Preschool Weekly Wrap Up- Letter B

Last fall we concentrated on the letter B one week during preschool.  Since it was fall we studied all about bats.

We did a fun bat painting.  I put some bat shapes on a piece of paper and then Hunter stamped white paint all over.

Harper made one too.  And also ate some of the paint, of course.

The completed bats- they were fun and easy, and turned out cute.

Hailey wanted to make one too, but she did hers a little differently.  She mixed some paint to create a sunset.

Then she glued some black bats onto the sunset.

I teach pre-k art at our homeschool co-op and we made this really fun bat.

Hunter glued beads onto the letter B.  It took a lot of glue to make them stick!

Another fun week of preschool!

Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 7

I am trying to catch up on my posts, so I am doing another post this week about what we have been doing in school.  I get too confused and can’t remember what we did which week when I get behind!  So, here is a summary of what we did last week:

History:

This week we learned that the Pilgrims decided to leave Holland and head to America.  They would have to leave all of their friends and would not be able to bring very much with them.

I saw this cute idea at The First Grade Parade.  Hailey had to pretend she could only bring one suitcase with her and decide what she would bring.  I thought her answers were cute.

Language Arts:

While reading our adventure book we created this staircase.  Each step has a problem that happened during the story written on it.  As the problem was solved Hailey colored that step.

Math:

In math Hailey is learning to add with double digits.  She practiced by using pennies and ones and dimes for tens.

Unit Study:

We finished up learning about bats this week (several of the activities we did came from Batty for Bats and Stellaluna), and the started a unit about spiders.

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 blindfolded her and had her find her “baby” using her sense of smell.

Hailey made this project as part of the super fun Stellaluna unit we did.

The inside.

Hailey wrote an acrostic poem about bats.

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.  We put our prey (a sugar cube) in a cup.  Then we injected it with venom (water) and drank our prey.

It was a really fun week!!

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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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