Fishing

Back in August Jenna had been begging to go fishing.  We happened to have some fishing gear that Drew picked up from some garage sales a few years back, so we headed to our neighborhood pond one afternoon.  Instead of using worms, we just cut up some hot dogs to put on the hook.  The pond mostly has Bluegill, so that's what we ended up catching both times.  And don't worry, we threw the fish back in the pond once we were done looking at them. 

We caught one!

Jenna even got to hold a fish

An up-close and personal examination of the fish.

Afterward we ate lunch at the park (after sanitizing our hands like CRAZY!). 

A fun, family outing for sure!

Week 5 - Letter O

As you probably guessed, our letter last week was O. 

The memory verse was Psalm 118:1 - "Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good."

Activities we did:

We ate an octopus for lunch one day and watched some YouTube videos about octopi.

Jenna's coloring page.  I was busy with Grant, so I wasn't there to remind her to color nicely and to try to stay in the lines.  She's not a big fan of coloring, so although she loves using the markers, she typically likes to get this page over with as soon as possible.

Grant's coloring page

Letter Disk Match - upper and lower-case

Play-Doh mat

Letter O - Octopus puzzle

Tracing page

Cutting page - this one was a little tricky with the circles thrown in there.  She didn't do too bad though.  Seemed to handle the circles better than she did the zig-zags.

Pattern Practice - She's getting better with the patterns.

Of course with it being O week, we had to have oranges for snack one day.

This picture's a little dark, but I wanted to show the capital and lower-case O's she made.  Not bad!  I love her lower-case O...very tiny.  :)

Number Pre-Writing

She glued oatmeal to her letter O for her ABC book.

Color puzzles - Jenna was lining them up and naming them all - Daddy was the blue octopus on the left, while Mommy, Jenna, and Grant were the last three octopi on the right.  I can't remember who was in the middle.

Jenna's Do-a-Dot page - I let her use a few different colors this time since Grant was sleeping when we did school that day...she had a little "too much" fun on this one.  :) 

Letter Search - She found all her O's...as well as a few e's and an m.

Graphing - This time I had Jenna count the octopi, find the correct number card, and then count the correct number of Cheerios.  I also had Jenna put the Cheerios on top of the octopi instead of in the boxes below.  That seemed to help with counting the correct number.

We had some Oreos for dessert one day - couldn't pass up another great O treat!

The O Wikki Stix

Magnet Page - notice how she had to match the pom pom magnets to the octopi on the page.

Poke Page

Clip Cards - She put the correct number of clips on some of the cards, but she had a harder time with them as the numbers got higher.

The finished product

Octopus lacing card

We decided to make some oatmeal cookies also.  Jenna was a bit excited, can you tell?

How Many? - I would put the number card on the page and she had to put the correct number of octopi on there.  Next time I might mix it up and switch the roles - I put the picture cards on there while Jenna finds the correct number. 

Size Sort - This activity was pretty easy for Jenna.  She just had to organize the octopi as small, medium, or large.

Putting the letter O on the coconut tree.

Another letter O craft - the kids used the Do-a-Dot markers to decorate the letter O.

Then we cut them out (Jenna cut the outside of her O, while I cut the inside) and glued the octopus tentacles on them.  Apparently I miscounted and our octopi only have 7 tentacles.  :)

Week 4 - Letter I

Last week was the Letter I...here's what we did...

Our memory verse was Philippians 4:13 - "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me."  We had another great opportunity to put the verse into action.  Jenna was complaining that she couldn't do one of the activities, so we repeated the verse and talked about what it means. 

Jenna doing her computer game

Rolling play-doh

Finished!

At this point Grant brought us a snack...

...so we had an impromptu picnic.

Letter-match activity for both upper and lower case letters

She had a little bit of trouble with her inchworm puzzle, but figured it out.

She did a file folder game where the second bird was blank and she had to find the number that came next.  She wasn't able to do it on her own yet, but could figure it out when we counted up from 1.

Making her body into the shape of an i.

Tracing the letter i - she loved this one since it was pretty easy.  Notice in the picture she even wrote both the capital and lower case on her own next to the dashed ones.

