U lessons

This week we made an underground picture. We glued brown paper bag (for the dirt) to green construction paper (for the grass) and then the girls painted inside the U tunnel I drew on the paper.

Then we added some pictures of burrowing animals after the paint dried. We have a chipmunk, worms, ants, a mole and a groundhog.

I saw something similar over at No Time for Flashcards blog.

I found a link to beginningreading.com at the Confessions of a homeschooler blog. I printed out a u letter find worksheet and a printing u practice sheet.

I have decided to do this for each letter from now on and keep the worksheets in a folder. Then we will put that week's worksheet into a sheet protector so they can use the dry erase markers. I also printed out a counting activity printable from the Confessions of a Homeschooler blog.

Seemed perfect that she had just posted about the letter U, as I have been looking for some more ideas.

We also made umbrellas, which have become a part of our Up banner/mural that we have started. For the umbrellas I searched for an umbrella template, copied and enlarged it, and printed out an extra copy so I could have a pattern by which to cut out the shapes in the colors the girls wanted to use to glue onto the umbrella.

Then we made some rain. I cut raindrops out of foil and the girls stuck it onto the sticky side of clear contact paper, then I covered it with another piece of contact paper.

Then we sponge painted clouds onto our sky banner/mural.

We talked about things that go up in the sky.

Our Up "mural" is the sky with the painted clouds and it is now hung to the "archway" between the living room and dining room. We made white cumulus clouds along with some gray storm clouds because I wanted to hang the umbrellas and rain to this banner/mural. We will be adding other crafts next week. Things that go UP.

This week we also started our new Bible Time book. Well, it is new to the girls. I have had a family worship felt set from Little Folk Visuals for over 10 years. I had forgotten I had this particular book as a matter of fact. I like that the book has object lessons, songs and activities to expand upon the lesson. We started with the story of creation which will take 3 weeks to cover. This week we focused on Days 1 through 3, so we had another way to link "sky" into our lessons. I decided tonight that we will make a Days of Creation Lapbook to help reinforce what we are learning. So, stay tuned...

I also found a color matching activity, though I can't remember whose blog I saw it on. As we are low on printer ink I used the template which I found for the big umbrella craft so I could cut umbrellas out of construction paper. As of today the girls have not had a chance to play this game. But they are to pick a raindrop and match it to the correct colored umbrella.

Here is the list of words I used for Uu:

words I found signs for: umbrella, uncles (I used pictures of two of their uncles), up

words without a sign: umbrella bird, umbilical cord (I used a picture I took of Hannah before her cord fell off)

Understanding is a wellspring of life unto him that hath it. Proverbs 16:22

I got my felt board out with these cute little pieces that are to be used for counting/math activities. I had been browsing through blogs, clicking on links to other's blogs and lost track of where I went. One idea I saw was to use a felt board for patterns and that was what I planned to do. Tabitha had other plans. The girls ended up putting matching pieces up in groups, in lines/rows. I took the opportunity to talk about odd and even, which I hadn't done in months. When Tabitha had two like pieces together I told her she had two pieces and it was an even number because they each had a friend. Then when she added another matching piece I told her it was odd because one of them didn't have a friend. So she would add another one so it would have a friend and become even. She would alternate between different animals until the entire board was covered with animals in groups. Then she used the pumpkin pieces and some animals got to eat.

When we were done, I had the girls sort them into piles so they could be put away neatly.

Tabitha wanted me to play some music out of my beginning piano book. When her grandmother was here she showed Tabitha and Amelia how to play with one finger so they weren't banging away. So she wanted me to show her how to play Brother John. I thought I had a brilliant idea. I used a piece of paper to mark the piano keys and then wrote just the note letters on paper. Then I pointed to the letter and asked her to find the matching letter on the keys. At first it looked like she understood. She found C, D and E but the next note was C again and she pointed to the G. Then when I tried to get her to point to C again she was looking up at the book, the paper and down the keys. I was frustrated, she was frustrated (in tears actually), so we stopped and haven't gone back to it yet. Here are some pictures of what we did:

One more picture. I wanted to share the barbells Tabitha made with her legos:

Update: I found the blog where I saw the color matching activity! Some really neat activities over at Chasing Marcus

To see what others are doing with there preschoolers and toddlers head on over to Homeschool Creations and 1+1+1=1