Literary Exercises for Turtle

We only did one book for the turtle lesson!  We had so much fun with this book that we just didn't do the other book.  We may try to catch the other book at a later date.

The Hare and the Tortoise - Aesop's Fable

Seth loved this story!!  He thought it was so funny that the turtle won the race being as slow as he was. 

After reading the story I had the boys watch a couple of short videos of the story on the computer while I got everything together to make our turtle puppets.  (Note: the boys already had rabbit puppets...I made them for them at Easter)

I found a pair of green women's mittens at Target.  I was going to try to find a pair of green trouser socks but when I saw these I thought they were perfect!

I sewed two green fabric circles together and then flipped them and tacked the middle of one side to the middle of the top of the mitten. I had the boys stuff their shells themselves and then I sewed the opening closed. I then cut out pieces of a patterned green fabric and had the boys glue them to the top of the shell using tacky glue.  I then cut out pieces from white and black fleece to glue on for eyes and a piece of pink fleece to glue to the bottom side of the mitten for the inside of the mouth.

 (That is Alyssa grabbing the scissors as I was snapping the picture - YIKES!)

I then had Seth act out the story using his puppets!!  It was quite funny!

Our Literary Exercises for Apples

Here are highlights from our literary exercises for our apple lessons.  We read two books for this lesson.

A New House (from the book Grasshopper On The Road by Arnold Lobel)

This was a funny little story about a grasshopper who took the bite of an apple that a worm was living in.  Then the apple went rolling down the hill. Seth giggled alot when it was talking about his house inside the apple being tossed around. He had fun talking about all the different funny parts of the story after we finished reading it.

I drew an outline of an apple on a piece of paper and had him draw pictures of what could have been in that worm's "house".  Here is the picture he drew.

Everything really didn't show up well in the picture. The two sets of lines are actually two beds and there are a lot of cirlces in between them that Seth said were the toys that were in the bedroom.  (I thought it was quite clever...he wanted to draw a bed but didn't know how...I told him to think about his bed and what it looked like and to draw it...he remembered the slats on the rails of his bed and that is how the bed cam to be with the lines...the little circles in the middle of each set of lines is the pillows on the beds...and like his room has his and Aaron's bed...he drew two beds in this picture as well...he was getting tired by the time he drew the toys..that's why they are just circles)

The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons

This was a cute little book about an apple tree that Arnold loved and the different things he did with the tree during the different seasons of the year.

Now one of the the activities they suggested was to make a booklet where the child draws how the tree looks in each season.  If you can recall we already did this activity (not a book but a picture) in our previous lesson on leaves.  But we did spend some time talking about the seasons again and how the trees change in the different seasons.  We also talked about all the different fun things that Arnold did.  Seth said his favorite was when they made apple cider. He said he wished we had an apple cider press so we could make apple cider (he is a HUGE lover of apple juice).

Another thing they did with apples in the book was make an apple pie.  The book included a recipe for homemade apple pie.  We had enough apples left over from all of our activities to make an apple pie!  Actually we had enough to make 2 apple pies - we are taking one with us when we go to MiMi and Poppy's tomorrow!!

(I love my little camera poser...look how he is looking at the book like he is reading the recipe )

YUMMY YUMMY APPLE PIE!  What a great way to end our lessons on apples!!

Our Literary Exercises for Leaves

We had a fun time, as always, with our literary exercises for our leaf lesson!  Here are highlights from those activities!

Caps For Sale by Esphyr Slobodkina

One of the beauties of homeschool is that you are not confined to a classroom!  You can have school wherever you feel like it!  I was in my bedroom gathering hats for this book and the boys decided they wanted to read the book in my bed so I thought "why not!"  So we all crawled in my bed to read this book (which the boys really liked!!)

After we read the story we decided to all take turns being the peddler carrying caps.  Thankfully Daddy has a good collection of ball caps, which made this a lot of fun.  (Don't worry Daddy...we put all the caps back when we were done!).

Here is Seth carrying his many caps and yelling "CAPS FOR SALE!"

Aaron couldn't carry as many caps because he wouldn't keep his head still long enough!  It seemed that the more I told him to keep his head still the more he wanted to move it!

Alyssa even had her turn!  We all laughed at her walking around with a bunch of caps on her head!

A Tree is Nice by Janice May Udry

Seth actually had a lot of fun with the activity of making his own book about trees.  In fact I took pictures of each page of his book.  (As per the instructions he drew the pictures and told me what they were pictures of and I wrote the words for him)

Page 1
Seth's tree is nice. It has limbs.

Page 2
Seth likes it when the leaves change color and fall off the tree.

Page 3
Seth likes it when the tree blows in the wind. "God made the wind so the trees will blow" he said.

