Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 6

I am still a week behind in posting what we did for school and it’s confusing me :-/  We are getting ready to start unit 8, but I am only posting about unit 6.  Last week when I posted pictures for unit 5, I had things in there that we actually did in unit 6.  I am going to try to get caught up this week so I don’t confuse myself anymore!

History:

In history we learned a bit about what life was like as the Pilgrims adjusted to life in Holland. We talked about how they had a scrubbing day once each week where everyone scrubbed and cleaned.

Hailey and Hunter scrubbed the kitchen floor. They loved it and begged to do the dining room too 🙂

Geography:

We are using Road Trip USA and this week we studied Maine.

We learned that Maine produces 98% of America’s low-bush blueberries, so we made some delicious blue berry muffins.  Even Hailey, who does not like blueberries, loved the muffins!

Language Arts:

Our poem this week was “The Months” and Hailey enjoyed adding illustrations to it.

Hailey learned about collective nouns this week.  I saw this anchor chart and used that as a guide to do our own anchor chart.

We played a Fishing for Collective Nouns game, which Hailey loved!  It was a lot of fun and a great way to practice collective nouns.

Unit Study:

In our unit study this week we learned all about bats.  This unit covers science, language arts and math.  I love teaching using themes and Hailey really loved it too!  She learned so much (and so did I!) and had a lot of fun doing it!

(Several of the activities we did came from Batty for Bats and Stellaluna.)

We started out our unit making a Bat Schema chart.  Hailey listed the information she knew about bats and we added it to the Schema side.  As the week went on we added lots of information to the New Learning side and moved some of the information from Schema to Misconceptions.

One thing we learned is that bats wings are like our hands.  They have fingers and thumbs just like we do.  They are connected by a thin membrane.  Hailey put plastic bags on her hands to represent what the wings are like.

Hailey wrapped herself up in a towel, pretending that was her wings, and hung upside down to go to sleep.  Or maybe I just flipped the picture upside down 😉

Since bats use echolocation to find their food, we played a little echolocation game.  Hailey was blindfolded to pretend she was flying at night.  (Bats are not actually blind, as many people think they are, they just search for food at night which is why they need to use echolocation.)  She would call out “echo” and I would reply “location” and she had to try to find me.  It was so much fun!

We did a lot of activities after reading Stellaluna.

We played this game where we took turns spinning a spinner and seeing which category we landed on.  Then the other person got to select a question from that category to ask the person who spun the spinner.

Hailey loved it!

Hailey acted out the story of Stellaluna.

We made a Venn Diagram about bats vs birds, using information we learned in Stellaluna.

Hailey made her own Venn Diagram.

We filled out a bat attribute chart about 4 different bats.  We included how big the bats were.  The smallest bat has a wing span of only 1 inch.  The largest one we studied has a wing span of 5+ feet!  To try to help Hailey understand how big those measurements are she used Unifix cubes to measure and see how many cubes it would take for each bat.

I found this silly little poem about Bat Poop and Hailey laughed so hard when she read it!

We had another fun week and I am looking forward to the week ahead!

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Tot School

Hunter is 22 1/2 months old.

We had a fun week at Tot School!

I just have to say that as you look at the pictures you might notice that Hunter is wearing the same shirt every day.  He has recently become quite attached to his Lightning McQeen pajama shirt.  He insists on wearing all. of. the. time!  I decided that if we are not leaving the house I am not fighting that battle with him.  So, that is why he always has it on 🙂

Hunter’s letter this week was the letter D.

He made a “D is for Dinosaur” using an idea I saw at Homeschool Creations.

Hunter loves the do-a-dot markers and had fun stamping the letter D from COAH.

Hunter practiced his counting, using these fun dinosaur numbers.  (from COAH)

I had Hunter use this printable to practice color sorting. (from COAH)

We have been learning all about bats, so Hunter had fun making a bat craft.

Hunter’s finished bat.

We learned how a mother bat uses her sense of smell to find her baby bat.  I dipped cotton balls into different things like vinegar, vanilla, coffee and perfume.  I let Hailey pick a “baby” and then I blind folded her and had her find her “baby” using her sense of smell.  We had a lot of fun doing that, so Hunter wanted to be a part too.  He loved smelling the different cotton balls!

Hailey just started a spider unit and this was our first experiment.  We learned how spiders eat their prey by injecting venom into it, which turns the insect into liquid and then the spider drinks the food.  So, Hunter wanted to do the experiment too!  We put our prey (a sugar cube) in a cup.  Then we injected it with venom (water) and drank our prey.  They both loved it!

We made a spider glyph, which you can see here.  Hunter made his the way he wanted and didn’t really care about the directions 😉  I love how his spider turned out!

Stop by 1+1+1=1 to see what the other tots were up to this week.

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Bee Crafty Kids- Spider Glyph

Welcome back to the Bee Crafty Kids link up that I am co-hosting with To The Moon and Back and Look! We’re Learning.

We are starting a fun unit all about spiders… at least I’m hoping it will be fun.  I like making spider crafts, but when it comes to looking at real spiders it’s not quite so fun 🙂

Our first spider craft was a fun spider glyph I got from Spiders: A Creepy Crawly Extravaganza.

I set up all the parts of the craft and the directions.
Some of the directions included- add a bow if you are girl, add stripes on the legs if fall is your favorite season, etc.

Hunter is happy anytime he can glue, so he had fun making his spider.

Hailey had fun creating her spider and following the directions.

Putting everything together.

Hailey’s finished spider

Hunter’s finished spider

Rich made one too, and when my parents came over on Halloween they each made one as well.

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Now it’s your turn! Link up and share what you and your kids have been busy making. Grab a button so others can join in the crafting fun too 🙂

<div align="center"><a href="http://ourcraftsnthings.com/" title="Our Crafts N Things"><img src="http://i1165.photobucket.com/albums/q594/dustybug83/BeeCraftyKids3_zps44074ad6.png" alt="Our Crafts N Things" style="border:none;" /></a></div>

Rules are simple:

~Enter the direct link to one or more of your own posts that showcase a craft or hands on activity for children.

~A link back with the above button is appreciated, but not required

~Try to at least comment on one or two of the other blogs that took the time to share and join!