Leaves - part 2

We spent more time this morning on the topic of leaves.

We may still do a little after today, but I was attempting to finish most of the leaf things that I had planned (before a trip to the park)!

We started with Calendar this morning.  It had been almost a month since we had done calendar time, so it was great to get back into that swing!

Both girls began with a review activity - Charlotte matching words to pictures

I got some leaf scatter from the dollar store and wasn't really sure what to use it for.

I decided to extend/review venn diagrams from earlier this week!

I started with two colors (orange and yellow) so we could talk about how in real-life leaves can be more than one color, but these leaves were only made of one color (i.e.: there is no overlap items)!

Charlotte's categories here were: Maple Leaf and Maroon

Adelyn's categories: Beech leaf and Maroon

Categories: Green and Oak

Our CGI problem for the day!

I tried some "Muffin Tin Math" with Adelyn!

 Charlotte always seems to want to do an activity I design for Adelyn herself.  I try to choose activities that they both do, but also some really skill-specific activities that fit each of them.  However, I've found that if she wants to do it, I let her.

It took her all of 2 minutes to do the entire tin, so why not, right?

Not to my surprise, Charlotte wanted to do it too!

Math and science go SO beautifully together!

Next, we moved on to some measurement activities.

We talked about how there are so many ways to measure an object.

We tried to weigh a big leaf, but it didn't even weigh a gram.

So, we used pennies to measure its length.

I like non-traditional concrete tools to start teaching kids how to measure things.

A penny is a win-win tool for us right now because we're trying to teach Adelyn the names of each coin.

This measuring activity also gives us a chance to work on Adelyn's counting skills, so it's nicely scaffolded.  Charlotte can count quickly on her own, while I watch Adelyn and be sure she slowly counts, matching each number with a penny!

Since Adelyn's leaf was longer, this big smile is because her leaf was much WIDER!

I focused on talking with the girls about how we can measure both length and width of an object and their chosen leaves did a nice job of illustrating the big difference between a long and a wide object.

Next, we talked about measuring a flat object by covering it.

I even called this Area, so we were up to 3 specific vocab terms.

Charlotte's leaf had an area of 39 pennies!

Although they predicted Adelyn's was larger, her area was only 34.

We followed the ideas of predictions into our float/sink experiments.

The girls LOVED this!

We talked about whether we thought leaves would float or sink.

They predicted them to float.

Then, I asked whether they thought the leaves might sink if I put just 1 penny on them.

Our first leaf sunk with just 1 penny.  

Each leaf after that, I had the girls predict how many pennies it would take to sink the leaf!

By the end, the girls decided the larger leaves could hold more pennies before they sunk!

We joined a homeschool group this year to help us build even more community around this part of our lives.  After a little "school" this morning, we met 2 families at a nearby park!  The kids all had fun and it was great to chat with other homeschooling Mamas.

After naptime continues to be my main literacy time with Charlotte. We do reading lessons from our "Teach your child to read" book or a related game or word study activity!

Leaves - part 1

Our leaf fun started in Virginia while we were visiting the family!

We really only did one day of formal "school" while we were there, but we had lots of other great fun/learning that wasn't so structured.

Charlotte started with her Read-Build-Write board and words that related to leaves.

Adelyn did her writing board that works on following curves and turns.

The girls both really enjoyed the leaf-shadow matching magnetic activity!

We also did some patterning

With leaf stickers too!

We did some more clothespin activities with initial sounds of words.

We colored a Where is the Leaf book from Pre-Kpages

We used our leaves-on-a-stick to show positional words during the story!

We went on a leaf-hunt!

There are SO MANY LEAVES in Grandma and Granddaddy's yard!

The drive home provided lots of stops and beautiful colors of leaves to look at and explore at rest-stops!

We even found a Gumball Tree on one of our stops!

We were going to draw trees for one of our days, but while we were at a friend's house, we painted tree trunks. 

Then we filled them with leaves (and a nest b/c they were studying nests)

Yesterday, another friend was hanging out with the girls.

 We did another leaf hunt at our house for fresh leaves.

Then, we did a number game where we chose a shape and filled the shape with that number of leaves!

