School Time Ww lessons

Okay, I have no idea what week this is supposed to be as I have not been very motivated this summer.  So, I am not even going to number them any more.  We are almost done with our alphabet.  Sort of zinging through a bit, but doing so in a way that is at least getting something of substance done.

We started off with our words/pictures of the week.  I haven't been making the word cards or picture cards.  Instead I give the children their page with W pictures printed on it and I write one word at a time on the chalk board. They find the picture and color it. Then later on we still cut and glue them onto a capital letter, this week it was the W.

I had the girls make some big W's. I made the dashes for Amelia to join.

For Hannah I just wrote the W and had her color to her heart's content.

For Tabitha I just put dots at a few points.

We used these later on. I will share in a bit.  

Of course we did our W collage.   Our words are wolf, wagon, worm, wasp and walrus.

I decided to draw some lines for Amelia to follow while cutting.  It really helped her.

And yes, Hannah was right in there with us again this week. She is getting old to fast. 

Here is our W Walkway. Told you I would share what we used our W papers for.

The girls got to walk on the W's, they brought their Winnie the Pooh's with them.  I would say different words. If they started with W, they got to walk to the next W, if it didn't, they stayed put. They had a great time.

Winnie the Pooh joining us for lesson:

We talked about wind this week, which went along really well with our Weaver Interlock. I had decided to wait because we were to be discussing Day 2 of Creation, God created air.  We talked about how all living things need air and we can't see air. But we can see the results of the wind.  Then I blew up some balloons.  As I finished blowing up each one, I asked the girls if we had enough for every one (Tabitha, Amelia, Hannah and mom of course).  When they said no I asked them how many more we needed.  And as I blew up the next one we would add on by 1.  I knew Tabitha knows how to do this, but Amelia did pretty well too.  Then the girls had some fun batting them around. I brought the fan into the living room and we blew them around the room and then I pointed the fan up to the ceiling and they had a blast watching the balloons fly around.

We read some books about wind:

In this book the wind blows one thing after another away from different people.  As the wind takes away one person's belonging, you will notice the next person in the background of the page.  At the end there are a whole bunch of people chasing their belongings until the wind jumbles them all together.  

This book had some great information about wind, but it was a bit over the children's heads and I found myself shortening it a bit for now.

What Can You Do in the Wind? by Anna Grossnickle Hines was a  short board book about different things you can do in the wind.

The children liked this story about the wind stealing the noises from the animals and mixing them up so that the animals were saying the wrong thing.  The little boy got all the sounds attached to the correct animals just in time for a little breeze to come by and start the problem all over again.  I think we may have heard this one at Story Time last year too.

We also read some books about Walking

In this story the boy comes upon several different animals as he goes for a walk. It is very similar to Brown Bear Brown Bear what do you see? in that each page ends with "What did I see?" The boy spies the animal and we see just a little bit of it, so we get to guess what the next animal is.  Then the animals all follow the boy.

Another book where the illustrations help you to anticipate what is going to happen.  Rosie the hen decides to go for a walk across the farm.  She is unaware of the fox following her.  As she goes along the fox tries to catch her, but some mishap always stops him.  I love that you are left wondering if the fox will catch the hen on each page. You have to turn the page to see how the fox misses again.

In this book we get to see and hear the way different animals walk.  The girls loved acting out the different animals.  My favorite is the camel that goes Galump, galump, galump. Other animals were the elephant, the penguin and the cat to name a few.

We started making a "wind chime" but didn't get a chance to finish.  Not sure how it will work either. I'll try to share the results later on this week.

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W lessons concluded

Well, we didn't do very much this week.  Brother and sisters were down from NY for the weekend and left after lunch on Monday.  So the morning was spent with them.  They spent a lot of time at the park recently.  The girls love swinging and sliding.  Of course, Tuesday was play group.  We did take our two W books with us, a couple of the children have gotten used to us bringing books to read.  The ironic thing is, Tabitha and Amelia rarely want to hear the books while they are there.  The first book we took was: "Diary of a Wombat" by Jackie French,which is a really cute story detailing the daily activity (or inactivity as the case may be) of a Wombat from the perspective of said wombat.  If you are wondering, a wombat is another one of those unique creatures that lives in Australia.  Oh, and they look a lot like bears only smaller.

The story is adorable!  Wombats tend to sleep and eat a lot.  The cute part about this plot is that the wombat gets new neighbors, humans.  It is amusing seeing normal everyday objects from an animals perspective.  

The other book we read several times was "Weaving the Rainbow" by George Ella Lyon and Stephanie Anderson.  The weaver in this story takes care of sheep, white sheep, but she can see a rainbow in their future.  The reader goes through the year with these white sheep who are getting closer to the rainbow.  We learned about shearing and preparing wool to be worked with and a quick introduction to looms and finally we see the rainbow the weaver has seen all along.  

Two great books to go with the letter W.  I wanted to find a way to do a weaving activity with the girls.  And then...another great find at the thrift shop last week.  A book called "Things I Can Make" by Sabine Lohf.  It had a Loom Weaving project!  I followed the directions then did some tweaking.

I took two cereal boxes (one per girl) and cut off the back panel.  Then I cut slits in 2 opposite ends.

I stretched yarn from one side to the other, probably not the correct way as the yarn would pop off when the girls would try weaving.  I rectified that problem by taping the slits closed at the top.

We tore old scraps of material into strips 

which I tied together.  

