it tests my patience.  :)

Sadie has decided she wants to talk.  It's so cute!  This week's phrases are, "Excuse you." and "Thank you."  Such a polite little one!  She also says "Beep, beep!" if you are in her way.

Tonight she refused to sleep until everything in her bed was just right.  It's almost like Where's Waldo?  Can you spot the toddler?  :)  

Tomorrow we begin a 4-week study of gardens.  I'm excited to get started!    

Easter Unit Study - Weeks 1 to 3

Time flies when you're having fun, right?  Somehow we are beginning the fourth and final week of our Easter study.  Here are some highlights of the past couple of weeks:

Adeline and I used liquid watercolor to paint "stained glass" crosses one afternoon while Braxton and Sadie napped.  I think they turned out really pretty!  

Our life of Jesus timeline hasn't gone so well.  Adeline added Jesus in the temple, then that's where our line came to a halt.  Maybe we'll finish it this week.  Jesus is now much bigger than He was as a baby.  :)  As far as Adeline is concerned, 12 year olds are grown ups!

We have added more words to our Easter word wall.

...And experimented with growing new life.  This was a Pinterest activity (again - I'm not on Pinterest, I just appreciate those who are and share their findings!).  We placed daylily bulbs on top of rocks and added a little water.  They took off pretty quickly!  Hopefully one of these days we'll have a pretty, living bouquet in our kitchen.

We started growing our sunflowers for the sunflower playhouse this summer.  Aren't they cute?

This is an awesome book!  The kids choose it every day to read before quiet time.  It's a sweet story of a sister who is sick with scarlet fever and a little brother who accepts Jesus as his Savior during the illness. It also teaches that Easter eggs represent Jesus' tomb.  A chick breaking free from the egg is like Jesus' resurrection.  I definitely recommend this one!

Not school related, but a good friend let us borrow a bike for Braxton.  Nathan thought he should ride Adeline's little pink bike, and I protested.  Thank you, Titus, for sharing your old bike!  Braxton LOVES it!!  (The pink training wheels were salvaged from Adeline's bike, but that's ok!)
  

Back to work!  We completed a unit on measurement in math.  One day we gathered all the thermometers we could find in the house and talked about how we used them.  For being someone who rarely takes a person's temperature (I don't medicate a fever, so what's the point), I thought it was funny that we found two thermometers for body temperature.  We also found the thermometer on our thermostat and two thermometers outside.  Whew!

We took a tour of our yard one day and examined all the new growth on our plants and trees.  This tree is so pretty when it blooms!  Wish it stayed that way longer than just a few days.

Look at how the daylilies shot up!  It's neat to watch their roots push down alongside the rocks.  

We planted spinach and arugula in the window box outside the kitchen.  So cute and tasty!  Watering them from the kitchen spray nozzle is just an added bonus!  

The strawberries are getting flowers!

The creeping phlox is gorgeous!

And I think these are lime-green four o'clocks returning for another year.  I sure hope so!  They were beautiful last year.

Easter lilies!

We explored a lot of trees, too.  It was neat to see different types of trees in different stages of leaf development.  I love school days when our lessons are so hands-on and real-life.  This is a great intro to our upcoming Gardens unit study!  Can't wait!!

We visited family in Colorado over Palm Sunday.  This was our family craft.  A fun new tradition, maybe?

Grandpa's friend, Cindy, helped the kids with some sidewalk art.  Sadie was excited to lay down and let Cindy trace her!

 

So Adeline!  

We got home in time to finish our Resurrection eggs.  I love that both Adeline and Braxton can tell the Easter story using the cues from the eggs. 

Adeline is working on finishing her lapbook this week.  She completed a John 3:16 word scramble and learned about the Last Supper for this section of the lapbook.

One day we learned about the three main types of clouds and watched a really neat PBS video that explained how the clouds are formed and what they mean in terms of weather.  I love the PBS LearningMedia website!

During the past couple weeks, I also learned that some people consider "w" a vowel.  For more information, check out this site: When is W a Vowel?  Long story short, our curriculum teaches that w is sometimes a vowel.  After checking with other homeschool and private school parents/kids, I discovered that our curriculum isn't wacko and lots of kids are learning this.  So, even though it felt really odd, I went ahead with teaching that sometimes w acts like a vowel.  