Then she wrote some more on the back of her paper.

The letter I wikki stix

She wanted to play with the wikki stix after she made the I's, so I let her.  She made these people ALL by herself!!  I was totally impressed!  From left to right it's Grant, Daddy, Mommy, and Jenna.  (She said the rolled up dots in the bottom right of the picture are Bailey...no idea the correlation there.)

Pattern activity

Making the I's with her geoboard.  I helped her just a little with the capital I, but she did the lowercase by herself.  (I love how she made the dot for the i)

Tracing her numbers

Using her Do-a-Dot markers to find all the I's in the story.

I saw this clothespin color activity on Pinterest and made it this summer.  This was the first time I had Jenna do it.  Each clothespin has a rectangle cut-out of a color.  She has to match it to the correct color chipboard.  It's great practice classifying different shades of colors.

For her ABC book, we used Ink to decorate the I.  Of course it was at this point that Grant is yelling from the other side of the basement that he needs to go potty.  So when I came back to check on Jenna all of her fingers had been dipped in the ink, but she did a good job of not getting the ink on anything except her paper.

I told her I wanted to get a picture of her pink fingers and this is the expression she gave me.  Too funny!

Putting together the inchworm color puzzles

Graphing pages - I had her count the inchworms on the paper.  Then she had to put cheerios in my hand, one-by-one to get the right number.  She still had trouble with wanting to keep adding more than she was supposed to, but improved as we went along.  (Please ignore the mess on the table in the background.  We had our carpets cleaned that day and I still had things off the floor at that point.)

Grant enjoying his Cheerios snack with a very attentive puppy.

Ingredients to make our Igloos.  This looks like a sugary mess just waiting to happen...

Jenna wanted to ice the igloo on her own.  She did well!

Grant's strategy for building his igloo was, "One marshmallow on the igloo, five in my mouth, one on the igloo, five in my mouth...."  Oh boy!

His "finished" igloo

Jenna's finished igloo.  She did a good job of actually decorating her igloo instead of just eating the marshmallows.

I had to get a close-up of her igloo - I thought she did a good job!

A new activity this week - she had to "build" the image on the paper.  She did well - just needed some help centering the inchworms to actually form a pyramid shape.

Matching the correct number inchworm to the number of holes on the leaves.

One of her favorites - Do-a-Dot markers

Of course Grant wants to participate too.  So proud of his work!

Since it was I week, we just had to make some homemade ice-cream. Yum!!

We then met Daddy for a late lunch at a local park and surprised him with it!  He's a sucker for homemade ice-cream.  :)

Going on a short walk at the park before Daddy had to get back to work.  I love this picture of the 3 of them!

The magnet page.  I hot glued craft pom-poms to circle magnets for Jenna to use on these pages.  I've been meaning to do that for a few weeks now, but finally got around to actually doing it. 

Pre-writing sheets

Grant loves using markers, so while Jenna did her pre-writing papers, Grant got to draw on these small white boards that B got them with his own marker.  So fun!

Lacing card

On our last day of the Letter I, Jenna wore her ice-cream shirt.  Very appropriate, don't you think?  :)

She had to match the numeral to the correct number of inchworms.

Funny - again, she got all the inchworms in the correct order by size except for 2.  She did that last week as well.

On the last day she put up the Letter I on our coconut tree and we read Chicka Chicka Boom Boom.

She also made the letter I into an ice-cream cone.

For a sensory activity this week, I made some ice cubes - clear heart-shaped ones, rectangular ones with small plastic teddy bears frozen in them, and then others dyed with food coloring.  I read online that the food coloring wouldn't turn their hands colors....hmmm.....definitely...not...true.  Messy, messy, messy. 

It was pretty cold outside that day so we started the sensory play indoors, but once I found out that the coloring was rubbing off onto their hands and Grant was having a hard time keeping the ice INSIDE the water table, we quickly moved this activity outdoors.  :)  The kids seemed to enjoy it.  Once we were outside Jenna quickly figured out an easy way to get the bears out of the ice - throwing them on the pavement until the ice cracked open.  Smart girl.

That concludes our week of Letter I.  Up next: Letter O!