First they were too long, so I cut them in half, as I decided we could always add on as they were just tied together anyway.  The weaving was definitely too confusing for Amelia, but Tabitha is getting it. She did get tired of it after a few passes through the loom.  We decided it would take a few days of working on it a little at a time to get it finished.  I debated putting it on the shelf as an activity, but Tabitha said she wanted to finish it so she could hang it on the wall.  Maybe I will make an extra one for the shelf, so the girls can work on it occasionally and improve their weaving skills.

We also played the Winnie the Pooh file folder game again.  

Tabitha played on Starfall and wanted to write the words they gave her to go with the e.  She made some of the letters, but I decided I would make some activity pages with the words for each letter (one letter featured per page) written out as dots.  Then she can reuse it over and over as we can put the worksheet for the letter she is working on in a sheet protector and use dry erase markers.  

Tabitha continues to amaze me by being able to spell words orally that we give to her, or she comes up with herself.  I am planning on writing a post soon highlighting some of the strategies that seem to have worked for her with her reading readiness .  Who knows, maybe these same things could work for you.  Of course, who knows if they will even work for Amelia.  All I know is, Tabitha is only 3 1/2 and she can read simple words. And after she sounds it out and realizes what she has sounded out she gets so excited and proceeds to tell me what she knows about the word.

Amelia was enjoying our ABC wipe off book I found... yes you guessed it...at the thrift shop.

However, we have had this book for a couple of months at least.  Tabitha is the one who wanted it and usually uses it.  Today, Amelia took her turn.  Mostly scribbling, but the scribbles meant something to her.  She made some scribbles that looked like V's and called them V's.  So she is definitely catching on.

Today I read a big book called "Spinning a Web" by Lisa Trumbauer.  

Then we made webs.  I glued black construction paper onto a piece of cardboard (actually it was one of the panels I had cut off the cereal box for the weaving loom).  Then I cut out two almost circles and then cut out slits.  The girls twisted yarn around and around to make a web.  

And as soon as I find the blog I found this on I will link to it.

Update: I found the blog where I spotted the idea for this web craft/activity.  Nicole over at Tired, Need Sleep had finished up a unit on bugs.  Here is the link to her Weekly Wrap-Up post on bugs.

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

W lessons with Winnie the Pooh and Watermelons

Well we may or may not be finished with the letter W.  I have a few more ideas, one of which ties into a book we are reading.  It would be a shock to have only spent one week on a letter, so most probably we will continue it for another week.  Here is what we have done so far.
Our words for our word card pictures on the poster this week are: web, wagon, wolf, walrus, watermelon and wombat.
The girls got to use their watercolors from their new art tote for the first time.  They watercolored a picture of Winnie the Pooh that I printed out.

Then they traced a letter W and colored the paper.

Later that day I allowed them to watch Winnie the Pooh (the original movie).

Seeing the movie on the shelf was what made me think of having them color a picture of Winnie the Pooh.  As usual Tabitha was the one glued to the TV, Amelia isn't usually stuck in front of the TV, she will wander around mostly.

For their W letter/sound books they each made a watermelon slice.  I cut out white paper in a wedge shape and red paper in a slightly smaller wedge shape (using the first as a pattern).  The girls glued the white paper onto the book page and then glued the pink to the white.  They glued seeds on

and then traced the dots I had made at the bottom in green.

Then we played a file folder game I designed and created.  Here is the storyline of the game:
Rabbit (from Winnie the Pooh) went to the market to buy watermelon seeds to plant in his garden.  On the way home the seeds were falling out of a hole in the sack without Rabbit noticing.  Winnie the Pooh is following the path (by walking of course) to pick up as many seeds as he can to return them to Rabbit.  We were supposed to use a die, but I couldn't find one.  So I grabbed the spinner out of our Chutes and Ladders game. On each player's turn the spinner is spun and the player moves the designated number of spaces.  The player then either takes the seeds from the pile if landing on a number space, loses a certain amount of seeds if landing on a minus space, loses all seeds if landing on the "Oh Bother" space, or loses a turn if landing on the "Hunny" pot space (because we all know Winnie the Pooh will not pass up an opportunity to help himself to a smackarel of honey).

The game set up

Everyone but Amelia ended up on the -2 space

Steven helped me by coloring the pictures I printed out.

Unrelated to the letter W:
Amelia is having lots of fun lately by cutting fringes in paper with my rippled scissors.

Tabitha is on a roll when it comes to sounding out 3 letter, and some longer, phonetic words.  I knew she learned about vowels being "sticky" letters that hold the words together from the Talking Words Factory DVD.  So the other day I typed out one word at a time and had her tell me which letter was the sticky letter.  It took a bit, but she seems to be getting it.  One of the words I tried was stuck.  After she told me the vowel and sounded out the word, I typed stick and she shocked me by sounding it out.

Then I wrote sentences one word at a time.  She had trouble with that and Piglet, but everything else she sounded out.  I explained what the period was and told her she had read a sentence!

Then I typed out a whole list of words and we took turns pointing to them and sounding them out.  Once again, one of those spur of the moment activities that has gone over better than anything I planned.

She loved pointing at the words!

I made quite the find at the thrift shop today:

Seemed perfect seeing what she has been accomplishing.

The other day I heard her singing a song from the Talking Words Factory DVD.  She was spelling cat and hat:

She wrote cat first (the one on the right), then hat (over to the left), then later added the other letters.  All with no prompting whatsoever on my part.

And I am so thrilled to realize that Amelia knows more colors than I thought.  We have some of those baby keys on a ring, each one is a different color.  I held them up one at a time and she was able to name: blue, green, red and purple.

I am linking this post up with the Schoolhouse Review Crew's Toys and Games For Homeschool Round Up.



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