Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Earth Day Theme - April 20-24, 2015

We took a break on theme weeks for a little bit and focused on other things, but now we are back to themes.

This week we did Earth Day activities. I am not sure we did the theme the way most people would, but it worked for us and had a good time with it.

I used the the Genesis creation story as our foundation for talking about Earth Day and how God created the earth and we are responsible for taking care of it. It seemed a very good tie in and Drew was asking good questions about creation and taking care of things. We are using The Beginners Bible for Kids as our Bible for Drew. He likes the pictures and it is easy to understand.



I found a new worksheet for him this week. It was a count the item and then identify the correct number and glue it into the square. He really impressed me with it. I didn't have to do anything but explain what to do and he did it all by himself. He did have a harder time with the glue stick, but he doesn't understand gentle in general and you can't just smoosh glue stick down and have it work.


We continued to work on tracing shapes. He knows the shapes, but he does much better practicing his writing basics with shape tracing than the does with other methods. The triangle trace was fun, he would count the actual lines in the triangle, but then as he was tracing it every time he made a bump off the line he would count it and add it to the number of sides a triangle has. One triangle had about 20 sides to it.


He wanted to practice his coloring and I didn't remember to actually print coloring sheets. So, sadly he had to color my version of the Earth. I am thankful he doesn't know what it is supposed to look like. He spent a lot of time retracing my lines before he finally started coloring.


Story time at the library was Earth Day. They took a different take on the day, too. Instead of recycling and such they did nature. I hadn't thought of that option. They talked about animals and planting a garden.


For the library craft this week they made bullfrogs. Again, it was a chance to practice our gluing. I didn't realize how much he wanted to cut his frog out when I was helping him, and it caused a bit of a freak out which turned into a major stubborn streak on taking his picture. I promised him we would do more cutting and pasting the next day.



I realize doing these post how often he manages to wear the same shirt two days in a row. Oh well. I had promised him that we could do more cut and paste when I found some good worksheets. I liked these because he could color them and then cut them out. After he cut them out he glued them onto construction paper, which of course I forgot to get a picture of. His cutting is getting better, it still isn't where I think it should be, but he is getting better at holding them correctly and learning to hold the paper tight.



Drew loves paint, like crazy will choose to paint over almost anything else. So, I am having to come up with new ideas on painting all the time. This week it was using a stamp the dots paint sheet with puff balls in a clothes pin. He did probably 75% of the dots before he just started painting with the puff. It was frustrating to him that it had white gaps between the dots. It was amusing to me.



I am continuing to try to figure out our homeschool wall a little more. I want somewhere that we can hang up his school work so that he can see what he has done that week. So, this is a work in progress to see how we can accomplish this. He liked it that he could walk by and show AJ what he did this week.

1 comment:

  1. You are amazing, Molly. Sure wish you had been my teacher when I was Drew's age!

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