Another fun thing we did was jelly bean math.  We found a book at the library that gave practice counting coins and buying jelly beans.  1 jelly bean = 1 cent.  We have plenty of jelly beans in the house right now for practice!  When we finished the activity, we visited the Jelly Belly website and watched a video of the process of making jelly beans.  The kids really enjoyed that!  You can see the video here.  

Just one more day and we begin our final unit in Language Arts.  How did Kindergarten go so quickly?!    

Easter Unit Study - Days 1 and 2

We're off!  We're trying out Amanda Bennett's Easter unit study before committing to a year of unit studies next fall.  To be honest, mentally I'm already very excited about the unit studies and very committed (as in, I have the year sketch-planned).  But you know, before making the commitment with our wallet, I wanted to try out a couple of studies.  We're beginning with her 4-week Easter study.  Two days in, I have mixed emotions.  I'm still very excited and mentally committed to unit studies, but I'm not sure this was the way to start.  The studies we plan to do in the fall are 1-week studies specifically geared toward kids K-4th grade.  The 4-week study we are doing is a K-12 study that is divided into two sections, Lower Level and Upper Level.  The upper level is fascinating for me!  I'm really enjoying going through the material and learning lots of new things.  However, even the lower level isn't quite "low enough" for a Kindergartner.  We only do about 1/3 of each day's lesson because it's a lot of information.  And some of the ideas are just plain difficult to present to a 5 year old.  Let me back up.  The Easter study is a study of Jesus' life, beginning with Old Testament prophecy and ending with His ascension.  Trying to explain prophets today was a flop.  Adeline kept telling me, "But Jesus wasn't born yet."  This is where a background in education would be helpful to me!  Maybe the idea of a prophet is too abstract for a 5 year old. Maybe I just don't know how to explain it.  I dunno.  Either way, she didn't get it and we moved on.  I'm ok with that, though.  We're still having a great time studying the life of Jesus and the kids are learning *something* even if it isn't everything that is laid out.  We can return to the study in a few years and catch the rest of the info. 

So, that being said, here is what we've done so far this week:

       

We started a timeline of Jesus' life.  Adeline drew Jesus in the manger with Joseph and Mary.  I was going to add the approximate date to our timeline, but I felt like that was information overload at this point.

Each day we open a Resurrection Egg and talk about the item's significance to the Easter story.  Monday was a donkey and Tuesday was silver coins.  This activity is a BIG hit.  They want to open all the eggs right away!

On Monday, Adeline copied the first half of John 3:16.  She already knows this verse, so we used it for handwriting practice.

Tuesday she copied the second half.

She also journaled about one way we celebrate Easter.  She wrote the sentence herself.  It says, "We hide Easter eggs."  Pretty close!

We located Israel on the map and marked it with a cross.  It was neat for the kids to see exactly where Jesus lived while He was on earth.

We have started a word wall for Easter.  We are adding a couple of words each day.

That wraps up our Easter study so far.  Two days down, eighteen to go!

In Language Arts we added the concept of two vowels appearing together.  You remember the rhyme? "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking."  We also added the "and sometimes Y" portion of "A, E, I, O, U."  I've been mostly happy with BJU Press' phonics program up until this point.  They use characters to help show word patterns, and although it's a cute way to explain phonics, it's hard for Adeline to remember the concept without the use of the characters.  Below is Miss Long and Miss Silent explaining the "a" and "y" vowels.  We will not be using BJU Press next year for phonics, but I have been happy enough with it that we will probably use it again for Kindergarten with Braxton and Sadie.  

 In Math we are revisiting money, adding the nickel to the previously learned dime and penny.  A friend found this book at the library for us.  It made a great introduction to the chapter!  

Well, that brings us up to the present.  I have a fun Easter craft planned for tomorrow and we've started a Pinterest flower growing experiment that I will post about later this week.  So far it's working!  And for the record, I'm still not a Pinterest person - just thankful for those who are that share their findings!

