Scavenger Hunt Sunday: October 10th 2010

The rules are simple:

1. Anyone can participate. 
2. You're encouraged to take five new photos this week for the challenge. 
3. If you get stumped, you may use one photo from your archive (although I'm not too strict about it - I do my best to take fresh shots). 
4. Link up here on Sunday (or Tuesday at the latest) - you can use the button above. 
5. Have fun!

Pink

This house is in a nearby town.  I had actually forgotten about it, but we drove past it this week and I thought it would be perfect for the scavenger hunt.

Books

My newly arranged bookshelves in the bedroom.

Fall Colors

A thought this was very artfully arranged in a neighbor's front yard. 

And it has a nice variety of fall colors.

Leaf

Tabitha found this leaf while we were on our walk and wanted to give it to me.  

Orange

I was actually surprised by all the "orange" subjects I found.  But this one spoke of the season the best.

Head on over to Ashley's blog, Ramblings and Photos to see some more great interpretations of this week's words.  I can't wait to see what she has in mind for us for the upcoming week.

School Time: Week 5 (Mm)

I decided I need to reorganize my daily/weekly schedule for our lesson time.  I thought I would be able to get a letter done each week, but now I feel we are a little too structured for my liking.  Or maybe it was just poorly scheduled.  The way I had scheduled everything we didn't have time for anything extra and the girls were having too much sit-at-a-table time.  They love when we get up and run around the table singing "Every move I make I make in you, you make me move Jesus..."  They love waddling like penguins.  They loved the puppet show we put on for If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.  However, that took time out of what I had "planned."  Plus doctor appointments don't help, but that won't be an every week thing.  I also haven't been finding time for our bird of the week that corresponds with the letter, or our state lesson.  Bad planning? Procrastination? Too much planned to begin with?  I don't know.  I don't want to overwhelm Amelia, but I don't want Tabitha bored either.  I think this would be easier if they were a little further apart.  I don't know.
Anyhow, I am not going to stress out if we end up having to take two weeks for each letter.  I still want to follow my basic schedule that I posted about on our first week of school.
Monday: Introduce sound using phonemic exercises found at readinglessons.com.  Color, cut and collage our word card pictures onto a capital letter.
During "circle time" I read one word card at a time (or have Tabitha read it if it is a 3-4 letter phonetic word)  and the girls find the picture card and place it on the poster. 
And of course we have Muffin Tin Monday I need to prepare, which takes some time, but the girls really look forward to it.

Tuesday: Playgroup, so far no lessons scheduled this day.

Wednesday: Tactile letter activities.  During circle time the word card is read by myself or Tabitha.  This time however the girls go and get the picture and bring it to me.  Then I get the letter to use in our tactile letter basket.  The girls get to use a pipe cleaner to form the letter, we use our sandpaper letter, and our lower case build-a-letter I just found, created by Nicole over atTired, Need Sleep.  Oh, yes, we are now using the sand box too.


Then we will do a stART project/Read, Explore Learn project Wednesday or Thursday.


Instead of continuing with the tactile letter Thursday, like I planned, I think I will move this to the second week, so we can focus on our geography or bird on Thursday.


And Friday we now have Storytime at the library.  It isn't our local library, but the one where I usually get all my books from because they have a fantastic interlibrary loan system.


So the following Monday they will continue the tactile focus.  First, during circle time I place all the cards on the table.  Word cards in a row left to right and picture cards turned upside down in a row above them.  The girls pick a picture and try to find the word card that matches.  Then we make a textured letter.


We were supposed to make our letter craft on Fridays.  A craft that uses the shape of the letter somehow. I will move this to the second Wednesday of our two week stretch.  


Hopefully, this will leave more time for the science, geography, writing and math, plus games.  I am also trying to get them outside more.  Today we went on our pine cone scavenger hunt. It was also an opportunity to take pictures for my photo challenges.  I'm thinking I will let the girls start taking some pictures of different things we find for the challenges, help them learn to see things and make connections/associations and to also notice the wonder of this beautiful world God created. 


So, what did we get accomplished this week?  We did get the collages made on Monday.  The girls insisted on cutting the pictures out themselves after they colored them.  I do end up helping Amelia usually.  Once again Amelia layered her pictures.

Our words this week are: moon, monkey, mouse, mailbox, mittens and map (you can't tell because they both covered it, but I used map from Dora).

On Monday we also had our Muffin Tin Monday meal. We had lots of M foods.

And the girls took all the cushions off the couch and love seat and made a mountain to climb on. Sorry, no pictures, I was just letting them play.

Tuesday evening I changed up the p/pop lid activity which I had originally found over at  My Tot Learning Time.

