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Friday, August 6, 2010

Creation Day 3--our week in review

This week we studied about Day 3 of creation some more. Here's our week of "kitchen school" in review:

Monday: Went for a naturewalk to see some plants and trees that God created. We felt bark on trees and talked about its roughness. We chose some pieces of bark to bring home. At home we painted on them with white paint. This was a new texture to experiment upon with the paintbrush!

Tuesday: Mommy drew a tree on the paper and Q colored in it. We talked about how trees have bron on the trunks and green in the leaves. We glued the bark from yesterday onto the trunk and used some small pieces of green paper (actually green paper we had coincidentally just peeled off the green crayon!) for leaves. Q is working on squeezing out "just a dot, not a lot" of glue from the glue bottle. She still needs me to apply some pressure to the bottle some of the time, but she is doing great!

Wednesday: We made flower garlands to hang up. We took apart some silk flowers. Then we cut a length of thin ribbon and Mommy melted the end a bit with a lighter so it wouldn't frey. Q practiced threading the flower pieces onto the string through the hole in the center. Mommy tied knots to hold the flowers in place. We talked about the sizes and colors of the flowers Q chose. We hung 1 in our display area where we hang all our projects, and Q hung the other one in her playroom for her to hold and touch and play with.

Thursday: We looked at flowers in our yard. Oma is coming today, so we made her a bouquet of flowers for her bedroom! We practiced holding the flowers soooo gently so they don't get crushed and carrying the little vase of water carefully so none spills. Q wanted to do some gluing, so I put 10 drops of glue along a sentence strip (the pink piece of paper) and asked her to put one bean in each drop of glue. She was able to do this--which allows her to practice her one-to-one correspondance, which is a necessary foundational skill for mathmatics knowledge (counting, operations {addition, subtraction, etc.}, and ordering). She was fairly random about the order she placed the beans in, but as she becomes more familiar with this activity as we repeat it, I will begin to gently suggest she works from left to write (the way text runs) when she puts the beans in the glue. After the beans dried I wrote the numbers 1-10 on the top of them and we practice counting them, with her touching each bean as we count. It's hard to convince her not to pick them off! Also, as we did the gluing activity, after she put the beans on the way I asked, I let her complete her own freeform gluing of the beans, letting her do it her own way. She did a bunch of beans close to eachother. I always like to give her some freedom as well as some guidance when we do projects together. Letting her do the same project twice often serves well to meet this goal.

Friday: Opa is here! He and Q collected leaves outside and glued them onto a collage together.

Everyday this week Q also had sensory time. I gave her the choice to work with macaroni, water or dried beans. She has been choosing dried beans all week. She loves to use lids now, so I have been giving her a little pot with a lid she can put on and off. I also give her some type of scooping utensil each day--this promotes the fine motor skills needed for drawing and writing. I have been encouraging her to do some pouring as well, and she has improved at pouring so much this week!



Flower garlands:
These could also turn into great necklaces or crowns! Older kids could knot beads under each flower to keep them in place. I can see some great props for dramatic play being made this way!

We've been reading this book:
mostly because it's the best one they had at the library (not a great selection....) I love the illustrations and the text is actually Genesis 1. We read it each day up to the day we're studying (so for now up to day 3). We also sing the Days song each day.

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