This year, we are using Heart of Dakota’s Little Hearts For His Glory curriculum.
It is adaptable for children ages 5 – 7. To read more about our choice, CLICK HERE.
Alex is 5 years, 8 months.
He will turn 6 in December 2013.
He had his first day of homeschool co-op this week!
Alex is learning right now that history is HIS story – the story of God’s world!
We were reading about Joseph’s dreams, and Alex thought it was SO funny that the sun, moon, and stars bowed down to Joseph. He giggled and giggled about that.
He made an Egyptian collar to learn about how Egyptians dress.
We planned to add jewel stickers, but the stickers have gone missing!
Alex is VERY proud of his collar,
and he wore it for a small bit of time each day while we did school.
(This picture is a self-portrait!)
Learning about the Ten Plagues
The manual suggests coloring pictures of the plagues. Since Alex doesn’t always love to color, we printed a 10 plague page that I found online and made a little construction paper book. (I flipped over the Jewish ‘wild animals’ picture and drew some flies on the back.) As I read the Bible story, Alex would find the next plague picture and glue it on the proper page.
I’d seen these ten plagues finger puppets on Pinterest, decided they were too much work, and then later in the day, I saw Laura’s post on using these with her son. So…back to the computer I went to print out these fun finger puppets of the 10 plagues. As you tell the story, your child adds these to his fingers in the correct order. Afterwards, your 2 yr old uses them like little dolls, hee hee!
The fly puppet is a replacement page, as this set included wild animals instead of flies. The fly printout is glued over the wild animal.
We played a little game to help Alex remember how Moses’ mother left him by the Nile River, where he was found by the Pharaoh’s daughter. I wrapped up one of Jensyn’s baby dolls, hid the basket, and Alex had to go on a hunt for the basket. Once he found it, we pretended he was the princess discovering Baby Moses.
(Yes, that’s my bedroom…yes, the bed is unmade…and yes, there are dirty clothes on the floor…we’re definitely very ‘real’ in our house, and at least one or two rooms are always messy!)
Jensyn ‘sabotaged’ our game by showing Alex where I’d hidden the basket or by bringing it to him. She was VERY upset that Alex was touching her baby and basket, and she cried whenever he tried to pick up the baby and re-enact the story of Baby Moses. Whoops – not everything goes as planned with a 2 yr old in the house!
Bible Verse – this was our longest one yet. He doesn’t look excited in the video. He actually IS happy about it, but the lack of excitement is actually just concentrating on his l-o-n-g Bible verse!
We are finishing All About Reading Level 1 – and moving on to level 2 – this year.
Alex is going through AAR 1 faster than I anticipated! He finished the second reader this week, and he is so very proud of himself! If you live nearby, he would probably gladly read you a story (or three…) from his readers! He read a bedtime story to Max and me last night, and was so very proud of himself!
I figured on starting AAR 2 in January, but I think he’ll be ready for it by early November. Guess I’ll have to get that ordered soon!
The pictures below are from Lesson 33, which we did while snuggling on the couch.
We moved to the table to play the Ducks in the Pond rhyming word game.
(He colored the pond & one duck before deciding he’d rather just play the game!)
(Please keep in mind that I have the older version of LHFHG, and if you purchase a new guide, your math will follow a different sequence than what we are doing. I created my own spreadsheet to match the math activities in the older version of LHFHG to the lessons in Singapore Essentials. It’s not perfect, but it will work for us!)
We were playing a “what’s one more?” game where Alex had to set out a certain number of counting bears. Then I’d ask him, “How many would you have if there was one more?” He had to tell me the number that came next, and then he’d add a bear to double-check if he was correct. It was too easy for him, but still a lot of fun!
After the activity, Alex did a “one more” page in his Singapore book.
I didn’t take a picture of the back of the page, and Alex thought we should have one.
The picture below was taken by my little photographer
Using crayons to work on “ONE MORE”…
We also had fun with gummy bears. Alex had to listen to me clap, counting the number of claps. Then he had to make a line with the same number of gummy bears.
We took turns. After that, I’d listen to Alex stomp his foot, and I’d have to make a gummy bear line using the number that he stomped. (There was an ‘equal sets’ Singapore page to go along with this activity.)
using Cheerios to make the number on the card I handed him, then removing one cheerio and telling me the number that’s “ONE LESS” than what is written on each card. We did this for 1 – 10. (Jensyn helped eat the cheerios…)
“one less” math page
Since we read about Moses and the burning bush, we learned about bushes in the science book. We talked about what a bush needs in order to live. As I held up one of the purple cards below, Alex pretend to be the plant stretching for sunlight, digging roots into the dirt, etc. Then he had to wave red crepe paper (which we didn’t have – so he used a red party badge) to pretend to be the flames on the bush.
Later in the week, science covered living and non-living things.
I don’t have any pictures of that
We are using Happy Handwriting and Rod & Staff ABC series.
Alex was celebrating his best M by blowing a party horn…silly boy!
His big-eyed smiley faces always make me smile!
Do It Carefully book
We are so behind on this! Alex likes the book; we’re just having a hard time fitting it into our days! I might just have to start reading it at bedtime or first thing in the morning before Jensyn wakes up…
Alex made an “Egyptian Collar” out of a paper plate. He wore this a LOT during this unit! We thought we had jewel stickers to add to it, but I hadn’t found them at the time these pictures were taken.
While Alex and I was doing his handwriting page one day, I walked over to check on the little ones. This is what I found in Jensyn’s room…
It may be a drive-in restaurant? I’m not sure, but they were having fun…
…and making a ginormous mess, lol!
Calendar Notebook
working on ‘today is’ and ‘tomorrow will be’
writing his name once a month…while I love this wobbly writing, I sure do hope to see improvement by the time we reach the end of the school year!
School time is not without its distractions. We had two memorable interruptions this week.
Alex discovered a moth on the kitchen floor, got HUGELY distracted, and had to show his brother and sister, then take a bunch of pictures. They took probably 25 pictures of this little guy, and then they picked up their new friend and took turns carrying it around the house. After a while, I asked them to release the moth outside.
And then yesterday, Jensyn followed Max into the bathroom when they were supposed to be having ‘room time’. Max went potty. Jensyn dumped 400 rubberbands into the potty that her brother just used. Sigh. I should be grateful that they FLOAT, so at least they were easy to fish out of there!
Since I really don’t want to end this post with a TOILET(!), I wanted to add this: Now that we are 4 units into our new curriculum, I am really seeing that Alex is ENJOYING most of our work. He’s learning more details about familiar Bible stories, enjoying the Bible memory, and laughing and smiling through many of our activities. It’s been quite the adjustment from MFW K to LHFHG, but I am no longer worried about this switch. We’re finding LHFHG to be a wonderful, Christ-centered, FUN experience! There are a few parts of our day that he doesn’t love – like reading fluency pages – but overall, he’s happy during our school time! HOORAY!
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