MFW K–Pp Penguin

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Alex is 5 years, 2 months
Max is 3 years, 6 months

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 Pp for penguin.
Our Bible words are: I show love to everyone, especially my family.

A Mother’s Journey was an excellent book to explain how emperor penguins care for their new baby.  Alex LOVED the cute story in Pouch.  My boys have always giggled at the Tacky books; we own several, and they love to hear these stories!

 

Alex was looking over his February calendar, which has a weather graph across the bottom.  He was surprised by how many gray, cloudy days we had in February.
It was a great opportunity to talk about seasons and what weather we expect!

We talked about how penguins show  love for their families, and we learned some Bible verses showing how family members should treat one another.  (Husbands, love your wives…wive, follow the lead of your husband…children, obey your parents)  It tied in perfectly with what the boys learned in their Wednesday night church class about treating your family with kindness and respect.  I love it when things come together like that!  (Alex gave us PLENTY of reasons to remind him to be loving, kind, and respectful this week.  Sigh.)

From my penguin pack…

All About Reading…we are reviewing (AND LOVING!) Level 1.
It’s not a necessary addition to MFW K, but it is a lot of fun!
Alex is reading to me from his reader, and he’s placing his next sticker on the chart.

sounding out words & playing letter recognition bingo with raisins

matching the banana words to the monkeys with the rhyming names
(ex: Dot eats the word ‘pot’, Ned eats the word ‘red’.)

video of the activity:

He cares!  He is really trying!!!
I don’t know if this is something new or if it is just coincidence,
but Alex worked REALLY hard on his handwriting practice this week!

 

We measured Alex’s height and weight to compare his size with the size of a Daddy emperor penguin.  We found out he is the same height as a Daddy penguin, but he only weighs half of what the Daddy weighs.

counting & writing 16

If it weren’t for his messy circles (he’s supposed to circle ONE favorite number) this was a really nicely done page.  I was proud of his efforts! 

This Count To Add page is in my penguin preschool pack.  I was impressed with this, as he did it all by himself, including writing the numbers.

 

Another penguin pack page – number order puzzle

counting/ordinal numbers – he loves these!

Alex & I played Emperor Penguin.  He was the daddy, and I was the mommy.  Here he is keeping the penguin egg safe on his feet while “Mommy Penguin” goes off on a 2 month journey in search of food.

Here, “Daddy Penguin” is waddling home after his journey to the sea to get food.

We explored “icebergs”, seeing how you can only see a bit from above water, yet there is still a lot more iceberg under the water.  Alex played in this for a LONG time! 

making shape penguins

acting out some of the words he read while doing All About Reading 

(run, hop)

 

finding his way through the maze in ABC order (from my penguin pack)

 
(Max is 3 years, 6 months…and Jensyn is 22 months, if you want to count her as well)

Just for the record, I *offer* these activities to my little ones.  I  *NEVER NEVER* force a 3 year old to sit down and do “worksheets”.  Max is free to play or do his own thing.  I encourage puzzles, hands-on activities, etc…and he can do whatever paperwork interests him.

Max LOVES to do his notebook!  I place activity pages from my preschool packs into page protectors, and he uses either dry erase crayons or dry erase markers to complete the pages.

Here’s Max working on counting & circling, and he also gave the scissors page a try.  He only did the straight lines; he said the bent lines looked too hard.  (Yes, Max has the scissors upside-down.  Since he’s never even TRIED a scissors before, I knew he’d get upset if I corrected him.  I wanted his first experience to make him happy so he’d be willing to try again .)

He now recognizes pretty much all of his numbers from 1 – 9.  He still makes the occasional mistake, but he was able to correctly do 1 – 8 on these pages without any help.  I was impressed!

Max stamped  - very neatly and carefully – each dot while COUNTING how many dots he put on the page.  He can find a way to work counting into just about any activity.  I think he’ll be our little math lover!

Counting (surprise, surprise…) which group has more.  I *know* he did some of hands-on activities, but I think I was too busy keeping Jensyn from coloring on herself with dot markers to pick up the camera at that point!  It’s crazy when there are 4 children at the table!  (Grace was here, too.)

We made shape penguins

Jensyn sat in her high chair and colored.  I tried giving her a dot stamp page, but she just kind of colored on it with the markers.  She was much happier when I let her out of her high chair; then she sat at the table and stacked dot marker caps.  I think she could have done that all day!

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