Another once-a-month update

I kept putting off updating our blog because I hadn't emptied pictures off my camera.  I still don't have any pictures to share, but I wanted to do an update because starting Monday we're going to shake things up a bit.  More on that later.  :)

So our story left off with our 100th day of school.  After that lesson, we spent a week learning about Spain and missionaries.  It worked out nicely that Adeline has moved on to the extra credit book in AWANA, which includes a study of missionaries.  She chose to learn about George Whitefield.  We found his picture, read about his life, learned how he shared the Gospel and imagined what it would have been like to help him.  During our study of Spain, we learned to count to 10 and say ten colors in Spanish.  Adeline is fascinated with other languages and constantly asking me how to say ______ in Spanish.  Unfortunately, most of the time I have no idea!  Spanish will definitely be one of her subjects next year - and we'll be learning together!

The next week's focus was the United States.  We learned about Hawaii and watched beautiful clips from YouTube.  We also learned about growing bananas - which reminded me why I prefer to buy organic.  Daddy taught Tuesday's lesson that week while I went to a Love & Logic conference.  The theme that day was the Statue of Liberty.  I didn't get a very detailed report, but from what Nathan and Adeline said, the day went pretty good.  Nathan did comment that he makes a better electrician than teacher.  :)  The next day was the Luray Caverns.  We watched a really neat video on YouTube, then tried to make our own stalactites and stalagmites using two glasses of salt water and string.  The experiment was a flop, though.  Nathan thinks we didn't have enough salt in the water.  I didn't think we could get any more salt to dissolve.  I guess that's part of experimenting!   We ended the week with Alaska, watching more beautiful footage and finding the state on our map.

The next week began a unit on weather and the seasons.  We made a model of the earth and sun using a ball and flashlight.  The kids were fascinated with the idea of the earth rotating and that night on one side of the earth is day on the other.  They ask on a daily basis what time it is in Germany, and now they understand why Kathi is asleep when we are eating supper.  :)

Weather forecasting was the topic of another day that week.  We watched our local weatherman predict the day's weather, then compared his forecast with what actually happened.  He was pretty close!  I tried explaining the use of radar and other instruments, but it mostly went over the kids' heads.  Around this time, I had a day of feeling sick.  I was laying in bed watching one of my favorite shows, Storm Chasers, on Netflix when Adeline crawled in bed with me.  Not exactly the best show for a 5 year old, but she was so intrigued by the tornado footage I let her watch it.  Now we'll find out this spring if the show makes her more or less scared of severe weather.

This week we have continued with the theme of seasons, specifically focusing on summer.  God worked it out for us that the weather this week has felt a lot like summer!  We spent time talking about the fun things we do in the summer, and experimented with placing a thermometer in the shade, then in the sun.  I was surprised to find our sidewalk measuring 110 degrees in March!  We have soaked up the summer-like sun this week by doing all of our school work outside (you should see our driveway!  We need some rain to erase our "chalkboard!") and spending lots of time at the park.

So that was the fun stuff.  Adeline has been working really hard in Language Arts adding to her knowledge of phonics.  Sh, Ch, Th, -ng, and Wh sounds were added early in the month.  The past two weeks have been spent on words with long vowels and a silent "e."  I was a little worried about trying to explain silent "e," but it only took a day and Adeline had it down.  I've been dictating a lot of words for her the past two weeks.  I've been really surprised at how well she can spell, and how eagerly she does it.  In addition to her schoolwork, she's been reading about 3 books a day.  It's really hard for me to believe how far she has come since September.  So proud of her!

Math this month included a chapter on subtraction to 6 and a chapter of solid shapes.  Yesterday we had a living math activity.  Adeline helped me measure our future garden and plot it on graph paper.  I thought the activity was great!  Adeline, however, told me, "Mom, I thought this was going to be fun, but it's work."  Not sure how much help I will get out of her this summer!

That brings us to the present.  We have 8 weeks left in this school year and I've decided to use those weeks to try out next year's style of curriculum.  Styles of homeschooling range from those who "un-school" to those who have "school at home."  Admittedly, I'm much closer to the "school at home" end of the spectrum.  I want to break the mold (a little!) and use unit studies next year as our core curriculum.  We will add in Language Arts (right now I'm planning to use All About Spelling and All About Reading), Math (Math-U-See) and a couple other things to round out first grade.  From the samples I've seen and the reviews I've read, I'm really excited to try out Amanda Bennett's unit studies.  Starting Monday, we will spend 4 weeks on her Easter unit.  I will definitely be blogging this experience!  At the end of the Easter unit, we will jump into her 4 week Garden unit - which will end just in time to start planting!  I can't wait to get started and to share our adventure!  

