Homeschooling

Learning Activities for the Letter “F”

This might be a bit long because I discovered that “F” is a great letter when it comes to learning. We studied frogs, firemen, flowers, and fish. We didn’t do an extremely in-depth study on each of them, but I think that the kids will still remember much of what we learned and they had a lot of fun!

We had a Fancy Nancy day. You can read all about the activities, crafts and food here.

I had gotten these feet shaped cardboards in socks awhile ago and saved them for this week. The kids made them into flip-flops by coloring them and hole punching then stringing yarn through them. They loved this activity and it didn’t cost anything. Also, foot and flip-flop are great “f” words!

For our fish day, the kids did a number of fish activities from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

They read 2 Rainbow Fish books and made this activity to go along with the Rainbow Fish idea.

The kids glued sequins onto fish shaped paper frames.

Making these flower mini books was a great way to reinforce colour concepts, especially for my younger kids. Plus, everybody loves mini books!

I love this worksheet from 2 Teaching Mommies because the kids thought it was just so funny (“a flower doesn’t need pepperoni pizza…that’s so silly!”), but I think because of that, they will really remember the talk we had about what flowers do need and why.

This cut and paste worksheet is also from 2 Teaching Mommies.

I made a flower muffin tin lunch to go with our theme:

-blueberry brown sugar flax cookie topped with an organic maple arrowroot cookie
-bread cut in flower shape and baby tomato
-sweet potato puffs
-apple strawberry puffs
-Greek yogourt with sprinkles
-babybel cheese with a heart cut-out

As a fun kick-off to our “F” week, I made these frog sandwiches. The kids thought they were awesome! They are super easy to make.

I also made another muffin tin lunch for the letter F.

-fettucine alfredo
-foot shaped cheese
-fish crackers
-F shaped bread
-fish fruit snacks
-fruit cocktail

The frog life cycle – I had these plastic models of the frog life cycle and the kids enjoyed playing with them. I also printed off a puzzle from 2 Teaching Mommies detailing the life cycle.

cut and paste of the frog life cycle

In learning about frogs, we also had a frog sensory bin and read the books Frogs and Who Taught Frogs to Hop?.

My dad dropped off 5 hoodies from his work and the kids made up this game where they would wrap the hoodies down over their feet and curl themselves up so that they just looked like blobs and then they would have someone guess who was who. It was actually really hard to do! I was able to guess them all correctly, but it took a lot of effort. The Husband got almost all of them wrong! They thought it was hilarious!

These are some of the many things we did in workboxes this week. Fall number and letter practise with clothespins, letter “F” sewing, counting on numbered lily pads using frog manipulatives.

We did some fireman and firetruck do-a-dot sheets from Making Learning Fun and made this foam craft.

This week was also the beginning of November, National Adoption Month, so I wrote up a very condensed version of our five adoptions. I am also planning some great things over on my adoption website this month.

And the week was kicked off with Halloween, when I took the five younger kids to a local indoor carnival. They had a lot of fun playing old fashioned carnival games and getting to hold animals such as a parrot and a bearded dragon.

I have a rule that the costumes can’t be scary and this year, we had planned for Snuggle Puppy to be a robot, but after homeschooling Monday and helping Einstein make his Rocketman costume, I ran out of time to make a robot costume, so I got desperate and put him in his glow-in-the-dark skeleton pyjamas!

This picture I just have to include because it so depicts Snuggle Puppy’s eating preferences. He hates typical kids’ food like KD, but loves the fancy stuff and anything super spicy. On Tuesday, I took the kids to WEM and we stopped to eat lunch and he ordered this:

(the other kids had spaghetti!)

Our memory verse this week was “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” – John 3:16

The kids finished Lesson 8 and started on Lesson 9 in Math U See, continued in A Reason for Handwriting, devotions, and started a new typing program that I am excited to review in a few weeks once they have settled into it. The kids also watched the movie “Degas and the Dancer” and we discussed Degas’ style of art.

Fancy Nancy Activities

By Sharla Kostelyk

The Fancy Nancy book series is a great tool for expanding your kids’ vocabulary in a fun way.

I love how easy this book is to incorporate activities into! I read the kids the original Fancy Nancy book as well as Fancy Nancy Poison Ivy Expert. As I read, I added words to a list on the white board with the “plain” version on the one side and the “fancy” version on the other.Fancy Nancy books are great for vocabulary building!

Of course, us girls had to get dressed up before the stories began!

I found printable Fancy Nancy worksheets and activities here.

Naturally, since it is Fancy Nancy, we had to bring out the glitter glue!

The three girls also made Fancy Nancy paper dolls and clothes and made fancy purses.

For our snacks today, we had to go fancy, so we had hors d’oeuvres… beet and goat cheese crostinis, stuffed olives, fancy cheeses on crackers, and spinach, artichoke, and asparagus dip! And it goes without saying that we also drank tea with our pinkies up!

