H is for...Hands-On Halves

Cristi from Through the Calm and Through the Storm and Meg from Adventures with Jude are hosting this great weekly party called Blogging Through the Alphabet. All are welcome to join in, just make sure to keep your posts family-friendly. I am determined to stay faithful this time around. I might not always post on the same day of the week, but I have every intention to post something each week.

Here is how I decided my "theme" for this round of Blogging Through the Alphabet. As I was going through old blog posts recently, I noticed I have some neat ideas for activities and crafts that I did with in the past. Unfortunately, I always included them in my weekly wrap up posts or more recently in Poppins Book Nook posts, so they sort of got buried. I can't really share them as individual activities or create pinnable images to promote them and share my ideas, which is why I started this blog in the first place (to share my ideas with others who work with children). So, I am going to make new posts for these ideas.

I have found there is a huge benefit in this strategy. I am remembering  ideas that I had forgotten, which means I can now do these activities with the younger children. I will be sharing the old pictures and possibly sharing new pictures of the younger children participating.

Several years ago, during our letter H week, I made the girls a fun, beginner way to play with fractions.

H is for. . . Hands-On Halves

I originally called this activity "Matching Halves" but Hands-On Halves sounded better for an "H is for..." post. I made some square and rectangle boards that included half of the image blank, while the other half had construction paper attached. I did this by cutting the construction paper into either a square or rectangle. Then I traced it onto a piece of white paper (in hindsight, cardstock would be more sturdy). I then cut the shape in half and attached half, while leaving the other half for the girls to use to find the matches. No printer required.

I laid the white half bases in a circle, placing the colored halves in the center and they had to match them up.

F is for Fraction Fun

I have discussed how I love to teach math in the kitchen. Fractions are one of the topics that are great to learn as they are a hard concept to understand, but in the kitchen you can get a lot of hands on learning. Whether it is cutting a sandwich into half or quarters, or having the children compare measurements when following recipes, fractions become real to the children. 

A while back I saw this really cool book called The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Bar Fractions Book.

I had taken it out of the library and we used part of the book a while back. Since then if we have a Hershey bar in the house, the girls will get it out of the drawer after lunch and ask to do fractions. 

I do not remember exactly how the book taught the fractions, but this is one way we learn about fractions.

First we write down that we have 1 bar.

This time I broke it into quarters to start with (I've been known to start with halves).

I explain to the girls that each piece is one out of the whole and there are four pieces. So they put 1 (piece) over 4 (total) underneath each piece.

Then we slide two of the quarters together on the right and the other two together on the left. 

I explain to the girls that we have 2 (pieces) out of 4 (total). Then we look and see that it is 1/2 of the whole bar. 

Then we slide all the pieces together and see that we have 4 (pieces) out of 4 (total). We add: 1/4 plus 1/4 plus 1/4 plus 1/4 which equals 4/4 or 1 whole bar.

 One whole bar that they really really want to eat. So...

they each get 1/4 of the bar. And mommy and daddy have to share the last quarter. Unless the girls are nice enough to share their quarter, which they usually are.

Of course now, Harold also wants some.

Here is our finished fraction paper.

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Learning Fractions with Hershey's Chocolate

We had another spontaneous activity at meal time this week.  I had recently read part of The Hershey's Milk Chocolate Fractions Book by Jerry Pallotta that I had actually planned on doing when we discussed fractions while doing F. (I found this book a while ago over at Ticia's blog Adventures in Mommydom)

I just kept putting it off, but decided I needed to read it before having to return it to the library. We only got a few pages in and the girls were getting really frustrated that they couldn't eat their chocolate.  So, I let them eat them, sharing them out evenly.  What amazed me, was that Amelia wanted to do it again after I returned the book.  So I simplified it a bit.  We talked about the bar being 1 whole bar (in the wrapper and out of the wrapper).  Then I broke it into 2 pieces, putting half on one side of the paper and one on the other.  I wrote the fractions above the candy, telling the girls they had 1 of two parts.  Then we pushed them together to show two of two parts make one whole.

Then I broke each half into half giving us 4 quarters.  Once again I wrote the fraction, explaining we had 1 of 4 parts as I wrote.

Then we put them back together and I showed them 4 of 4 parts added together make 1 whole bar.

Then we shared them out and ate them:

Mommy and daddy had to share 3 pieces, so we got 1 and a half rectangles, while the girls each got 3 rectangles which were 1/4 of the bar.

Linking up to 

School Time Week 34: Conclusion of C (Caterpillars and Clouds)

It's been another productive week here.  I am not sure what there is about having the new curriculum, but I have been extremely motivated and organized.

We started our week with a Breakfast Muffin Tin which had no relationship whatsoever with our themes this week.  Just a request from Tabitha.

