Academic Year 2010-2011 - Week 1 in Review

Well our first week of school was a success!!!  We had a lot of fun activities...I have hightlighted most in this post.

This will probably not be the normal lay-out of our weekly wrap up post...because this first week was a bit different that what our "normal" week will look like!  I am hoping to find an organized way to do this weekly wrap up post (so that maybe I can even make a template post that I just have to fill in the details :-) - anything that will make things easier will be a big help!)  But hopefully I will come up with something great!  (I am planning on putting these posts into a book at the end of the year for the kids to have a memory book in years to come!)

Here is what I want to highlight this week though:

God's Creation
This week we focused on God's creation.  (note: the MFW kindergarten curriculum had you do this in 10 days but we condensed it down to 5).  Along with doing the activities from the MFW curriculum (making a days of creation book and coloring and cutting the creation numbers), here are some activities we did for each day of creation:

We started our study watching just the creation section of this video I found online.

Day 1- God made light and seperated light from darkness - we made day/night pictures (using this idea from Danielle's Place (go down to the Day and Night picture idea).

Day 2 - God made the seas and the clouds - we made a clouds and sea picture.  We painted with blue paint on construction paper for the water and then glued cotton balls on for our clouds.

Day 3 - God divided the seas and made dry land appear -We did this cool craft from Danielle's Place.  We used blue hair gel that I found at Wal-Mart.

Day 4 - God made the sun moon and stars - we took a piece of white const paper and stapled black construction paper to 1/2 of it.  On the white side the boys drew pictures of suns and on the black side they took a white crayon and drew the moon and stars.

Day 5 - God made the creatures of the sea and the creatures of the air.  We made fish bowls from this craft idea (scroll down to fish in a fish bowl craft) on Danielle's Place.  I wasn't able to get fish bowl gravel so we used beads instead.  We used cut up green pipe cleaners for the grass and colored and cut out fish.

Day 6 - God created the creatures on land and humans - we made pictures using our animal stamps.

Day 7 - God saw all that He had created and rested- so we rested- we watched our Veggie Tales DVD "God Made You Special". I asked Seth beforehand "Why do you think we are watching 'God Made You Special'?"  He responded with "because God made us last?"...pretty deep for a 5 year old!

Reviewing our ABC
One reason why we condensed the 10 day study on creation to 5 days in the MFW curriculum is because the curriculum, alongside teaching the story of creation, had you teach the kids the letters.  Seth already knows his letters (and letter sounds for that matter) so I didn't see us needing to spend 10 days on it.  We did review the alphabet all week though.  We watched the LeapFrog Letter Factory one day (which I give big KUDOS to...this video is what helped Seth learn his alphabet and letter sounds!).  We also watched some educational videos on the alphabet that my mom gave me.

We also reviewed the alphabet using flashcards and using our alphabet puzzles.

We had fun with starfall.com this week as well playing some of their alphabet games. The boys really liked that!

Our Fun Snacks this week!
When I was preparing the lessons for this week I found online somewhere (I honestly don't remember where) cool snack ideas that go with the days of creation!  We had a lot of fun with these!

On Monday we studied days 1 and 2 of creation so our snack was oreos (representing light and dark from day 1), marshmallows (representing clouds from day 2) and ice water (representing of course water from day 2).

On Tuesday we studied days 3 and 4 of creation.  Our snack that day was dirt cups (chocolate pudding with crushed oreos on top).  We were going to make star and moon shaped cookies and ice them...we just ran out of time that day.  But the boys loved the dirt cups!

On Wednesday we studied days 5 and 6 of creation.  Our snack that day was goldfish crackers and animal crackers.

On Thursday we studied day 7 of creation.  We decided to have sundaes that day.

This Week's Fun Lunch
I am trying to think of some fun lunches for us to have every week...of course I can't be creative every day but I am striving to have at least one fun lunch every week.

On the first day of school I made silly face pizzas!  OH BOY the giggles from the boys was worth it!!  They loved them!!  And they were very tasty and very easy to prepare - so they will probably make a regular appearance this year.  (I just used refridgerated pizza dough, jarred pizza sauce and mozzerella and cheddar cheese.  As I do them again I will be adding either green or white puree from The Sneaky Chef cookbook to add in some more nutritional value!  The boys will never even know the extra veggies are there!)

Other Highlights
It has been so incredibly hot around here lately!  It was a nice change when a cool front blew in on Tuesday night!  In fact we were so excited about the temporary change in weather that on Wednesday morning we had our bible time and did our crafts out on our gazeebo!

Thursday morning was even cooler than Wednesday morning so we started our day with some P.E. time.  The boys enjoyed running around the yard.

This first week of school Aaron participated in everything that Seth did and did a pretty good job keeping up. As we get into the "meat" of kindergarten Aaron will have his own preschool workbooks and activities to do while Seth is doing kindergarten.  Once we start that I will have a section in the weekly wrap up to highlight Aaron's preschool activities.

And I will highlight Alyssa as things happen that are highlight worthy :-)  Seriously, she will just be playing along with the boys.  I do have special toys for her that are in the schoolroom and I will try to highlight them every now and then.  I am not going to try to "formally" have any tot activities for her...it would just be extra work for me.  I have become a firm believer to just let the babies be babies.  She is learning so much through just free play and watching her brothers.  But I having some do plan on having some special times with her and will highlight those when I am able to do so.


We go on Monday afternoon to sign up for our co-op classes with the local homeschool organization that we are involved with. I will include in next week's wrap up what classes the boys will be doing!! :-)  I am really excited about it!

I hope everyone else had a good week as well and pray you all have a good weekend!