Little Hearts For His Glory, Unit 5

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.

Alex is learning right now that history is HIS story – the story of God’s world!

The history and the Bible in the first half of LHFHG are VERY interwoven. 
In this unit, we’ve followed the Israelites and Moses from Egypt to the wilderness.

We “woke up” and gathered “manna” (vanilla wafers) from the living room floor.



We made paper airplane “quail”.

 

Our weekly Bible verse – HOD tied this in nicely with the Israelites needing to remember that GOD is the one who deserves their prayers and praise, not a golden calf!  We, too, need to make sure that nothing is more important in our lives than the one TRUE GOD!

I have to smile at the way he half-sang, half-spoke this verse. 
He couldn’t get the praise song from church out of his mind :)

We are finishing All About Reading Level 1 – and moving on to level 2 – this year.

Alex is doing SO WELL with this!  The fluency pages, though they are gradually becoming more difficult, are getting easier and easier for Alex to complete the reading on these pages.  We are AMAZED by how well he is able to read!

 

He is not at all intimidated by the amount of words on a page.
He easily read the King Sam story in the third reader of AAR 1.

playing a reading game from the student pages


I just ordered All About Reading Level 2, which we will begin using in November.
I can’t believe we’ve reached this point already!

(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 Essential Kindergarten.  It’s not perfect, but it will work for us!)

We are working on More/Less/How Many More/How Many Less this week. 

Alex thought I was crazy when I pulled out the forks and spoons to use as manipulatives,
but we had a lot of fun counting and comparing!




This is a new concept for Alex, and we need to draw some lines and circles on the paper to help him visualize the answers.  I think he’ll catch on as we keep working on this skill.

We read about soil this week, and we talked about what soil is made of.  After reading it and talking about the rocks (chocolate chips), dried leaves and twigs (cereal flakes), and even bits of insects and animals (crushed graham cracker), we made ‘dirt cups’ to represent the layers.  We did ours on top of pudding to make a tasty snack!

We also talked about how clouds are made of water droplets,
and the water begins to drip down when the cloud becomes heavy with water.
Alex found this fascinating!

We are using Happy Handwriting and Rod & Staff ABC series.

 

Alex LOVES the Rod & Staff books!  This is one of his favorite parts of school time!

We are now doing handwriting every day.  Alex knows how to form all of his letters, so we’re just practicing each letter for a day.  We have about 8 more uppercase letters, and then we’ll run through the lowercase letters.  Once we’ve completed that, Alex will be moving on to “A Reason For Handwriting Level A”.  I think he’s ready to start using words/copywork to practice letters and neatness.

 

We’re almost caught up to where we SHOULD be in Reddy Fox.  Both of my boys, 4 and almost 6, are so captivated by this story!  They are anxious to know what’s going to happen to Reddy Fox!

We made “cake mix playdough” to have an edible playdough.  The HOD manual calls for a peanut butter-based edible playdough, but we had to find an alternative since Alex is allergic to peanuts.

Click on the picture to see the recipe for cake mix playdough.

The point is to have a golden colored edible playdough.  We created a golden calves from the playdough, just as Aaron had helped the Israelites construct a golden calf in the wilderness.  Moses ground the calf into powder, poured it in the water, and make the Israelites drink their idol.

We made our golden calves, and then we ate them just like Moses made the people ‘drink’ their calf.  We discussed why we should never, ever allow anything made by people to be more important to us than the ONE TRUE GOD.

We also painted (this is from Little Hands To Heaven, as Max’s stories and Alex’s stories lined up with each other for a few days) a crayon resist of the parting of the Red Sea.


We didn’t have shiny white paper,
so the water seeped under the masking tape and our path isn’t very wide!

Calendar time – hunting for and circling the number of the day.