Page 4

Some trees stand straight. Some trees lean over.

Page 5

Birds build nests in trees.

Leaves by David Ezra Stein

(I was unable to fnd two of the books suggested, The Singing Leaf and Johnny Maple-Leaf, but I did find this additional book at the library that we did some exercises with)

This is a very cute book about a bear who sees leaves falling off the trees and tries to put them back on...he then goes and sleeps in a hole through winter and when he comes out there are new baby leaves on the tree and he is happy feeling that the leaves are telling him "welcome".

We once again talked about bears and hibernation (seems that we have been talking about that alot lately!  Seth is going to come out of kindergarten knowing a lot about bears as well as all of these other subjects!)
This book also allowed us to review the 4 different seasons that we talked a lot about just a couple of weeks ago in our sun lesson.

I took a piece of paper and divided it into 4 sections, labeling each section "Spring", "Summer", "Fall", "Winter".  I had Seth draw a picture of how a tree looks for each of the seasons (you can see his drawing the picture above).

Seth really liked this book!  I am so glad that I thought to add it to our books for today!

Literary Exercises For Our Moon Lesson

The Day 6 literary exercises is fastly becoming my favorite part of this curriculum!  It's funny though - once again we didn't do them on day 6!  We had another lesson week where we changed up the schedule again.

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.

Our Literary Exercises for the Sun

For those of you who read this blog and do not use the MFW curriculum, on day 6 of each lesson, the focus is on literature.  They give several literature selections. They ask that you pick one to read and do the corresponding activities.  We are going to strive to do as many of the selections as we can because they are GREAT selections (a lot of them classic books) and the activities all look like a lot of fun!

(And for those of you who don't use MFW maybe you could get some good ideas to do with your children from these posts.  Since I am only giving major highlights from each book, if you would like to have more information on all the activities that we did for a certain book just ask...I would be more than happy to share with you :-) )

Since we had to condense this week due to mine and hubby's weekend get-away :-) we divided the books over a few days.  They gave 3 selections this week so we did a book a day for the last three days of our lessons.

What The Moon Saw by Brian Wildsmith

This was a book about opposites.  We discussed the opposites in the book and made an opposite book using index cards.  Seth had a lot of fun of this.  He liked thinking of the picture he wanted to draw.  I drew an example on the whiteboard that he followed to draw on his cards.  It turned out really cute!

Bear Shadow by Frank Asch

This was a book that I personally bought and I am so glad that I did because the boys loved it and were excited to know that it was a book that they could pull out and read whenever they want!  :-)

In this book Bear is mad at his shadow and tries several ways to get rid of it.

The activity that we were suppose to do was to go outside and play with our shadows.  Well, the day we did this book it was raining cats and dogs outside!  But that's ok!  This momma knows how to adjust (or is successfully learning how to adjust would be a better way to say that - HA!).   We did this book on the same day that we did our globe and flashlight experiment so we already had a flashlight in the room!  So we turned off the lights and pretended the flashlight was the sun!  I was able to move it in different angles to change the size and shapes of our shadows, just like the position of the sun during the day changes the sizes and shapes of shadows.  Now when I pointed the flashlight straight down it didn't completely take away the shadows but Seth was still able to grasp that there was a point in the day, at mid day, when there would be no shadow due to sun being directly above us.

We also used our flashlight in our dark room to help us act out the story.  Seth absolutely LOVED pretending to be bear while I read the story again.

We also took a sheet of paper and Seth drew out his favorite way that Bear tried to get rid of his shadow, which was when he tried to nail it to the ground.

Regards to the Man in the Moon - Ezra Jack Keats

We checked this book out from the library but we are going to have to find our own copy!  Seth loved this book. A little boy builds a spaceship and pretends to go to space.  Seth has a huge imagination and this book was right up his alley!

After reading the book we talked about what parts of the book were real and what parts were pretend.

I asked Seth if he could build a spaceship how would he build it.  He told me he would go to his daddy's shop and get some blocks and nails and a hammer to make the spaceship.

Then I had him draw a picture of his spaceship (I am really trying to encourage him to draw...his mind is so full of so many ideas and imaginations and I would love to get a glimpse at some of them and feel like he could really do well with drawing.).  Seth drew his spaceship and then I told him to draw where he would be in his spaceship.  He drew the earth, Saturn, Mars and Pluto.  (it helped that the night before he became absolutely fascinated with a book he found on his bookshelf about space and planets!  He actually told me those were the planets that he would see...he remembered the names of the planets!)  The drawing is in the picture above.

Hubby and I will be out of town this weekend.  He told me that he wanted Granny to read the book to him again this weekend and he wanted her and him to make a spaceship together.  They should have a lot of fun!