Valentine's Day

Valentine's was the perfect day to learn about the circulatory system! We read some books about the heart, and also did some fun exercises that got our hearts pumping. The girls had fun finding their pulses and feeling the difference before and after exercising.

We decorated our "h" cutouts with hearts, of course! We also brainstormed "h" words.

The girls had fun completing this heart pattern worksheet. They had to paste the hearts in the correct spot to make the patterns.

We also made this heart craft. We cut out a heart shape in the purple paper, then we painted paper towels with watercolor paints. Finally, we taped the paper towel to the back of the heart cut out and hung the craft on the window. They look so pretty with the sun shining through! We ended our day reading a book of Valentine's poems.

The Five Senses: Touch and Taste

Today we finished learning about the five senses. After our morning routine, we sat down and read about how the sense of touch works. We then took turns touching lots of different objects and describing the way they felt. We made a chart so we could see all of the descriptive words we used. I also had the girls go find objects that felt different ways. For example, I said, "Go find something that is soft," and the girls had to come back with their own object that matched the description I gave them.

Next we moved on to learning about taste. The girls had fun looking at their taste buds on their tongues and talking about all their favorite foods and why they like them. Then they got to try samples of the three out of the four tastes. We tried sugar for sweet, salt for salty, lemons for sour, and we skipped bitter. Check out Sophie trying the sour lemon! Zoe kept getting stuck on the texture instead of the taste. She said the sugar and the salt were scratchy.
At the beginning of the month we traced Sophie's body. We have been adding the body parts as we learn about them, and we've also added descriptions of how the body works.

We ended our lesson with this idea I got from The Mailbox. We decorated a hat (a la Dr. Suess) with the rime -and. We then added -and words. These will be Sophie's spelling words for her test next week.

The Five Senses: Smell

Our school time starts the same every day. First we say the pledge of allegiance, then we do the calendar, and then we do some type of review, such as counting popsicle sticks, comparing groups of objects, sorting etc. Today after calendar I did an assessment with the girls. I had them get out their white boards and write different letters and numbers as I dictated them. We did upper and lower case letters a - g and numbers 1 - 12. I kept track of which letters and numbers that they need to review and made up some worksheets for them to do independently throughout the week.

After our assessment, we learned about our sense of smell. We read a book about how we use our noses to smell, and then we did a little experiment. I made a chart of different items that we were going to smell. After smelling each item, the girls made a smiley face if they liked it, a sad face if they didn't like it, and a straight face if they didn't care either way about the scent. After smelling all of the items, they picked the one they liked best. Sophie's favorite was the cinnamon, and Zoe's favorite was the vanilla.

Next we made a list on the chalkboard of how our bodies reacted to the good smells and the bad smells. The girls thought it was pretty neat that their bodies responded instinctively to the bad smells by trying to keep the odor from getting into their noses and by trying to dissipate the scent. After that, they went through the house to find something that smelled good to them. Zoe brought back the Tinker Bell bubbles from the bathroom, and Sophie brought her favorite blanket.
Here is a game we got out of The Mailbox - Time to the Hour Lotto. Since learning time to the hour is one of our objectives, I've been looking for fun ways to reinforce the concept. The girls thought this was fun, so we'll be playing it again throughout the month.

The Five Senses: Sight and Hearing

We started our new theme by learning about our sense of sight and our sense of hearing. The girls had fun using flashlights to see how our pupils adjust to the light. They talk about it every time we come inside. Zoe especially loves to point out that our pupils are getting tiny when we go in the sun and then how they get soooo big now that we are inside!

When learning about our sense of hearing, we did a fun activity where the girls sat facing away from me. I had gathered different objects (a xylophone, an egg shaker, some jingle bells, a toy phone and a toy pepper grinder) and had the girls use their hearing to guess what each item was.

One day we did the letter "G", which the girls decorated with gold glitter and goldfish crackers.

We also brainstormed words that start with the letter "g".
Sophie's copy work for the day. She is working on being able to write her full name by herself. She can do her first name no problem, but she still has trouble with her last name - she usually gets the first three letters before she has to look.

God Made Me

Our theme for February is "God Made Me." We are starting by learning about the five senses, then we will learn about the three main body systems: circulatory, muscular and skeletal. The girls are very interested in their bodies so this was the perfect theme for us. We will learn about the heart and circulatory system during Valentine's week. At the end of the month we have a field trip planned for the Tucson Children's Museum, which has an exhibit about the human body.

For math our objectives this month include: telling time to the hour, addition to 5, estimating and the calendar. Our social studies objectives are about how people are alike and different, and we're going to review address, phone number etc. as well as discuss different jobs that people have. For language arts, we will continue to work on sight words, word endings, copy work and spelling. Sophie will have her first spelling test this month! I've also been thinking about a way to track how much reading she is doing.

We will continue to decorate our letter cutouts - doesn't the "F" look pretty with its feathers?

Resources for "God Made the World" Theme

Our theme for January was "God Made the World." I picked this theme because it was the beginning of a new year for us, and the beginning of kindergarten for Sophie. I knew that I wanted to make booklets with the girls, with one page for each of the first seven days. This was not fancy: construction paper, markers and yarn for assembling the book. I printed out text for the girls to glue onto each page, and they decorated each page with foam stickers that we already had in a stockpile (thanks to clearance shelves at Michael's).