Fall Sensory Bin

By Sharla Kostelyk

Fall sensory bin

I love this time of year. Autumn or fall, no matter what you call it, is absolutely beautiful! I even love the smells. The colours, the crispness in the air, the harvest foods, I love all of it! So, that is the inspiration for this week’s Fall sensory bin. This could also be used as a decoration and play center at Thanksgiving.

I used popcorn seeds as the base and added Indian corn, a mini pumpkin, silk leaves, pine cones, and various sizes of cookie cutters in the shape of leaves and pumpkins. I also added a scoop so that the kids could play with the sounds of the falling popcorn seeds as they scooped and dumped.

If you are looking for more information on how and why to create your own sensory bins, check out my book on Sensory Bins!

A Bad Case of Stripes Activities

By Sharla Kostelyk

The book A Bad Case of Stripes has long been a favourite. In it, Camilla Cream gets a bad case of stripes because she doesn’t want to stand out, so she won’t admit to liking lima beans. The illustrations are great, the story is fun, and there is an opportunity for discussions afterwards on things such as bullying and being yourself.

After reading this book again to the kids, we did a few activities. They had a lot of fun! I think they especially enjoyed what we did to correlate to this book because we’ve read it so many times over the years that it’s familiar to them.

They especially got a kick out of this:

I printed out a picture of each of them and they gave themselves a bad case of stripes using markers. This is Snuggle Puppy’s finished work.

We also had a muffin tin lunch to go with the theme. Only a few things go with it as I just threw it together, but the kids liked it anyway and they all tried the lima beans. Some liked them, some did not!

-tomatoes
-cooked sausage
-striped fruit roll up
-chocolate zucchini cake
-plantain chips
-and of course, LIMA BEANS!

We had a discussion about the things that make us unique and how we should be proud of those things, not embarrassed about them. The kids talked about their feelings when they have been made fun of for being different. Then I had them each make an outline of themselves and in it, draw pictures of write words of things that they like. This is Miss Optimism’s. In case you can’t tell, that is a horse, a coconut, and an eggplant. She also added wavy hair and green eyes as other things that make her unique.

Dinosaur Activities

By Sharla Kostelyk

This week, we were working on “Dd”. We focused mainly on dinosaurs. Here was this week’s dinosaur themed muffin tin lunch:

-fries
-dino shaped chicken nuggets
-yogourt with dinosaur sprinkles
-dinosaur fruit snacks
-pepperoni sticks (logs)
-broccoli (trees)
-plastic dinosaurs as “garnish”

Excavating dinosaurs from ice. I got this great idea from I Can Teach My Child. To make these, I put a bit of water in disposable cups and froze them, then added a plastic dinosaur to each one and covered with water and continued freezing. I then took them out of the cups and kept them in a bag in the freezer until we were ready to use them. The kids used water in dinosaur shaped water guns and eye droppers and plastic knives to dig out the dinosaurs. They loved this activity!

Dino Dig – I gave the kids a kit where they dug out a glow in the dark dinosaur out of a dinosaur “egg”. This activity didn’t go as well because the kids didn’t like taking turns and because it created quite a bit of a fine dust which bothered Miss Optimism’s lungs. I wouldn’t recommend this activity as the ice one made less mess, was less expensive to make, and the kids enjoyed it more.

You can check out our dinosaur sensory bin here.

Here are some of the activities that I put in the kids’ workboxes this week:

-dinosaur measuring activity (idea from Counting Coconuts)

-dinosaur matching activity…I printed off cards on various sites for the kids to match up with the dinos in the bowl

-dinosaur graphing (from Confessions of a Homeschooler)

-I set up a pile of books about dinosaurs next to the reading corner so that the person who got this card in their bin could sit and read the ones that interested them

-Dinosaur Card Game

One of my favourite moments this week was when we decided to do our schoolwork in the kitchen so that I could get some pumpkin cookies made. The mood was light, the kids were helping with the cookies periodically, and after I had read from the Science textbook and Story of the World, we turned some music on and danced around before they started working on some of their worksheets!

Every day, we focused on a different dinosaur with activity sheets, colouring sheets, dot-to-dots, and information sheets. I got most of these from All Kids Network and Kidsparkz.

I used a few different tools to help the kids remember which direction the “d” and “b” face, including this cute “dog” and “bee” printable from Five Js.

In our Apologia Science, we started learning about the skeletal system and the kids are picking it up really well. Math U See continues to be going well. In Story of the World, we finished learning about Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar. The kids are still loving their gymnastics classes.

Dinosaur Sensory Bin

By Sharla Kostelyk

For this week coming up, we are working on the letter “D”, so I decided to throw a dinosaur study into it as well and I know the kids are going to love it!

To make the dinosaur sensory bin, I used dry lentils, dry garbanzo beans, rocks, a stick, triceratops bones for the kids to assemble, a few plastic dinosaur, a squishy glow in the dark dinosaur, and for fun, a dinosaur whose eyes bulge out when you squeeze it.

This is the most expensive bin I’ve made so far, with the triceratops bones costing $10 and the squishy dinos another $6 total.

Check out my book on Sensory Bins!