Tree and Flower Crafts

I decided to try my first post with pictures, the tree and flower crafts listed on my Community and Nature idea chart. I'd like to get linked up to Tot School, but I'm a little intimidated and not sure I'll have the time to create detailled posts.

First, we collected the materials at our local park: bark, twigs, leaves, acorns, rocks, and petals.

Then we made the flower. Raccoon wanted to paint it first, then I put the glue on for him to add the petals. He wasn't crazy about adding texture to his paper, so there aren't as many petals as I'd imagined. He kept trying to brush them off. We talked about the basic parts of a flower - petals and leaves.

He enjoyed the tree much more. We had so many things left over that I quickly drew another tree with markers. He got tired halfway through so I helped more with the second one. We talked about the basic parts of a tree - roots, trunk, bark, branches, leaves, seeds/acorns, and how it gets it food (through the roots and leaves).

Community and Nature Week

Activities
Language	Phonics Cards	Riddle Matching	Worker Memory Game	Music Activity
Science	World Map	Ocean Booklet	Ocean Diorama	Map Activity
Math	Frog Numbers	Make a Tree***	Make a Flower***	Pizza Fractions ½  ¼
Pretend	Dress-up	Guess Who?	Plastic Animal Tracks in Playdoh	Toothpick Art in bananas
# Books Read
Extras	stranger danger role play (w/Bernstein Bears book), threading “fish” blocks, cornstarch sidewalk paint

Just a few notes on how I use this chart:
*I try to print/prepare all of my material over the weekend so that I'm ready to go on Monday. I keep all of the things I need in one folder.
*When Raccoon is in a good mood or I'm looking for something new to play, I pull out whichever activity I think will work at the moment. So some days we do one thing, other days five, it just depends.
*Our big "learning" times are Tuesdays and Thursdays for now, as they are our completely stay-at-home days.
*We do a lot of things in the afternoons because by then we've played all his favorite things and he's often ready for something new.
*This list is probably too brief to be helpful. Right now it's more for my record-keeping, but in the future I will try to put up more links or pictures.

***I downloaded these two printables from the Teacher Express part of Scholastic's website under their "Free Resources" section on the left-hand side.

Almost there...

I have been teaching an early learning class for moms with kids 0-4, so Raccoon and I have not done much lately. My new printer ink is fabulous though. I have our lesson plan for next week only half-done, but it's summer, we have live-in guests, and we've been travelling, so I'm not worried about what we didn't do. Now it's time to jump back into learning. My theme for next week is the ocean and people in our community. We'll be starting Year C in September, roughly corresponding to Pre-K. I'm still using most of my favorite resources from Year B, but I'll be adding some Abeka things in the fall. More on that to come.

Back in the Saddle

We've taken much more time off than I planned. One of the major obstacles was that our printer kept running out of ink and the cartridges are expensive. But my husband took care of that today, so now it's time to print away! Hopefully I'll have a weekly post of "what we did" to put up soon.

Flechitas

I started an education play group and today was our second meeting. It's been small both times, but since our space is limited, small is good. I call the group "Flechitas" (little arrows) because of Psalm 127:3-4. The women mostly come from impoverished homes, so the group has two goals: encourage one another through prayer and a mini-lesson each week on topics of interest. The format is simple, a welcome and prayer, free play based on that week's topic, a snack combined with story time, and then the moms pray in pairs. My goal is for it to last about an hour, but so far the moms haven't been very punctual, so we start and end late. I don't really mind though, I'm just glad they're coming!

Week 1 - the importance of reading to your children for 10 minutes a day. There is so much research out there that children from lower economic backgrounds enter school with only a handful of hours spent reading with their parents, whereas upper class children spend between 1,000 to 3,000 hours of reading with their parents before kindergarten. Basic literacy skills is a major flag for success or failure in school, and many people sent to prison are illiterate or school drop-outs.

Week 2 - we talked about the group's name, along with the role of imaginative play in developing creativity, vocabulary, and a positive parent/child bond. I brought two large cardboard boxes with cutout doors and windows, along with some plastic animals, foam animal masks, and a wooden Noah's ark. It was fun to see the mothers playing with their children.

Next week - gross and fine motor activities with balls and puzzles, and words of affirmation (from the 5 Love Languages).

If you have any ideas for a topic of interest or simple & fun mom/child activities, leave me a comment, I'd love to hear from you.

Ideas for this Week

Shaving cream and food coloring
Play-doh letters
Jars with colored water and glitter

More to come...

Simple Science, or maybe it was Art

Raccoon loves glass jars. He has a collection in a plastic basket, each one filled with water. I recently bought some food coloring because I often see it on the list for at-home activities. I wasn't sure how he was going to react to me coloring the water in his jars; he tends to like everything to stay the way it was originally. This is one area where his phenomenal memory definitely works against us. But I went ahead anyway, and it turns out that he loved it. My favorite was the jar that looked black just sitting on the table, but held up to the window was clearly purple.

We also did the vinegar and baking soda experiment, except it turns out that I had too much vinegar and not enough baking soda. My budding scientist was very disappointed that it didn't explode!