Who Owns the Sun?

Here is a page from Caleb's notebook with our art lessons for our week with "Who Owns the Sun?". These two lessons are from the FIAR manual. First we looked over the beautiful story illustrations and tried to match some of the colors with our crayola box. The boys learned many new shades. Caleb added them to this crayons coloring picture.

We also tried to copy some of the illustration using watercolors. Can you guess where these two paintings come from? : )

This story provides a wonderful descriptive-poetic text, with lots of references to the senses. During one of our readings, I had the boys point at the board whenever they heard a reference to one of their senses in the story. This proved to be a very simple but fun activity. It helped them both practice attentiveness. They enjoyed it so much that asked for it to be done the following day. Just one look at the simple drawings below and I think it's clear that we don't need to be artistic to have a creative and fun learning day at home. I'm definitely encouraged by that!!

To further study the senses we used a few Usborne books resources. The boys really enjoyed "How Do Your Senses Work" (one of the Flip Flap Body series).

Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel

One of Caleb's favorite children's book is "Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel". So I was so excited to row this book!!

Homeschool Share has great printouts to go along with this unit. We used most of them for our week. Here's a sample of Caleb's notebook for the week.

For Noah (my preschooler) I focused on the topics of "digging", "building" and "squares". I added this set of books by Michael Rex for him to explore this week and he LOVED them.

Who Digs?

Who Builds?

Homeschool Share has a neat "Boxed In Game" printout. I used it to practice making squares. Instead of writing their initials, the boys used stamps to mark their squares.

One afternoon the boys had fun digging canals for the boats to sail through like Mike Mulligan and Mary Anne did in the story.

Nature Faces

Another fun idea I borrowed from Amy's Blog was to go make these nature faces. Check out her blog to see all the creative "faces" they came up with.

We went on a nature walk to a park in our neighborhood and collected all kinds of things a long the way: sticks, leaves, stones, acorns, pinecones, berries, flowers, grass, etc.

We drew different circles with chalk on our driveway and the boys got to work making faces with their collected things.

They were busy for over an hour working on these. Here's my favorite ones...

Caleb working on a "hairy man" face.

Noah's "happy baby"

Sad Face

Happy Face

Candy Math

Earlier this week we did a fun math session using candy. I borrowed the idea from Walking by the Way (printout available at the site).

Amy shared tons of ideas to do math, languages arts and science using candy.

For our session, I gave each boy a ziploc bags and told them to choose a variety of candy from their weekend's collection and bring it to mom.

I handed them a cookie tray and the sheet below for them to sort, count and finish their graph.

The Rag Coat

The boys favorite activity for our week with The Rag Coat, was making their own quilt pattern of the "Joseph Coat of Many Colors". We used the template given in the manual and glued triangle cutouts from scrapbook paper.

A good read along book for this unit is "A Quilt for Baby" by Kim Lewis. A simple story of a mom who is telling her new baby all about the quilt she made for him. The quilt tells the story of the farm where they live. Very cute and my preschooler loved this story.

After several readings, our boys decided to pull out their favorite quilt and make a story from the squares. I shared with them the quilt was given to us by my dear friend Laura when Caleb was born.

Soccer Season Pics

Took some cute pics of the kids last Saturday at soccer field so had to share here, especially for Lola and Abuela (grandmas). Caleb is having a blast in soccer. Once again that beautiful smile God gave him never leaves his face the entire game. Noah and Sarah love to cheer their big brother too. We love being out on Saturday mornings for the games now that we got the perfect weather going on here. Looking at these smiling faces makes me praise God for the gift of family. We are so undeserving of it. Only by His grace!!

A Pair of Red Clogs

Our week with A Pair of Red Clogs was a great way to introduce our boys to the Japanese culture. The boys favorite day of the week was Art lesson day.

Here's our table setup for the morning. The boys colored a Japanese scene with pencils and tried to copy techniques from the book's illustrations.

Then, following the manual idea, we played a game of finding action body figures using a guide with "stick figure" drawings. This was so much fun that the boys decided to trace their own figures and have the other person find them.

Then we made some flyers and spinners with fancy origami paper I got at the thrift store for 50 cents a pack!

And we ended our day by playing the "weather telling game" like Mako in the story. Caleb manged to get his slipper land sideways twice. It was also a rainny day which made it more fun for the boys.