Our friend Lilliana joined the fun!

We even did a venn diagram with leaves. 

I was REALLY impressed with how even the 3 year olds seemed to get this.

We'll definitely do it again.  Today's categories were:

Red, Yellow (and the overlap was red AND yellow) - pictured

Green, little (and the overlap was green AND little)

Yellow, big (and the overlap was yellow AND big)

Today, after wrapping up our apple study with vocabulary words, we sang a fall song.

I hadn't taught it to the girls yet, but I had put it on their mp3 players for our trip, so they both knew the words pretty well.  I like putting our songs on their mp3 player because they can listen/sing them whenever!

With motions :)

One of the things I want to really master in the next few months is Adelyn knowing the letters in her name (in the right order) so I put the letters on leaves and let her sound out her name and put them in the right order!

Charlotte did a word/picture match.  Some of the words are a little difficult for her, but with a fixed number of words and pictures, she does a pretty good job! The idea is for these words to be sight words that she doesn't have to sound out each time.

We read a story and chose words to "find" in the story

Adelyn (for some reason) decided this was difficult and said she was "all done with school today". 

Hmmm.

So, for the first time, I actually told her "no, school isn't all done today".

She came and sat on my lap and we found this word together in the story.

Because she hung in their, we followed with a dot activity that she loves!

The last activity for today was a bar graph activity.

This is a printable from Homeschoolcreations for a die and a bar graph template.

This was really FUN and the kids were completely engaged.

We pushed back the table so we could roll the die on the floor and each one of us had a different colored crayon to record our roll!

The best part of this activity was how engaged the girls stayed the WHOLE TIME because it was like a game.  For me, it was awesome because I got so much bang for my buck on this activity.

I introduced the concept of a bar graph & recording on the bar graph.

I could ask TONS of math-related questions along the way for both levels!

(Above) Charlotte could answer more complicated answers and the graph was a great representation that she could prove her thinking on.

(Below) Adelyn could practice counting (working on her 1-to-1 correspondence) each time after she colored in her roll.

Lots of great questions along the way:

* Who has the most?

*Who is winning?

*Who has the least?

*How many MORE does ___ have than ___ ?

*What do you predict I'm going to roll?

* Which one do you predict is going to win?

* How many does ___ have?

* How many will ____ have after you fill in this square?

Apples - part 2

To finish out studying apples within our fall unit, we reviewed a few activities and added a few new ones!

We made fun apple cards!

Did some writing along the way!

We used our first apple card to write to our pen-pal and beloved cousin, Rora!

Googly eyes make everything more fun!

I wonder if you can figure out which ones Charlotte versus Adelyn did!  

They both did an awesome job!

This is chanted to the tune of "5 little monkeys"

The girls thought this one was particularly fun/silly :)

We continued to solve CGI problems with apples!

We used those 5 senses that we talked about earlier to apply them to apples!

They really loved this activity.  

I printed the shell of a tree and wrote numbers on the tree!

I wrote numbers 1-6 on Adelyns and 2-12 on Charlottes.

They took turns.  Adelyn rolled 1 die and counted the number on it and dotted that number.

Charlotte rolled 2 dice and counted the total of the two dice.

Adelyn filled hers up first.  I'll definitely do this one again :)

We did our apple tree playdough mat again!

We used some of those printables as a review!

Then, we did this crazy thing!

We drove across the country to go apple-picking!

A 2-day drive all the way to Virginia to visit the family and pick apples!

Here is the link to more apple-picking pictures :)

I wasn't privy to much of this conversation but Granddaddy did some weighing with us!

We did some more apple slicing to help Aunt Leigh Ann make a pie!

and more taste-testing of course!

We did lots of apple-bobbing!

This was definitely a hit.

Even the grownups joined in :)

I thought we would do a sink or float experiment, but the girls told me they already know they float from bobbing apples.  Win-win!

To finish up our apple discussion, I asked the girls what new words we learned from apples.  Charlotte and Adelyn came up with: Seed, core, flesh and peeling.  Most of those came from the books we read.  I was happy with those and we listed them in our fall journal/book!