In addition to making the booklets, we read lots of stories and listened to music that related to the theme. We read the actual story in Genesis many times and in several different books. One was The Children's Illustrated Jewish Bible, by Lauren Brown and Lenny Hort.
We also read from My First Bible, published by Parragon and illustrated by Andrew Geeson and Sophie Keen. Both of these children's bibles are great because they have simple text and colorful illustrations.
I was pleased find a variety of books at the library that worked with our theme. Some were Christian based while others were from a Jewish perspective. We are still navigating the religious waters as a family, so I chose to teach this theme using resources from both my religion and my husband's religion. Here is a list of other books we read throughout the month:

Creation, by Gerald McDermott

The Story of Creation - A Little Bible Playbook, but Reader's Digest Children's Books

All Things Bright and Beautiful, by Cecil Francis Alexander, illustrated by Anna Vojtec

The Seventh Day, by Deborah Bodin Cohen

Fishy Tales, by DK Readers

Made by God - Spiders, Snakes, Bees and Bats, by Zonder Kids

"Uri Uri"CD, by Elana Jagoda - song #2 Seven Days

We also read from The Torah, which really didn't hold their interest, but I thought it was important for the girls to hear the "original" version of the creation of our world!

Days Six and Seven

I think the girls' favorite day from the creation story is day six. In addition to reading books about different animals, we also went to the zoo to look at the "beasts". Sophie's favorite animal is a lion, and Zoe's is a giraffe. We also learned that God made man to care for the world and rule the beasts. For the seventh day, I had the girls draw a picture and tell me about it. This is Zoe's drawing. She said, "My favorite thing that God made was puppies, the sun and the land."

Day Five

We had a lot of fun learning about the fifth day. We learned the word "swarm" and brainstormed as many creatures we could think of that live in the sky and sea. After decorating our book pages, we played a game where I would say either "sky" or "sea" and the girls would have to pretend to be a creature that lived in whichever place I said.

The "E" got decorated with elephants and eyes.

Day Four

This week we started with the fourth day of creation. We learned about how the sun, moon and stars guide the seasons. We are fortunate to live in a part of the country that gets beautiful sunrises and sunsets, plus we have amazingly dark clear skies at night. We took extra time this week to observe the skies throughout the day.

The girls decorated the D with dinosaurs and dogs.

Creation Day 3

Here is a page from Zoe's creation book featuring the third day. For this part of the creation story we made a trip the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. We went to look at all of the plants that are native to the Sonoran Desert. The girls' favorites were the Teddy Bear Cholla and the Octopus Agave. We learned about how trees help people and animals and why it's important to plant trees.

Here's how the girls decorated their letter C: clouds, cupcakes and candy canes.

This is a center/independent game that the girls played together. They took turns spinning the spinner (not shown here but made with a brad and a paper clip). Whoever was spinning would read the word that the paper clip landed on, then color in a space above the word on the worksheet. The object is to continue playing until one of the sight words' spaces are all filled. They had fun trying to predict which word would be the winner! This is a fun way to practice sight words.

Day Two

It took us two days to complete about half of what I had planned for yesterday thanks to the stomach flu making its way through our family. Before the girls were feeling mostly better, we decorated our "b's", which was fun and distracting for them. We picked blue buttons, blue butterfly stickers and bandaids for decorations.

Today we reread the creation story from a different children's bible. My objective for this lesson was to teach the girls the word "divide" and to have them demonstrate it in their artwork. They had fun decorating the next page for their creation booklets using cotton balls for clouds and wavy cut blue paper for the water.
We ended our school time by making this fun snack: blue cream cheese frosting (cream cheese softened and mixed with a little powdered sugar) water, marshmallow fluff and white sparkling sugar clouds, on top of a graham cracker.

New Year, New Objectives

After 2 weeks off from our regular routine, it was good to get back on track today. We started our morning using our new calendar. Today we just did the basics of completing the date and weather, but over the next few weeks I plan to incorporate some other activities into our calendar time, especially some math skills like counting by 5's and 10's.

Another new routine of ours is to decorate these large letter cut-outs. I have an upper-case and lower-case set for the entire alphabet. Today we decorated the A's with apple stickers. The girls had a lot of fun doing this. After, we wrote some a's on kindergarten ruled paper and they each picked an "a" word to spell. Sophie picked "apple" and Zoe chose "ant."
Our theme for January is "God Made the World." Today we read the creation story from the girls' Jewish Kids Bible. We talked about the first day and completed a page of what will be part of a homemade book. Today's page had a scratch-art paper on it for the girls to decorate. I also had them paste the text of the story at the bottom of the page. After they completed their pages, we went into our guest room closet, which has the light switch on the outside of the door. So while the girls were in the dark closet, I waited outside. They would yell, "Let there be light!" and I would turn the light on for them. They thought this was so fun that they wanted to keep on playing it while I went and made snack.
It seems like it's going to take us a few days to ease back into our schooling, but I'm excited for this month. We've got some field trips planned and lots of fun activities and projects. I'm noticing that Zoe is content to sit at the table and do pencil and paper activities, but Sophie prefers to be up and about, doing hands-on projects and experiments, so I'm working on finding some appropriate science projects to do. I'm glad to have a good start to the new year and am looking forward to the rest of this month!