My Happy Preschooler

Noah LOVES his preschool activity bags. This one is one of his favorite things to do right now.
Pour white glue all over paper and paste little tissue pieces. He will sit and do this until he cannot see the paper anymore. Sometimes he will crumble the little pieces to make "mini tissue balls" or roll them to make worms.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with all his beautiful tissue art. Any thoughts??

Madeline

For our Madeline story we enjoyed the most learning about rhymes and Paris. This was a low key for us due to sickness in the house so we limited our FIAR activities mostly to topic discussion and reading books about Paris.

Following the story illustrationst the boys colored this page of the Eiffel Tower using monochromatic colors.

Testing for Acid

This experiment was not part of our Lentil study but it would be a good add-on science activity. It's par of the Usborne Science Activities volume 2 (Science in the Kitchen).

We gathered some kitchen ingredients (lemon, orange, grapefruit, vinegar, apple juice, milk, water, baking soda).

Slice and boil a red cabagge. Cool the water and use it to test for acid in the ingredients. If acid is present, the purple-like water will turn red or pink. For fun, try baking soda and watch the water turn blue.

Lentil

Lentil by Robert McKloskey is one of those stories where I heard the boys said after each reading "read again...again!". It's amazing how a story that is illustrated black and white is so full of details and captivated their little eyes.

We spend a lot of time this week, talking about patriotism, learning patriotic songs and playing with their harmonicas.

Caleb practiced drawing music notes (like in the story) for his notebook. The squiggly lines to the right are supposed to represent "loud noise" : )

We couldn't possibly read Lentil without trying to suck on a lemon. So here it goes....Caleb went first while Noah watched...he just licked the lemon but still....SOUR!!

Noah still wanted to try afterwards, but he went for a real slurp. Love their faces!

Caterpillars and Butterflies

The beautiful fall days here in southeast Texas is giving us a chance to be out in the yard every day. We've been spotting lots of butterflies lately, around 6 different types.

Yesterday my little nature explorers found an area in our front yard with LOTS of caterpillars. We counted over 20!!

So I had to take at least a picture of the boys holding one, right?

Well, Noah was all in....

But Caleb....not sure what happened...he is our nature lover...but something about the fuzzy-sticky body of the caterpillar he did not like. I asked him to smile for the shot and this was the best he could do! LOL!!

I'm glad they found the caterpillar because now I'm sending them every morning outside with their magnifiying glasses to observe and come back in to report to mom what they saw. The best science class is in the yard for sure!!

Storm in the Night

Here are some pages from out notebooks for Storm in the Night. This was a story that my boys enjoyed more than I thought they would. It gave us so much to talk about. Like Thomas, my boys love to hear stories from when mom and dad where "young". It's funny how they say that since I still considered myself young...at least for another week. : )

Mini book where Caleb wrote examples of onomatopeia in the story. List making of sources of light. Art lessons: facial expressions.

Inside of the facial expressions minit. We practice making the faces in the mirror as well.

We spent a lot of time this week reading about types of clouds. Every day we went outside to observe the clouds. We also had some serious thunderstorms that week! So that made reading this story even more special.

Art lesson: painting a "storm in the night" with acrylics.

Chopsticks Fun

A fun activity I added to our "Ping" week was this game of transfering objects using chopsticks. We tried marshmallows first, but it ended up a bit too sticky. They were getting stuck to the stick and my boys ended up a bit frustrated with it. So we tried using pom-poms next and it was great! I'm trying to add more hands-on activities and games for Noah, but Caleb joined in on this one as well. : )

The Story About Ping

Our very first FIAR story for this semester was The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack. We had lots of fun learning about the country of China and life by the Yangtze river. Our highlight for the week was going to a local park to observe the ducks, see their reflection on the water and the ripples they formed while swimming. Unfortunately, my camera's battery died while we were there so no pictures of our outing. : (

Other books we read this week:

Tikki Tikki Tembo

The Five Chinese Brothers

The Little Duck by Judy Dunn

Come Along, Daisy

A peek inside our notebook for the week....

All printouts from Homeschool Share.

Flag and map of China (kids drew Yangtzee River on it), picture of river with "yellow" water, Ping's Family math activity.

Art lesson: drawing with coloring pencils, layering colors, drawing a duck, drawing water.

Vocabulary words, bouyancy experiment results, ducks facts that Caleb learned throughout the unit study.

Another fun activity I added to Noah's notebook is an Animal Classification Section. I designated one page for each of the basic vertebrates categories and one for invertebrates and other creatures. Each page has a pockets (see below) and we are adding an animal card for each new animal we encounter in our stories. I gathered ideas from here for this project.