A whole bunch of pictures!

I was doing so good at updating once a week and then it all came crashing down.  So, forgive me, but here is almost a month's worth of pictures.

We took a day off and visited the children's museum with some friends, then made up our school day on Saturday.  I love that flexibility!

Sadie LOVED the new tractor exhibit.  The screen shows corn in the processes of planting, growing and harvesting.  It even sounds like you are riding in a tractor.

I made some games from TeachersPayTeachers.com.  They have TONS of downloads on the site and lots of freebies (like these!).  

I used the snowmen cards for Braxton with number recognition... 

...and for playing a matching game with Adeline.  She had to choose sets that equaled 10.

This is a favorite game of both kids.  Braxton just likes yelling out "SKUNK!"  

We take turns drawing cards and reading the word on the card.  If you can read it, you keep it.  If you draw a skunk, you have to return all of your cards.  The person with the most cards at the end of the game wins.

My daughter doesn't believe in smiling nicely for the camera.

A friend's daughter attends Kindergarten in a neighboring town and came home with a marshmallow/toothpick creation a while back.  I thought it sounded like fun, so we gave it a try.  This activity kept Braxton and Adeline entertained for an incredibly long time!  

Braxton, of course, spent a few minutes building things, then ran for his pickup and loaded it up.  He is all boy.  

Adeline told me this is a playground.  Looks like fun!  Or maybe deadly... 

Jessica came over for another music lesson.  This time she started teaching Adeline about the staff and notes.  Adeline can recognize C on the staff and play it on the glockenspiel.  

We hit a mid-year lull this past month, so I decided to add some fun with a Horton Hears a Who mini-unit.  We read the book 5 days in a row and completed a different activity with it each day.  On Monday we made elephant ears (fried bread with cinnamon and sugar).

I think Braxton was starting to say something.  Maybe it was, "This is so good, Mom!"

Each day we added two words to our bulletin board.  We read each word, defined it and used it in a sentence.  We also talked about how the word was used in the book.  

One fun thing we did during the unit was watch a video of an elephant painting, compliments of the PBS LearningMedia website.  Very cool!

 

On Valentine's Day, we had a Living Math lesson and made Daddy some sugar cookies.  Everyone helped!  And only two people fell off chairs.  :)  

Sadie thought the mixer was too loud!

This cracks me up!  Braxton is yelling, "Cookies!" and although it appears that he is about to pummel his sister with the sifter, I assure you no children were *seriously* injured in the making of these cookies.

 Ta Da!  

Not school related, but so cute!  Sadie can eat her cereal all by herself... and drink the milk, too!  So big!

Back to business...  We spent a week learning about the ocean.  On this day we were learning about whales.  We watched some really neat videos from PBS LearningMedia, then experimented with Crisco to find out how it keeps whales warm in cold water.  **Edit: Crisco does not keep whales warm.  Blubber does!** 

Adeline helped write the experience story.  

We have moved on to "sh," "ch," and "th" in phonics.  Adeline was having a hard time remembering "sh" and "ch" so I drew a train to help her remember.  Trains go ch, ch, choo, choo!  Right? 

Art really isn't my thing, so I found a better picture.

 In case you were wondering what Miss Sadie does during all this excitement....

She helps her sister with her work.

Assigns new chores to her siblings.

And decorates the classroom.  She's a busy little girl!

We celebrated our 100th day of school this month, too!  The library had some great 100 day books.

To celebrate, we counted 100 pieces of cereal and strung them on necklaces.  

Never a dull moment.

Adeline says, "Mom, there might not be 100 on my necklace.  I had to eat a couple."  

Monkey see, monkey do.  Braxton's necklace is missing more than "a couple!"   

Adeline wrote numbers 1-100 all by herself!   

 And finally, it's not school related, but I wanted to share the pictures.  Adeline and some friends got to dance with the college dance team last weekend.  They had a blast!  

So sweet!