I think I left off with "S" Activities so I'll start with some of the things we did for T-Z. I wasn't as good about taking pictures because we were also in the midst of packing up the house and the picture part of things fell low on the priority list.
T Activities:
Art Gallery: Textured T's. They had to decorate their Tt by doing texture painting but it was also a puffy paint that gave a different texture than their regular paints.
This is them gathering items to do their texture painting because they couldn't use a brush this time.
Making a town. We were also doing our "community" unit so they had to think of the buildings and places that make up a town and make them out of boxes. Then, they took their toys and let them play in the town.
U Activities:
Art Gallery: They cut out pictures that started with "U" and pasted them on their Uu.
Upside Down Paintings
We talked about Michelangelo and how he painted part of the Sistine Chapel laying on his back and then we looked at pictures of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and some of his other work.
V Activities:
For the art gallery, they painted violet V and v's. Then, one day for their phonics craft, they made a couple of clay vases and the next day they picked one of thiers to paint.
W Activities:
Art Gallery was watercolor W's.
X Activities
We have a big skeleton puzzle so in science they put the puzzle together and we talked about the human body and skeleton. Then, they looked at some of the bones from the puzzle and drew them with white crayon or white chalk (they picked) onto black construction paper to make X-ray X's for the art gallery.
Y/Z Activities
I can't believe I didn't take any pictures of these activities but for the art gallery they made yarn Yy's and for the zebra we took zebra print fabric and they glued it onto the Zz's and drew a head at the top of the Z and a tail at the bottom.
*You can see some of the Letter Art Gallery from the year around the room on the cabinet doors.
For one of the Y craft activities, they made a yacht out of popsicle sticks. We used a square piece of wood for the stand. For Z, we dressed up like animals because I have a lion and zebra mask and played animal charades. Then, they designed and made their own zoo out of play doh and Grant chose to draw his zoo too. They had to realistically think about where the animals would go based on the type of animal it was. For example, the reptiles would be in one area and the animals that live in the grasslands would be in another area. This was a good review of our unit at the beginning of the year on habitats. Then, they also used our felt animals to make up a story about a zoo and they told their stories using the felt animals.
If you are looking for a good curriculum, I highly recommend Moving Beyond the Page. The ideas on this blog are mostly original because I didn't want to have any copyright issues but I loved this curriculum for teaching units. You do have to supplement for phonics and math but I found it did a great job meeting the state's objectives as well as using a lot of higher order thinking but in a fun creative way!
It was my first year to homeschool them and it was a true blessing. I got to teach Grant how to read which was so rewarding and Peyton came so far with knowing all of his letters and their sounds, days of the week and how to identify the day of the week by looking at a calendar as well as yesterday and tomorrow's day. They learned to count by 10's, and at the end of the year, Peyton knew how to count to 30 and ID numbers up to 40 and Grant learned how to count and ID numbers to 100 and started understanding counting by 2's. I hope that doesn't sound like bragging because that is not the purpose. This is my scrapbook for now so I'm trying to document life as we go!
Another neat blessing was the very place that I used to play school became a place that I got to homeschool my boys for their first year. I will miss that house because it has so many wonderful memories and I would have never dreamed as a little girl that one day my pretend play as a teacher would one day be real with having my very own boys being my students! :)
Time to pack up the school room and say good-bye.
Our Word Wall. When I introduced a new letter, they would give me every word they could think of that started with that letter. Then, I had a song for every letter that we would sing and so we would add words after singing the song. Last, any books that we read, they would ID a word that started with that letter, and we added it to our wall. Sometimes they would think of a word for a letter we weren't on that week or they would like a word so much from our reading that they would want me to go back to that letter and add it to our wall.
Peyton helping me pack up the room.
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