Pretzel Day - April 26th

Today we celebrated pretzel day.  Since we usually have a morning snack around the time we are doing "home school" we just made today's snack pretzels.  With stick pretzels we did math.  We began by counting 20 pretzels out of the bag (making sure not to skip 15!).  Then we used the pretzels to do manipulative addition and subtracting (ie make piles for 3+4 and count them to get 7).  You could also do multiplication. 

This ended up going a step further as it is a tradition in our house to serve stick pretzels with mini-marshmellows (they like to stick them onto the ends of the pretzels).  My three year old, tore his marmellows into pieces so he could have "more".  This lead into a good discussion about fractions.  I broke one pretzel in half and laid it along side a whole pretzel.  We talked about how two haves could be added together to make one whole.  You could do higher fractions if you are at that level. 

We also used the pretzels to make letters.  When it was time for writing we focused on the "stick" letters that he had made with the pretzels and how to properly form them when writing.  This could be extended to making words. 

A simple day with a snack I already had on hand - just what we needed.

Pencil Day - March 30th

We have been trying to come up with ways to encourage writing. As parents we have been modeling writing more and encouraging dictation of stories to us that we write on artwork. We still needed a way to get our oldest to pick up a pencil himself. Then I learned that on March 30th the first pencil with an eraser was patentened.

So the week before we went to Walmart and bought neat pencils with erasers. Ours happened to be glittered. Personalized pencils would be great for children with unique names or spellings.  Then on the day before Pencil Day we sharpened all the pencils in preparation.

On Pencil Day we took some of the pencils to his neighbor friends and wished them a "Happy Pencil Day". Upon returning home we took our paper and new pencils and drew pictures. The boys were very excited to use their new, special pencils.  When we were finished we put the pencils in a prominate location so they can be seen.  The special pencils have been requested  several times for school and artwork.  Our oldest has learned he likes to sit at the table and draw or write while I am making dinner.

A simple celebration brought about lasting results.

da Vinci Day - April 15

Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15th.  We decided to celebrate the day by reading out him in the encyclopdia. I knew he had painted the Mona Lisa but learned some of the other things he did as well and the day grew from there.
The picture above is a self-portrait that da Vinci had done.  It was a beautiful day so we took the sidewalk chalk outside and did self-portraits of our own. Then we washed the cars (a bonus for me) and washed our drawings away.  Inside we continued to be artists as we did some painting of whatever they wanted to paint.

Another interest of da Vinci's was flight.  He made sketches of parachutes and even his idea for a helicopter.  After learning that we made tissue paper parachutes and talked about gravity for our science lesson.  Older children could expand this into learning about Newton as well.
It was good to talk about how you can do lots of different things like da Vinci did and learn about anything that seems interesting to you at the moment.

St. Patrick's Day - EE (long e)

On St. Patrick's Day we learned about the long e sound of double e (ee). We started with the words green and three (for three leaf clovers). This was a good long vowel sound to work on because it only makes one sound.

I also added some number and color sight words to his flash cards building from green and three: one, two, three, four, red, black, green, pink, yellow, and blue. I tried to use color words that are simple short vowel but added a few of his favorites as well. I did two sets of cards. To start the week I used cards that also had pictures to give him hints and then switched to plain cards with just the words by the end of the week.

I also followed up with having him read the color/number words in the directions of the other projects we did. Another fun activity that I found was a pot-of-god coloring page with easy sight words written on the gold pieces. They do them with upper or lower case letters as well if that is where you are at. You could color the pieces as the word was read correctly or it would be even better with gold stickers.

This worksheet was also a review of colors as well as ordinals.

And, of course, we had green waffles (food coloring) for dinner. Yum!