Grapevine Studies Review

We start each homeschool day with Bible as our first subject. I have really wanted to be able to combine Hailey and Hunter for Bible to save myself a little time. But, with their age difference (5 years) it is hard to find something that really works well for both of them. Then I tried Grapevine Studies, where I am able to do one lesson with both of them.  There are, of course, different requirements for children of various ages, but it can be used with a wide range of ages.

We were given the chance to review the Birth of Jesus: Multi-Level which is geared for children ages 7 and up, as well as the Traceable for Multi-Level which is geared for ages 3-6.  I received a digital download of the teacher book, the multi-level student book, and the multi-level student traceable book.

The Birth of Jesus Studies covers the time leading up to the birth of Jesus, the birth of Jesus, and the Wise Men, Shepherds, and angels. We decided to do one lesson per day, which comes out to 24 lessons.  If you were using this as a curriculum for your Sunday school class, it can also be done as 5 weekly lessons.

This is a sample page from the 64 page teacher book.  I did not print it out, but rather used my laptop as my guide when teaching. Each lesson gives a read aloud from the Bible to do.  Then there are some notes about what to discuss with the students.  There are drawings to show the teacher what to draw on the white board for the students to copy onto their page.  There are different activities for the kids to do depending on their capabilities.  There are words to look up in a Bible Dictionary, there are memory verses, and review questions and answers.

This is an example of the Traceable student version of the Birth of Jesus.   I used this with Hunter (age 3).  Hailey’s pages were exactly the same but without the gray scale drawings to be traced.  Both the traceable and the regular version have 48 pages each.  For each day I printed out a copy for each of them to have to do their work on.

So, how did we use The Birth of Jesus Studies?

Each day we went over the Bible story, verses, and discussion.  Then the kids would do their stick figure drawings about the story.  This seemed to really help them to remember what we had been learning about.  It is great for them to be able to look back over their past work, see the pictures, and remember what they learned.

The first day we used Grapevine I did have to use a little bribery to get Hunter to participate.  But, after the first day I never had to bribe him again- he came right away when I said it was time for Bible.  Some days even Buzz & Woody, and Mr. Incredible and Dash came to hear the Bible story 🙂

Both Hailey and Hunter did really well with listening to the verses and drawing their pictures.  Hunter became quite fascinated with Herod and that he wanted to kill baby Jesus.  He talked about it over and over again, and was rather relieved to find out that Herod died.  Since the lesson on Herod, anytime we discuss something from the Bible he wants to know if Herod was involved haha

This is a sample of a page of Hailey’s work, her stick figure drawings are about when Mary found out she was going to have a baby.

Here is a sample of Hunter’s work, the gray scale drawings there for him to trace.  There are also lesson review questions which Hailey and Hunter were both able to answer, as well as a suggested memory verse.

We had a lot of fun using Grapevine Studies!  Drawing the stick figures really helps the kids to remember what the lessons were about.  I would definitely recommend Grapevine to anyone looking for a good Bible curriculum.

Want to see more about Grapevine?  Check these out:

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Weekly Wrap Up

Since we are several days into October, I thought it was time I finished up our activities from our summer learning fun.  Our last theme for the summer was Jack and Beanstalk.  Of course, we read Jack and Beanstalk every day, and several times some days.  Both boys really liked the story.

Hunter and Anthony colored some bags of gold.

They practiced their cutting.

Then they matched up the pictures they had cut out and glued them.

They worked on a “which one is different” page.

Anthony cut out some numbers and then glued them onto the square that had that number of beans.

They worked on a q-tip painting of the letter B for beans and J for Jack.

I made a little beanstalk and Anthony thought it was fun to have his superheros climb up the beanstalk.

We put beans and a wet paper towel into a ziploc bag, then hung them up on a window.  It was fun to watch the beans sprout.

We made this little picture- some beans on the bottom, green tissue paper for the beanstalk and some clouds.

(Printables from 1+1+1=1)

Jack and the Beanstalk was such a fun little unit! We had a great time!!

Weekly Wrap Up

We did a super fun unit during the summer about frogs!  It was so interesting to learn about the frog life cycle.

Hailey helped me out by reading books about frogs to Anthony and Hunter.

 They were all very interested in the books about frogs and listened so well to all of the information.

 We used these fun little toys to talk about the life cycle- eggs, tadpole, froglet, frog.

 We set up a little aquarium so we could watch our tadpoles grow.

 Hunter added some food.

 Hailey added the tadpoles.

 We made this fun Froggie Fold Up Book.

 The frog book all folded up.

We worked on this Frog Life Cycle printable.

Anthony and Hunter made a Life Cycle of a Frog book.

Hailey, Anthony, and Hunter made these cute little frogs.

We all learned so much and had a lot of fun doing it!

Weekly Wrap Up

We had a fun summer full of learning and playing and relaxing.  Here are some of the learning activities we did:

Hailey held circle time in a tent that Rich set up for the kids to play in.  Looking at the calendar tells me this was the first week of August- guess I’m really far behind in my posts!

Since the boys both like Toy Story, we used some Toy Story printables to work on some different skills.  In this picture Anthony is working on some prewriting skills.

They also cut out the Toy Story characters and then sorted them into either people toys or animal toys.

They did a paper where they had to circle the one that was different on each line.

Anthony and Hunter also cut out characters from Toy Story and then used them to practice patterns.

We also did a Toy Story graphing activity, which both boys really liked.

We used Lincoln Logs for table toys.  They liked using them, but both had a hard time actually building with them.  So, they had fun doing their own thing instead.

They also used Farmland Math for a table toy and both had a good time with that.  The characters from Batman came to the farm too 🙂

We finished up our Toy Story theme by making some cute Potato heads.

I still have a couple of weeks from summer activities to catch up on posting.  I’m going to try to get it done so I won’t be behind with our regular work we’ve started for school.