This week we focused more on the Trinity.  We used the illustration of an egg to explain the Trinity, which I thought was a pretty neat idea.  I've seen the shamrock used around St. Patrick's Day, I've used the triangle.  Both of which are three parts to make a whole.  But the egg seems really appropriate, because each part is actually different from the other, shell, white and yolk and has a different function/job, just like the Father, Son and Holy Spirit do.  We then spent some time drawing pictures of our family (all of whom have a special function in our family).  

We sang a cute song to reinforce the idea of God being 3 persons in 1 and then spent time doing things in groups of three.  I let the girls take turns picking things to do, Amelia liked choosing spinning 3 times.  Daddy had us do 3 sit ups.  Though we also got to jump and clap.  Then we built 3 block towers...

and pyramids.

Amelia still has some difficulty with counting one to one.  She can count, but she didn't quite get the idea of stopping at 3.  So we will work on that occasionally.

I'm not sure which day we actually did the second day of our Interlock, but we learned that is important for people to work together.  We made a "Our Helpful Jobs" chart.  I didn't feel comfortable calling them "chores."  We came up with different things the girls have been helping with and can start helping more with.  Things such as, helping with the laundry (putting them in the washer, putting them in the dryer, and Tabitha also helps fold), cleaning their spot on the table after meals, picking up toys, picking up papers and sweeping after meals (Hannah makes a royal mess).  I wrote them down, put the paper in a sheet protector and added lines to make it into a chart.  Then they get starts on it when they complete "helpful jobs."

We really didn't do everything in the Interlock this week, the biggest reason was I just couldn't go out and get some of the materials.  Though some things just seemed to much of a review that wasn't needed.  Next week looks interesting though.  

I am glad that the Interlock is just extra stuff really.  We did have a lot to do with our C lessons.  The girls worked on finding C's

On Wednesday we had a picnic in our back yard.

And got to enjoy some time observing the clouds.  And of course, if you are going to observe puffy clouds, you have to spend some time figuring out what they look like, don't you?  Tabitha of course gave Amelia input for what she was seeing.  I actually had them look at the pictures a day later, to see if what they came up with was different (it was).

Tabitha: whale

Amelia: elephant

Tabitha: dog or zebra

Amelia: fish

Mom: Dog

Tabitha: heart

Amelia: whale

Mom: face (possibly a frog)

Mom: I see a bird wearing a baker's hat blowing out a fire or blowing smoke or ice.

The rest of our Wednesday was quite eventful. Before we made lunch we had gone to the library because we wanted time to go to the park after the picnic (originally the picnic was to be in park, but it was easier to just bring it out to the back yard).  While we were there we saw some friends who also homeschool and are a part of the homeschool group. We aren't actually a part of the group yet, the girls being so young, but they invited us over to the fire station with them for their field trip.  I shared about that on Wednesday, but here are a couple of my favorite pictures:

On Thursday we painted some cloud pictures. First we checked out a couple of different types of clouds online here at Web Weather For Kids. Then the girls painted Cirrus clouds:

And Cumulus Clouds

Today we added clouds to our Learning to Read chart.  The other day I shared our caterpillar word families. I had already planned on using clouds to work on the sight words.

I showed the girls several sight words one at a time.  Tabitha really knew them all already.  Then they put them on the chart.  After they were all on, I asked the girls to find a word and hand it to me.  Amelia actually did pretty well.

Unfortunately Miss Hannah likes pulling the circles off the caterpillars several times a day.

Then we made Cotton Ball C's, which conveniently looked like clouds in the sky.  What can I say, I like connecting things in our lessons.

We had another spontaneous activity at meal time this week.  I had recently read part of the Hershey Fraction Book that I had actually planned on doing when we discussed fractions while doing F.  I just kept putting it off, but decided I needed to read it before having to return it to the library. We only got a few pages in and the girls were getting really frustrated that they couldn't eat their chocolate.  So, I let them eat them, sharing them out evenly.  What amazed me, was that Amelia wanted to do it again after I returned the book.  So I simplified it a bit.  We talked about the bar being 1 whole bar (in the wrapper and out of the wrapper).  Then I broke it into 2 pieces, putting half on one side of the paper and one on the other.  I wrote the fractions above the candy, telling the girls they had 1 of two parts.  Then we pushed them together to show two of two parts make one whole.

Then I broke each half into half giving us 4 quarters.  Once again I wrote the fraction, explaining we had 1 of 4 parts as I wrote.

Then we put them back together and I showed them 4 of 4 parts added together make 1 whole bar.

Then we shared them out and ate them:

Mommy and daddy had to share 3 pieces, so we got 1 and a half rectangles, while the girls each got 3 rectangles which were 1/4 of the bar.

Tiny Tot Time

Miss Hannah found herself a new activity.  She was in my cupboard and found this pan

And had fun putting plastic silverware (also from the cupboard) in the hole.

She also discovered that you can make some cool "music" with plastic forks and spoons and a cooling rack.  Sorry, no pictures of those.

 And of course, this is how she spent a lot of time at the Fire Station.

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