School Time: Advent Lessons

We have been taking a break from officially doing My Father's World lessons, though I have been throwing in some review. The week's before Christmas we were reviewing SchoolhouseTeachers.com as part of the Schoolhouse Review Crew. You can see the review here. I was glad to focus on the Bible, Luke 2 and Matthew 2 for our lessons during Advent. I printed out some coloring pages (from the PreK Activities: Read and Play) that included the Bible verses of the Christmas story and the girls colored a couple a day.

First we focused on angels being God's messengers.  Of course I had to make a muffin tin.

We made hand and foot angels like we did a couple of years ago.

 They traced their hands.

I even traced Harold's.

I traced their feet by doing one and then putting the heel of the second foot in the traced heel but shifting the second foot over to create a robe for the angel. 

Then I cut out the hands and feet.

They painted the feet/gown with silver glitter paint.

Then they used a strip of foil to make halos.

I had to share Hannah's 2010 angel compared to her 2012 angel. 

I also printed out an angel dot-to-dot picture.

And we made toilet roll angels (once again, part of the SchoolhouseTeachers.com PreK Activities lessons).

That was our review of the letter "a" and we got to discuss how the long a sound was different than the short a sound we were learning with MFW. 

Then we moved on to the letter "m."

We discussed Mary being Jesus' Mother and how she laid him in a Manger. We made mangers similar to the ones we made 3 years ago. I made the manger by drawing a trapezoid and some legs. 

I traced them on brown paper and the girls cut out their own.

Then they cut yellow yarn into pieces for the hay.

The yarn kept Harold busy for a while.

They glued a yellow oval to the manger and then glued the hay to the yellow circle.

We then swaddled baby Jesus in a piece of felt.

And we attached him to the manger.

Unfortunately the glue did not hold. I think stapling will be needed, but I couldn't find my stapler. For the time being they are taped.

We also made Baby Jesus Haystacks for our Kids and a Mom in the Kitchen time. This was also an idea from the SchoolHouseTeachers.com lesson, though I did tweak it a bit and use white morsels instead of chocolate chips. I figured the change gave the haystacks a more authentic color for hay. 

We then moved on to Shepherds and a review of the letter "s" with discussing the staff. 

We played a game were the girls had to take turns being the shepherd and lead the sheep (held by one of the other girls) on a safe path home by saying words that started with the letter "s."

The safe path had the letter S written on it, which you can't really see in this picture. The other papers were blank.

We discussed how sheep (like people) tend to go astray. The sheep would go astray in our game if a word was said that didn't start with the letter "s." But the shepherd had to quick say an "s" word to get them on the right path to be good shepherds.

Seeing as there are three girls they also took turns being the bear or the lion who would growl if the sheep got to close.

I also made a Christmas colors Muffin Tin

And we read  The Candymaker's Gift: The Inspirational Legend of the Candy Cane by David and Helen Haidle.

You can read my 25 Days of Christmas Blogshare post for Dec 24th to read about the legend of the candy cane. We made a birthday cake for Jesus with a focus on candy canes.

I am linking to:

And a couple of new linkies:

School Time With My Father's World: Unit 4- Aa Apple

Unit 4- Aa Apple

Words to Remember: If I stay in Jesus, I will have much fruit

We finished our Aa-Apple Unit a while ago, and I never published it. Oops. Since finishing the Apple unit we have done the Nn-Nest Unit, which I hope to blog about soon and we have spent time reviewing SchoolhouseTeachers.com and incorporating it into not only our homeschool, but into our MFW curriculum as well.

So, even though this is old news, I still wanted to share what we did. It seems I started this post while I had my nasty cold, that could explain things. So, I am going to leave this post as is and just share.

It has been really hard for me to get my school time posts out on time. I still need to get my Ll: Leaf post out (that was Unit 3), but I didn't want to get further behind, so I thought I would go ahead and share what we worked on for the past 2 weeks. We are going to conclude Aa Apple this week as we are not quite done. Hoping I feel good enough to have lesson time this week. I am having a really hard time shaking this nasty cold. If you are so inclined, I would appreciate any prayers.

I am trying to find the best way to organize our days. I love the idea of having our "lesson time" with our Pledges, calendar and songs, but we are having a hard time fitting it in with the baby. I realized last week that I can homeschool without making it look like a miniature preschool, so while I fed the baby the girls sat at my feet in the living room and we sort of still did the same things, but made it work for us. Worksheet time at nap time hasn't been working so well. I am just so glad I do not have to be "official" here in Pa until Tabitha is 8. I just don't want her to fall behind in what she has been doing.

Anyhow, this is what we did get accomplished.

The girls colored and cut out their Aa pictures and we put Aa picture cards on our poster. Then they did their Aa handwriting page. 

School Time: Week 2 (Aa, 5)

The Letter A

This week we focused on the letter Aa, the second letter recommended in the lessons from readinglessons.com.  We followed the same basic schedule as last week.  After "circle time" where we pray, say the Pledge of Allegiance, do calendar (which includes the season) and the number and letter, the girls colored there pictures for their A Collage.  Our words this week are apple, alligator, astronaut, ambulance, avocado and ant.  All words except avocado have an ASL sign I was able to find.

I was impressed that Amelia is starting to fill in some details.

Gluing the pictures to our capital A

Here is what the Alphabet Set 1 worksheet from Beginning Reading.com looks like.

It shows the letter in one square, has dashes in the next squareand has 4 squares for the child to write in.

(she writes her name by herself)

Here is Amelia trying it out.

And Tabitha wanted to do it again.

Our state this week is Pennsylvania:

We also had some active time this week (spur of the moment so no pictures).  One day we reviewed #5 and then, to get them out of their seats I had them do certain things 5 times.  Clap their hands, jumping jacks, marching, spinning (I spun along with them, boy was I dizzy after 5 spins).

My idea for this week's letter craft comes from Jolanthe over at Homeschool Creations.  I couldn't get online to check hers out but here is my take on an A apple:

First they glued a white circle to the back of the a

Then we put 5 drops of white glue on the white, inner part

They added seeds

Tabitha said the apple was on her heart

Gluing the a's onto the red paper for our tactile a's

Amelia was so pleased with herself

Ewww, mommy the seed is on me

Focused on work

Distracted by crying baby sister

Here are Tabitha's completed projects.

The "a" on the right was the one we used for our listening for the /a/ game where they step on the letter if they here the sound. She wanted to color it afterwards.

Then Amelia wanted to show her work off. Unfortunately she got

glue on her dress because she was holding it backwards.

I went to put the camera away and she insisted I had to take a picture of the apple a as well, just like I had for Tabitha.

Then I got out the apple seed counting game we made last year.

We laid them out in order

Turned them over to see the numerals

Then we matched up the second set of apple slices to the correct number.

Tabitha has been asking for a lunch in the "circle plates" 

So today I made them an "a" muffin tin lunch

Then the girls helped me make an apple pie using the recipe in the book

The Apple Pie Tree by Zoe Hall

We also made an apple tree project, you can check it out at here where I linked up to stART over at A Mommy's Adventures

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

 

And check out The Ultimate alphabet craft collection for unique craft ideas for every letter of the alphabet over at The Attached Mama