Tuesday, December 11, 2012

MFW K– Oo Octopus

{CLICK HERE} to view the rest of our MFW K unit posts.
{CLICK HERE} to view our post explaining WHY we chose MFW K for our family.


Alex is 4 years, 11 months
Max is 39 months
prekindergarten
We are using My Father’s World Kindergarten as our base,
adding in some of my own printables.

This week, we are learning the letter Oo Octopus.
Our Bible words are: Even the octopus praises the Lord!


books

Alex’s favorites this week…
bible
We sang the song “Praise Him, Praise Him”
We read lots of Bible verses about all creation praising the Lord.

I read Alex a Psalm,
and he had to raise his hand every time he heard the word “praise”.
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Each week, we add one circle to our “Words To Remember” caterpillar. 
Alex can point to each circle and tell you exactly what it says.
While the words to remember aren’t Bible verses, they are character-building phrases
that remind us of the Bible lessons he learns each week.
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phonics
He decided that the “dads” in the picture are Daddy and Papa. 
Papa is the Daddy with glasses.
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Drawing isn’t his passion by any means, but I see improvement in his drawing abilities each week as he draws pictures of words that begin with the letter of the week.
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Alex is proud to say he can read every word on this page!
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Alex did a GREAT job making words, but he didn’t want to do any words with the vowel i.
After he made the words, I wrote them and he traced them on the lines.
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handwriting
O’s are easy!
(The hard part is convincing Alex to keep his letters the proper size for the lines!)
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math
Number formation is still very challenging for Alex.
He has the desire, but he still struggles to get it right.
He wants to do it, yet he speeds through it without taking time to get it right.
He doesn’t want Mommy telling him how to do it,
but he can’t do it correctly without help.
It’s a challenge to be kind, gentle, and insistent that he get it right all at the same time.
I want learning to be fun, but I also want to keep him from forming bad handwriting habits.

He’ll get there, but it’s going to take time!
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Along with number formation, we also worked on measuring and making squares and rectangles.  Alex was very excited to use a ruler!
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science
We read a lot about the octopus!
Alex absolutely loved our octopus book this week, and we read it every day.
He was proud to tell Daddy that
  • octopus have 8 arms
  • octopus squirt ink to escape from their enemies
  • octopus have suction cups on their arms for grabbing and holding things.
We filled a bowl with water, added in some toy seaweed, a rock, a fish, etc.  Then I pretended I was an octopus with an enemy fish about to attack.  My octopus (a bottle of blue food dye) squirted his ink to confuse the enemy.  We watched the ink spread through the water while the octopus (blue food dye bottle) hid behind a rock.
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art
We made a handprint ocean picture.
Thanks to Pinterest, we found lots of fun ideas for sea creatures made from handprints.
The boys were AMAZING at obeying instructions, and these turned out so cute!
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snacks 
lunch – hotdog octopus in a “sea”of noodles
with a ketchup “ink”
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other
SOCIAL STUDIES:
We used a world map to learn about continents and oceans.
We marked our state with an x, then Alex colored the oceans blue.
We talked about how octopus live in the ocean.
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SERVING OTHERS:
A friend of ours was helping her children fill a box to send to a soldier, and she invited other friends to help fill the box with pictures and small items.  We colored thank-you pages, writing names/ages at the bottom, and then we added a picture of each child.

Then we took a “field trip” to the dollar store to buy some small items (beef jerky, chapstick, Easy Mac, gum, instant coffee, puzzle book) that the soldiers might like to have.
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tot school 
(Max is 37 months)
Max read stories with us, made handprint sea creatures, ate a hotdog octopus, colored pictures for the soldiers, and helped us choose and purchase our items for the care package for the soldiers.
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I will not be including Jensyn regularly, but she was SO cute when I let her make her own coloring page for the soldiers that I couldn’t leave her out:
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We may be linking up with the following blogs:
Tot School

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like a super fun week! I love the food coloring octopus science activity!

Mama to 5 said...

what a great week! Great job! Feel free to stop by and link up at Learn and Link http://mamato3blessings.blogspot.com/2012/12/montessori-happy-birthday-learning.html

Nicole said...

You are awesome! I love how you work learning into really fun stuff!

I have an almost 6 year old and I feel you on the letter and number writing. It can be SO hard to be patient and remember that trying is great! They will get it eventually!

My Josie also is not a fan of drawing. Once in awhile she gets into a drawing project and I treasure those, but for the most part she is over it before we begin!

MamaDuck76 said...

We did, too! That was lots of fun!

MamaDuck76 said...

Thank you, Nicole! :)

I've peeked at your blog before and love to see what you do with your little ones, especially Josie. How are you liking her WinterPromise curriculum? I've looked at their Animals program, but I felt like their samples didn't give me enough information to make a good decision...and it's pretty expensive to just buy as a "maybe I'll use it" purchase.

MamaDuck76 said...

Thanks! :)

I'm in the process of linking up, but Linky Tools is working very s-l-o-w-l-y this afternoon for some reason.

Congrats on baby #5! :)