Last Tuesday was when we started our moon lessons. This was the day after Labor Day, the day after hubby and I came home from our weekend getaway. On Monday when I was planning out our week I was planning a trip to the library for Tuesday morning (which is when our story time is...even though we got there and found out that had all changed...more on that at another time!) But anyways I thought it would be fun to take the kids to the park. We hadn't been to the park in a while and they always love that! So I thought we would change things up and do some of our literary exercises on day 1 of the lesson at the park. We would read all of our stories and then do a couple of the acting out of the stories and things like that! We would then do the other exercises for each book as we went through the rest of the days of our moon lessons.
Well - we woke up to rain on that Tuesday morning. Of course I shouldn't have been surprised since the weather has not cooperated with us at all since the start of school! Thankfully though at lunch time it wasn't raining. Even though it was still too wet to really play we still decided we would go and eat our lunch on one of the covered pavillions and we could still read our stories. (see - I'm learning how to adapt!)
The only problem with this was the fact that Seth really really wanted to play and got tired of reading the books...so it didn't turn out to be as fun as I had pictured in my head! But - we did have fun re-reading all the books throughout the rest of the week and doing our other activities with them :-)
Anyways - on with the highlights for the books!
Little Bear Goes To The Moon
We have always loved Little Bear! And the story of him going to the moon has always been one of our favorites!! Of course this was the first one we read at the day at the park so Seth was happy and into the reading of the books at this point :-) At the park we read the book. I then had Seth retell me the story and I wrote it in his story journal. Then on a later day we went back and drew the illustrations for his retelling of the story.
The science activity for day 4 of the moon lesson was to build a spaceship and have fun pretending to go to the moon and talk about things you might need to take with you. One of the exercises the curriculum mentioned for the Little Bear story was to construct a space helmet and act out the story. We decided to combine these two activities :-) We made a spaceship by draping a sheet over our school table. We then made our space helmets. For Seth's we took a collander and stuck a couple of pipe cleaners out the top. For Aaron's I did the same thing using a woven basket. The boys then got in their space ship and pretended to go to the moon. They had a lot of fun with this!
Goodnight Moon
I have had this book ever since Seth was a baby and used to read it to him as a baby. We hadn't read it in quite a while though. We enjoyed reading the book at the park and then going back through the book and finding all the objects mentioned in the story in the illustrations of the book.
I have to interject in here that on our last day of moon lessons I woke up that morning after being sick with a stomach bug all during the night. Needless to say we did not have any school that morning! But I started feeling better as the day went on and decided that we would have night school! Daddy is out of town all week so he wasn't going to be home. It actually worked out really well because we finished our activities for Goodnight Moon, a very good book to read at night :-)
We went through some old magazines and found pictures of things that we could use for our own goodnight book and made a book called Goodnight World. It turned out really cute. I only got a picture of the cover below. But we had pictures of shoes, and flowers, and cats and dogs, and yogurt and numbers and doughnuts (which we put in the book that we didn't say goodnight to because we would be seeing them first thing in the morning!). We found a picture of a kid sleeping in bed with a teddy bear that we used for the last picture!
Happy Birthday, Moon
I am loving these Frank Asch books and am so glad I have been able to purchase them so that we will have them as part of our library! We loved this book. We read it at the park. I was trying to explain echoing to Seth...I was wishing we had a cave we could go to in order to hear our echoes! I realized after we got home that we could have gone to one of the tunnels on the playground (I will have to remember that for the next time we are at the park!)
On another day we watched a video of this book that my mom gave us! Seth really liked watching the video of the story! We then looked through the book and talked about Seth's favorite part -which was when bear put the hat in the tree for the moon. He didn't feel like drawing a picture of that on that day and I didn't push :-)
Mooncake
For those who use this curriculum it suggested as another book Moongame by Frank Asch. I have been unable to get a copy of this book (even though I am going to keep trying because I love these books!) but I was able to get a copy of Mooncake by Frank Asch when hubby and I were in San Antonio!
Can you tell from the picture above that this was the last book we read at the park?!? Seth was really wanting to play by this point. But I can say this - I took the picture before we read the book and he ended up really liking the book and told me he was glad we read it! So that has to count for something, huh? We only read this book at the park. He was tired so we decided to concentrate more on this book later.
On a later day we read the book again. We talked about how bears hibernate and about the differences between winter and spring (which we touched on seasons on the previous set of lessons on the sun so this was a good review!) I then gave Seth a piece of paper with a line down the middle. On the left side I told him to draw a winter picture, which he drew a snowman, snow and wind blowing. On the right side I told him to draw a picture of spring. He drew grass, flowers, and a tree.
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