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?