Butterfly Unit Study

Bee Unit Study

How is it possible that it’s been three years since I last posted?  I decided that I am going to start trying to post again now that it feels like life has slowed down a little bit.

We finished up school a few weeks ago and one of our favorite units was learning about bees.  I hadn’t actually planned on blogging about this, so I only have a few pictures that I took with my phone.

After we spent a few days learning about bees, we drew and labeled bees in our science nature journals.

We also studied the life cycle of a honey bee.

Hunter is looking at a sesame seed with his magnifying glass.  We learned that a bee’s brain is the size of a sesame seed.  It’s pretty amazing all of the things that bees can do with such tiny brains.

We took a field trip to learn more about bees.

Field trip- looking at the life cycle

Field trip- looking at the different kinds of bees

Field trip- doing activities with hexagons

We made some bee art.  The kids had to make a queen bee, a worker bee, and a drone.  Each one has different characteristics that they had to represent in their bee drawings.

Learning about bees has definitely made us less scared of them.  Now when a bee comes near one of us we just say, “It’s not going to hurt me, it’s just trying to pollinate.”

ArtAchieve Review

Without a doubt, Hailey’s favorite subject is art.  She is also very good at it.  Me?  Not so much.  I can find cute activities for her to recreate, but as far as actually teaching art and art techniques- I don’t have a clue.  For most of the school year we attend a weekly co-op and she takes an art class there.  But, that ended at the end of April and Hailey has been asking me if she can take some art classes. For the past several weeks she has been using the Entire Level II from ArtAchieve for her weekly art lessons.

ArtAchieve is an online resource of art lessons for kids.  The lessons are very complete and there isn’t much you as the teacher will have to do, other than gather supplies.  There are 5 different levels available at ArtAchieve.  The lessons can be used for any age from kindergarten on up.  Even adults can use these lessons!  You will just need to choose the best level to start at depending on the ability of the your art student.  Within each level there are several different art lessons.  We reviewed the Entire Level II and there are 14 different lessons on that level.

The lessons are available as a video where your child will watch a teacher and follow the instructions.  The lessons are also available as a PowerPoint, which is how we chose to use the program so that Hailey could do the lessons at her own pace.

Each lesson starts out by showing the art standards that the lesson will meet.

 Then there will be a picture of the object that the lesson is about.  This picture is from the Japanese Goldfish lesson.  There are several slides with information about the object.  Not actually included in the PowerPoint presentation, but given on the website for each lesson, are ideas to make cross-curricular connections.  With the Japanese Goldfish lesson there are ideas to connect it to Social Studies, Science, Writing, Literature, Geography, and of course, art.

 Next you will find a slide with the materials that will be needed within the lesson.

 Next up will be a relaxation technique to help get your child ready to create art.

Relaxation is followed by a drawing warm up that will need to printed out ahead of time.  Music is also an important part of these lessons and students should listen to some quiet music to while they work.  Finally there are a few rules to go over before starting the drawing part of the lesson.

Now it is time to draw.  There are step by step directions to guide your child through the drawing.

When the drawing is finished there will be instructions to color or paint the drawing, depending on what is being used for that particular lesson.  There are some suggestions given, but the rest is up to your child.

Hailey’s finished fish.

 Here are a few other projects that Hailey worked on:

This lesson about the Czech Cat is available for free, so you are able to see how this homeschool art curriculum works and see if it would be a good fit for you.

Hailey’s finished cat.

Hailey also worked on the Swedish Dala Horse.

The completed horse. 

 Another lesson Hailey did was the German Nutcracker.

This art curriculum is perfect for us!  For the most part, the lessons are easy enough that Hailey can actually complete them without any help from me.  She has learned a lot and even asks to do the lessons during her summer vacation 🙂  That is a sign of a fun curriculum!!

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D is for Dinosaur

When learning about the letter D, what could be more fun than turning it into a dinosaur theme?  I can’t think of anything better for a 4 year old boy.  Hunter loved learning the letter D and all about dinosaurs.  This was definitely his favorite unit all year.

 Hunter’s letter D bin was full of fun things for the week.  Harper kept taking her diaper out and putting it away haha, she didn’t understand why it was in the bin.

 I printed out this letter D page from these preschool printables and then Hunter had to make the D using pattern blocks.

He spent lots of time playing with the little dinosaurs.  We used them for some math games too, like sorting, patterns, counting, etc.

Hunter and Harper enjoyed using the dinosaur stamps.

Hunter loved this dinosaur mat!  He has spent hours playing with this.

Hunter working on some dinosaur puzzles.

Finding and coloring the letter D.

We used painters tape to show how long some of the dinosaurs were.  Hunter was pretty impressed with how big they were.  We weren’t able to do the really big dinosaurs because they were bigger than our house!

At the end of the tape I put a little fact card about the dinosaur the tape was representing.

We made dinosaur fossils by pressing little dinosaurs into modeling clay.

What would a dinosaur unit be without making a volcano?  Hunter liked doing the volcano but when the “lava” came out of the mountain and touched his dinosaurs he was not happy.  So, the rest of our volcano fun had to be done without the dinosaurs nearby.

A representation of big a t-rex footprint was.

We had a little fossil dig to look for dinosaur bones.

Hunter working on finding some bones

Hailey helped too, it was actually really hard to get the bones out.

Then Hailey and Hunter took turns hiding some dinosaur bones in the sandbox and then searching for them.

Learning about dinosaurs was our favorite unit this year!