Now we have milk jug lids on an m.

Amelia definitely enjoys this activity.  I also let her work on the p one from last week.

Wednesday we made our sock puppets and props for our puppet show of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.  We put the show on for daddy and then for brother and sister.

Thursday was filled with doctor/dentist appointments.  My poor son had his 3 (he only had 3) wisdom teeth pulled.  And today he went to school and work.

Friday was our first Story time as mentioned at the beginning of the post.  It is for 2 and 3 year olds, but they are letting me bring Hannah.  The children and parents sit in an arc around the room on rugs.  The librarian takes the attendance and gives the children a sticker for their bear name tag.  We got to hear two cute books.  There were songs sang and snack, then before they left the children were able to color a leaf to help decorate the library.

Amelia pointing out her's.  Tabitha's is the green, orange, yellow one in the upper level, the panel second from the left.

We're going to be working this

over the weekend, then I plan on linking up to Math Links on Monday.  So stay tuned.

Just one more thing.  I just wanted to inform you that Words of Wisdom Wednesday is back.  This week I asked the girls, "Where does the rain come from?"  To check out the answer please click on the link below.  And while there I invite you to link up your post of your child's/children's response to the same question.  The linky will be open until Wednesday.

I can't wait til next week to see what we will get accomplished.

Our Bible Verse this week is, "Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again." John 3:7

To see what others are doing with their toddlers and preschoolers head on over to 1+1+1=1, Homeschool Creations  Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers 

Photography Challenges (Alphabet and You Capture)

Alphabet Shoot Challenge is found over at Barb's Photo Journal

This week's letter was E

I know a lot of people took pictures of eyes.  I tend to focus on words that start with the short sound of /e/.  

It is what I am used to doing with the girls.  Unfortunately, I didn't get my picture of egg sandwich like I wanted to as my hubby eats one every day.  But we haven't had any in the house for the last couple of days.  So without further ado here are my E pictures:

Evergreen

Empty

Elevator

And this week's theme for You Capture hosted by Beth at I Should Be Folding Laundry is 

Faces

This week I found:

A Happy Face

A surprised face

A dirty face

And blue faces

I think they were trying to look like the one person they saw at the Buffalo Bills game.  However, they know they are not to write on themselves.  But, knowing what the challenge was, I HAD to take a picture.

Perceptive Perspective: Landscapes

This week's Perceptive Perspective challenge was landscapes.  Unfortunately the heavy rains of late had a huge impact on what I would have liked to photograph.  Lots of the colorful leaves were ripped off the trees.    As we were driving to my son's dentist appointment today I had the opportunity to look for some prospective locations for my picture taking.  The first one is actually part of a golf course.

I felt I would be remiss to leave out a picture of a farm as this is farm country around here.

To see other landscape photos head on over to Hollie's blog.

If You Give a Moose a Muffin- book+activities



This week we read the book, If You Give a Moose a Muffin  by Laura Numeroff. It was a book we read last year for the letter/sound M and I was debating reading it again, then I saw it was the recommended book from Readinglessons.com.  This moose keeps the little boy just as busy as the mouse keeps the boy in If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and the pig keeps the girl in If You Give a Pig a Pancake.  Have a mentioned I love these books? 

Earlier in the week we made muffins. 

Then today I had another spur of the moment project/activity idea.

Why not make sock puppets like the moose did in the book.

So I cut out the needed parts and found my pair of holey socks.

We glued a piece of cardboard inside the sock so that when we

glued on the other parts the glue wouldn't go through.

The girls glued their ear parts together:

For the rest of the parts we used white glue.

We glued on the ears and eyes.

Then the nose and whiskers:

Just as an FYI, the white glue wasn't holding the whiskers on, so

Steven hot glued them on later.

Then we made the props for our puppet show/play. 

The reason we made a mouse instead of the moose is because I didn't have any

brown socks.  The moose in the book also made a mouse.

So we made the mice in anticipation of doing a puppet show of

If You Give a Mouse a Cookie

Here we are making the props.

Cookie:

(brown paper circle with black hole punch dot chocolate chips)

Mirror:

(Foil wrapped cardboard.  We glued it on, shinier side out)

(an index card and crayon to represent the paper and crayon

the mouse asks for to draw a picture)

Here are the props all ready to go, attached to straws.

(cookie, milk, napkin, mirror, broom, book (made from small piece of cardboard folded over with a piece of paper folded inside.  The two page book reads, "If you give a mouse...a cookie"), and the piece of paper with a crayon taped on.)

Our love seat turned stage:

Getting ready to put on the play:

Sorry these are so dark, not sure why.  The girls had such a good time putting on the plays for their daddy and then again for big brother and sister.