Week 2- Bugs!

AJ has been SO excited for bug week! We stopped by the library over the weekend to pick up some bug books to go along with what we already had. Links for everything we used will be at the bottom of the post.

Monday- AJ and I read The Munching Crunching Caterpillar by Sheridan Cain and Eric Carle's The Grouchy Ladybug. She then practiced counting out ladybug spots and caterpillar body-dots! We also watched the tv adaptations of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and The Very Quiet Cricket. Then we experimented with ways to make butterfly snacks. Her favorite was a banana/apple/pretzel combo.

Later, we broke out our Very Hungry Caterpillar board game! It's a very simple game, but AJ loves collecting all the different foods from the book.

Our other Monday activity was playing with a 6 sized cube with letters on each side. She rolled the cube and recorded which letter came up. Then when all the squares on her paper were filled, she counted each one and made tally marks to keep track.

On Tuesday, we made playdoh- I had lots of plans for this! AJ enjoyed measuring out ingredients and mixing at the stove.

When the dough cooled, she made bug impressions with a variety of insects, spiders, and assorted creepy crawlies. We has lots of fun talking about the different shapes of bugs, number of legs, wings, etc. After making the impressions, she mixed up the toys and matched them back up.

We used two sets of bugs for this activity- Melissa & Doug Bag of Bugs and a mini insect set found on Amazon. Then she flipped the bugs over and made doh molds of the bugs. Later we mixed up some plaster of paris and poured it in. When it dried, she removed the playdoh and painted the bugs to match her toys.

Since she was having so much fun with the toy bugs, I broke out the Usborne Big Book of Big Bugs to talk about each one. She had a blast matching them up on each page! The other book we used for this activity was I Love Bugs by Philomen Sturges.

On Wednesday, AJ was not feeling well enough to go to co-op, so we read our new favorite book about snails (Escargot by Dashka Slater) and played Snail's Pace Race

We closed out the week with friends again! The girls and I read Escargot and the Usborne Phonics Readers "Bee Makes Tea" "Bug In A Rug" and "Underpants For Ants"
Then AJ taught her friend how to play Snail's Pace Race and we broke out the playdoh one more time. This time, I taught them a song to name insect parts (to the tune of "head, shoulders, knees, and toes") and presented them with playdoh, googly eyes, and pipe cleaners. They made several insects and a spider!

We're jumping right in to moon week this week, then space week and a break!

Usborne Books & More used this week
Big Book of Big Bugs- https://1103214.myubam.com/p/1550/big-book-of-big-bugs
First Questions and Answers: Why Do We Need Bees? - https://1103214.myubam.com/p/6288/lift-the-flap-first-questions-and-answers-why-do-we-need-bees
Bee Makes Tea- https://1103214.myubam.com/p/3176/bee-makes-tea-ir
Bug In A Rug- https://1103214.myubam.com/p/5310/bug-in-a-rug-ir
Underpants For Ants- https://1103214.myubam.com/p/2613/underpants-for-ants-ir
Caterpillars and Butterflies- https://1103214.myubam.com/search?q=Caterpillars+and+Butterflies+-+IR


Other books used this week

Munching Crunching Caterpillar https://www.amazon.com/Crunching-Munching-Caterpillar-First-Storybook/dp/1589255135/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505763028&sr=8-1&keywords=munching+crunching+caterpillar

On Beyond Bugs https://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Bugs-Insects-Learning-Library/dp/0679873031/ref=sr_1_28?ie=UTF8&qid=1505764364&sr=8-28&keywords=bug+book

I Love Bugs! https://www.amazon.com/I-Love-Bugs-Philemon-Sturges/dp/0060561688/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1505767539&sr=1-1&keywords=sturges+bugs

Escargot- https://www.amazon.com/Escargot-Dashka-Slater/dp/0374302812/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1505767654&sr=1-1

Week 1- Farm

AJ will be 4 this month and it feels like everybody is starting school! We began our first week of planned activities on Monday…and what a week it was!

AJ and I read On The Farm, a new early reader level 1 from the Read With Usborne series. After talking about all the different kinds of animals she read about, I broke out the bucket of farm animals (link below). AJ sorted them first by number of legs, then by species. She especially liked the pigs so I revised an activity later in the week to be more pig-centric. 

AJ has been practicing writing numbers (we made a number line 1-12) and adding 2 numbers together in board games, so I was excited to find this activity from The STEM Laboratory (Yay free printables!) where AJ counted animals, wrote in the numbers, and then added them together. Part of that printable included a page to write out the finished equations, and AJ LOVED writing plus and equal signs!

Check them out here! 

We also started reading stories from Usborne’s Complete Book of Farmyard Tales- two or three stories each day.

On Tuesday, we read one of my all time favorite books- The Big Red Barn by Margaret Wise Brown. Then we built a barn from triangles AJ cut out herself- she had fun figuring out how to put them back together to make a rectangle and a roof! Then she added animals using the Melissa & Doug Baby Farm Animals Stamp Set (link below). 

Later in the day we moved on to tracing and reading 3 letter words (thanks to these awesome printables from A Dab of Glue Will Do. 

Mid-week is our homeschool co-op field trip; this week the 3-6 year olds visited a frog pond and explored its ecosystem. AJ enjoyed catching tadpoles and having a Monarch caterpillar crawl all over her hands. 

For the last day of farm week, a friend came to visit! The girls read Hen’s Pens (From the Ted and Friends phonics readers) and designed handprint chickens. As we read the story, we talked about all the different features of a chicken- wings, beak, feet, etc.

Then…..piggy day! Inspired by this post  over at Fantastic Fun and Learning  we made “mud” from cocoa powder, corn starch, and water- set up the pigpen and taught them the “6 in the pen” song. They had so much fun exploring the mud, rolling pigs through it, experimenting with mud splatters (definitely a messy activity….we should have put the girls in smocks), and making up their own variations to the song! A great story to go with this activity is “Curly Gets Lost” from the Farmyard Tales book. 

Finally, the girls made butter. We talked about cows and cream and milk and butter- then I gave each of them a taste of heavy cream before handing them each a jar of it. We all went outside, put on some dancing music, and shook shook shook it up! I don’t think they believed me at first, but when we checked at the midway stage, the cream had already begun to thicken. I saved the buttermilk for making bread next week, and we all enjoyed the most delicious fresh butter on bread for an afternoon snack. 

Here’s a list of the books we read this week, along with where you can buy them.

On The Farm https://1103214.myubam.com/p/6316/on-the-farm

Peek Inside the Farm https://1103214.myubam.com/p/4495/peek-inside-the-farm

Ted and Friends (book and CD set) https://1103214.myubam.com/p/4495/peek-inside-the-farm

The Complete Book of Farmyard Tales (book and CD set) https://1103214.myubam.com/p/208/complete-book-of-farmyard-tales-with-cd-cv

Farm Picture Puzzle Book https://1103214.myubam.com/p/5579/farm-picture-puzzle-book

Big Red Barn https://www.amazon.com/Big-Barn-Margaret-Wise-Brown/dp/0694006246/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1504969650&sr=8-1&keywords=big+red+barn+by+margaret+wise+brown

Here’s links to products we used this week

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FDALPQ/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TYO5W8I/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Next week is bug week- check back on Saturday to see how we did!