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!