A little over 3 weeks ago, our sweet little new addition joined the family. She has just been the sweetest baby and such a JOY (as her middle name indicates!). We’ve toned down our schooling a bit, but we are still plugging away through the Peaceful Preschool. I would be napping right now, but nap times just didn’t line up today for all three kids. Instead, I thought I’d catch up on a bit of blogging.
The past few weeks we’ve been trying to figure out our new routine… mostly we are just reading books and doing a couple of the activities. It’s too nice outside these days to not be running around barefoot without a care in the world, so we’ve been outside exploring and burning off as much energy as possible. When you live in Michigan, you learn to soak up as much sunshine as possible while you can!
This week we started the Letter J… so as you can see, I’m a bit behind in my blogging, but here is a recap from our Letter H unit!
I think I say this with every new unit that we do, but we really enjoyed our books this week! The Little Red Hen, Harold and the Purple Crayon and The Little House all quickly became new favorites. My kids especially loved Harold and the Purple Crayon. Something about the imagination and simplicity of the story really captivated them!
One morning I handed each of the kiddos a purple crayon and asked them to replicate a picture from the book. The drawings are very simplistic (think “drawn by a kid”), so my 5 year old, messy drawing loving son enjoyed copying a couple of the pictures. It was a really fast craft, but I took few minutes to point out details in each drawing. I think it was a good activity to teach him to look at details… because there weren’t many, it wasn’t overwhelming.
“Who wants to help me bake the bread?!” I yelled from the kitchen… and both kids came running yelling, “I do!!”
The Little Red Hen sparked some great conversation with my 5 year old. At the end of the story, the Little Red Hen decides NOT to share her bread with the other lazy animals. My son asked me if that was the kind thing to do? Ooooohhh… now we get to have a great discussion about doing the right thing! Should she have shared? Yes… God commands us to be loving even with those that try to take advantage of us. God’s Word says if someone asks for our robe, we should give him our coat as well. BUT the Bible also teaches not to be lazy! As a door turns upon its hinges, so does a slothful man upon his bed. We definitely used this story to build our character. We are supposed to work hard like the Little Red Hen, but we also need to be giving to those who do not “deserve” it because God gives to us what we do not deserve… eternal life!
The Little House had so many great things in it that we parked on this book for a while. We watched a time-lapse video of a house being constructed and talked about what it takes to build a quality house. We then took a couple days designing our own houses using differing materials/media. Hobby Lobby has awesome paper houses for a very reasonable price by the way!! The kids enjoyed making these houses, which later turned into houses for my son’s Lego men.
The Little House also discusses moon phases! So we took some time to go on a tangent and discussed moon phases. I’m pretty sure the kids just really liked using Oreos to construct different phases of the moon. It made a lasting impression that’s for sure! I found the moon phase printable from Free Homeschool Deals.
For math, we used screws to count and add with the number cards provided by our Peaceful Preschool curriculum and we discussed how building a home uses MANY screws and also talked about what other materials are used during construction.
Of course we had to do our handprint art. Since spring was quickly approaching, we made a H-ive. My son kept asking me when the bees would be back… and now they are here!
