Summary Saturday: Beach Before Books

This past week of school started out with a lot of fun! We were able to go with Preacher Man to Corpus Christi for a mini-vacation. He was there to work, and we went to have fun.

Chipette and Magpie in a tree.

Magpie posing for me on the beach.

Preacher Man and Monkey throwing rocks in the ocean.

After such a rejuvenating weekend we came back from the beach ready to learn, learn, learn.

Chipette:

For some reason I didn’t get a lot of pictures of Chipette this week. But I did get some shots of her science experiment about bats. We had learned that bat mothers can pick out their baby’s unique smell from hundreds or thousands of other baby bats.

To see if Chipette would make a good bat mommy I took 20 cotton balls and found various scented things from around the house.

She chose one scent to be her “baby”, then I mixed up the cotton balls, blindfolded Chipette, and let her sniff until she found her baby’s scent.

Unfortunately, Chipette was a not a very good bat mom and chose the wrong cotton ball as her baby.

Magpie:

Lots going on this week for kindergarten with Magpie, so let’s get to it!

1) We started this week working on our new literature study using Clifford the Big Red Dog as our inspiration. One of the activities was to graph the pets that the children in your classroom owned. Since all of the kids in our “classroom” have the same pets, I turned to my favorite home school forum for help, The Well-Trained Mind Forums, aka The Hive.

Monkey helped Magpie color the pet labels.

Magpie holding our finished bar graph.

She learned how to count by tens and how to graph for this activity which was a lot of fun!

2) During our Bible time, Magpie learned about Elijah and Elisha. She used the story of Elisha’s miracle of the oil that didn’t run out to work on measurements. I made up four cups of water with yellow food coloring to be the oil and then Magpie measured out the oil with ¼ cup and ½ cup measuring cups.

She had so much fun with this that Monkey and her continued to play with measuring cups, muffin tins, and water after we finished this lesson.

3) For the letter M we created a Monster M.

Magpie loves when we do these letter crafts!

4) Magpie has really, really good fine motor skills, so handwriting isn’t a problem for her, but spacing her letters and numbers is. I came up with the idea of putting her numbers in jail on her math worksheet so that she would keep them spaced out correctly.

I drew lines down her math worksheet using a highlighter and told her to put her numbers in jail.

This idea has worked perfectly to teach Magpie how to space her numbers. I plan on doing the same thing as we start to work on copying words before moving on to short sentences.

All in all we had a great weekend and a busy week of school!

Often putting play before school in the tree house,

Chelli