Homeschool–E is for Elephant

- Abigail is 2.5 years old (31 months) -

- Adam is 4.75 years old -

E is for Elephant

This week was “E is for Elephant” using Confessions of a Homeschooler’s Letter of the Week curriculum. Our AlphaTales book, was “The Enormous Elephant Show” and the ABC poem from the Scholastic Teacher Express ABC Poem of the Week e-book was “Eggplants to Eat and Enjoy”.  After our fabulous Dinosaur week, we were much more laid back and only got around to a few things for Elephant week.

Abby’s ‘E’ Activities

Elephant Color Matching Puzzles

Pom-Pom Counting

The full picture of what goes on while I’m attempting “school” with the big kids.  It’s basically semi-controlled chaos!

E/e Sorting

Elephant Size Sort
Adam helped her make them into a tower.

Abby’s Tot School Activities

The kids begged me not to return the dinosaur books to the library, so they made a frequent appearance throughout the week.  Abby would bring me her favorite book and ask me to turn to the T-Rex page for her because it’s her favorite dinosaur.

We attempted this shape matching wheel a couple of weeks ago and she was not into it.  This time, she figured out how to open the clothespins by herself, so I would hold the wheel and she’d stick them on.

 

Adam’s “E” Activities

Elephant Graphing
Any time Adam can use a dry erase marker, he’s happy!
I didn’t realize this was the only individual E activity he did this week.  Whoops!

 

Adam’s Preschool Activities

“Kumon: Let’s Cut!” book.  He asks for this just about every day!

He did a few pages from his “Handwriting Without Tears Pre-K” workbook.  Here, he is drawing parts of Mat Man.
 

“Same or Different” workbook

We finished Part II of All About Reading Level Pre-1 which was the lowercase letters!
I thought this page was particularly cute.  He colored two of the cats purple because it’s Abby’s favorite color.  And he named the kittens Wheel of Fortune, Jasper, and Lover.

Jasper is the name of my parents’ cat, we frequently watch Wheel of Fortune as a family at night, (yeah, we’re old and boring now), and lover?  No clue where he got that one!

Now that we are on Part III of his All About Reading lessons, we are doing two at a time so we can finish quickly.  Level 1 came in the mail this week and is just so excited to start really learning to read!

 

Combined “E” Activities

Elephant Cut & Paste

Ee Do-a-Dot Pages

Adam                               Abby

Pre-writing Practice – Adam

Pre-writing Practice – Abby
She’s much more interested in tracing/coloring than Adam was at her age!  I love this picture of her cute little hands.

We walked around like elephants while listening to “One Elephant Went Out to Play” on our Sharon, Lois, and Bram CD.  I need to be more purposefully silly with these two silly kiddos!

Letter E Collage – googly EYES!

I didn’t get any pictures of our art project in action, because my hand was covered in paint!  We made handprints and then glued on a foam ear, tail, and sun.  I love that we’ve preserved our hands together in this moment of time!

The highlight of the week was getting “Elephant Ears”, aka scones, at a local café for dessert one night.  Yummy!!

That was our E week!

Linking up to Tot School and Preschool Corner.

Homeschool–D is for Dinosaur

- Abigail is 2.5 years old (31 months) -

- Adam is 4.75 years old -

 

D is for Dinosaur

Last week was “A” week, but we skipped to “D” this week in order to have something special for “C” and “B” weeks….yep, in that order.  Can you guess?  Caterpillars to Butterflies!  We had to wait until the weather cooled off so the little caterpillars would arrive alive, so we’re actually doing “E” week next, and we’ll go back to “C” and “B”.

So, for “D” week, I used Confessions of a Homeschooler’s Letter of the Week curriculum and did D is for Dinosaur!  We read a bunch of library books about different dinosaurs and I was reminded just how cool they are!  Our AlphaTales book, was “Detective Dog and the Disappearing Donuts” and the ABC poem from the Scholastic Teacher Express ABC Poem of the Week e-book was “Deep Diving Ducks”.

The kids absolutely devoured everything about dinosaurs!  We had lots of talks about how they lived a loooong time ago and that only their bones are left on the earth now.  I guess that’s a hard concept for a kid!  The highlights of the week were having a family movie night and watching The Land Before Time and going to a dinosaur park!

Abby’s ‘D’ Activities

D/d Sorting

Dinosaur Size Sort
This concept is a little hard for her right now.  So, what she mostly did was play “family” with them!

Loving on the “tiny baby”!

Dinosaur Counting
Notice the cute baby toes at the bottom!

 

Adam’s “D” Activities

Dinosaur Size Sort

Dinosaur Clip Cards

Letter D Hunt
He circled the ‘bb’ in Debbie and then when I pointed it out, he put a little ‘x’ under it.  He had to really concentrate with all the d-b-p’s on the page!

Dinosaur Graphing
He used a dry erase marker to color or ‘x’ in one square per dinosaur.

 

Preschool Activities

In addition to a little bit of Math-U-See Primer, Adam used his “Kumon” Let’s Cut!” workbook to practice scissor skills.  He loves this book!

He then asked to cut construction paper.  Look how peacefully diligent they are working!  Looks can be deceiving!

He made a little Christmas tree and then some random “machines” with the snips of paper he cut.

Using our Handwriting Without Tears curriculum, we built Mat Man using the wood pieces and blue mat.  Both kids really enjoyed this
activity!

Adam building his own Mat Man while listening to the Mat Man song.

Abby’s Mat Man.

After building Mat Man with the wood pieces, we drew him on paper.  Here is Adam’s completed drawing:

I love all the detail he put in!  He made me label everything, which I’m grateful for, since there’s no way I’d ever remember everything!

 

Combined “D” Activities

Hard at work on various coloring pages.

Adam tracing letters.

Abby also started tracing some of her letters!

Dinosaur Cut & Paste

All the coloring/art pages we did one day.
Adam                       Abby

Adam named his dinosaur, (the middle page), Adam Shurtleff Adam because he said his Papa’s last name is Shurtleff.  He asked me how to spell it and then worked hard to write some of the letters for the first time.

I captured this precious moment of them looking at a dinosaur book together.  Adam decided that his favorite dinosaur is a Triceratops and Abby decided that her favorite is a T-Rex.  They loved this library book in particular.

For my own future reference, it is "National Geographic Little Kids: First Big Book of Dinosaurs”.

For our Letter D Collage, we used dinosaurs to make dinosaur tracks!

 

Dinosaur Dig Sensory Bin
I “borrowed” some sand from our local park and buried some plastic dinosaurs.  I gave the kids little shovels and paintbrushes and told them to start digging.  They were so excited to find dinosaurs buried in the sand!

On Saturday, we took a family trip to a local dinosaur park.  They have an indoor museum, and then a park with walking paths and models of dinosaurs, complete with scary sounds, (which little Abby didn’t quite appreciate).  We had a lot of fun and the kids recognized a lot of the dinosaurs that we had been reading about!

Abby’s favorite….T-Rex!
She wasn’t too thrilled with it because there was a scary roaring sound coming from a speaker, as well as guts and blood hanging from it’s mouth.  What you can’t see in the picture is that there is a poor, dead dinosaur on the ground with a big chunk bitten out of it’s side.  Yeah….they were pretty life-like.  We had to keep reminding the kids that they were just pretend!

Adam’s favorite….Triceratops!

Digging for bones

“Don’t eat us!!”

We had a GREAT week learning a little about dinosaurs!  I think we could spend a month on them…..maybe in a few years we’ll tackle it!

Linking up to Tot School and Preschool Corner.