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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Helen Keller Book Report

We finished up reading Helen Keller by Margaret Davidson and we also watched The Miracle Worker. Hailey and I really enjoyed both!  We did a few fun activities about Helen Keller.  As a final project, I had Hailey do a cereal box book report.  She worked really hard and enjoyed working on it.

Here is the cover of the cereal box she created- Keller Crunch.  She included a picture of Helen Keller, a picture of what the cereal looked like and a picture of the prize included inside the cereal box.  She used a doll for the prize because Helen Keller loved dolls.

Using printables we found here, Hailey made the “ingredients” of her cereal- the main characters and setting of the book.

Hailey wrote a summary about Helen Keller.

On the back of the box, Hailey created a game.  She made a word search, and all of the words included were people or things that were important to Helen Keller.

Hailey loved making her book report and even asked if she could do the same thing for the book we are currently reading 🙂

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Heart of Dakota- BLHFHG Unit 5

Has another week really come and gone? It just doesn’t seem possible!  This school year is going by so quickly.  I have actually gotten a little bit behind in my posts.  I am just now posting about unit 5, but we are going to be starting unit 7 tomorrow.  Anyway…

We started a new behavior chart a few weeks ago.  When Hailey has had 5 outstanding days on our chart she earns a reward.  Hailey made a list of the rewards she wanted to work towards- she has things like skip a subject, extra snack, computer time instead of calendar time, pajama day, show and tell, etc.  So, she had earned 5 outstandings and decided she wanted to pick show and tell for her reward.

Hailey showed us her American Doll, Aveena and told us all about her.  Then she showed us her stuffed dog Mike and told us all about him.  She loved doing show and tell!

History:

In history this week we learned about how the Pilgrims found Holland to be very different than England.  Streets were canals and houses looked very different.  Everything was very different for the children and adults and the children even started learning to speak some Dutch.

Language Arts:

Hailey working on putting her poem for the week in order.

Hailey’s illustration for her poem.

Practicing spelling words… I am running out of fun ideas for practicing and would love some suggestions.

We have been learning about nouns and for a fun activity I had Hailey tell me a short story.  I wrote it on the board and had her erase all the nouns.  Then without looking, she named off new nouns to fill in the blanks.  Our own little Mad Libs :-).  It was a lot of fun and turned out really silly.

We started learning about common nouns and proper nouns.

Hailey made a word search with common and proper nouns.

We are doing an interactive language notebook, so Hailey added a page for common and proper nouns.

Working on listing common and proper nouns in her notebook.

Hailey did a cereal box book report about Helen Keller.

We started a new book this week.  It’s an adventure book, so we started out with a treasure hunt.

Hailey loved the treasure hunt!  She thought we should do one everyday 🙂

Science:

During science we learned about the heart and then listened to each others hearts using an empty paper towel tube.

Columbus Day:

Since these are activities from a few weeks ago, we made a boat for Columbus.

Then we made this fun map.  You can see everything we did here.

Unit Study:

Our Unit Study was all about leaves.  One day I had Hailey and Hunter dress in the color of chlorophyll 🙂

Hailey also made this cute Fall Tree Craft.

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Columbus Day Activities

We did a little one day mini unit about Columbus Day and what it is all about.  We started out by watching a video about Columbus on BrainPOP.  We also played a game and took the quiz on BrainPOP.

Then we made a mini book that I found at Royal Baloo and a couple other free printables from the Columbus Unit she created.

After we finished talking about Columbus and what he did, we made a map to show where he went, using an idea I saw at 2nd Grade Shenanigans.

I drew this (I am clearly not an artist!) on a paper bag and then Rich burned the edges for me to make it look like an old map.

Hailey and Hunter painted their maps.

Completed maps

Hailey and Hunter gluing together a boat for Columbus Day, using an idea I saw at A Cupcake for the Teacher.

Completed Columbus boats.  Hailey drew a picture of Columbus in one of the windows on her boat.

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