...a Hope & a Future..: Preschool with Might Math Power

Weeks of May 23 – 30th

Verse: God is truthful. John 3:33

Theme: Garden

We have wrapped up our school for this year. We may do a few activities here and there, but time is coming short to when JP will be deploying…and between then and now we have quite a bit of company coming into town. But here is what we did the last couple weeks of May.

Theme

We finished up a few activities of our garden theme from here. Along with our garden theme we read the books “Flower Garden” by Eve Bunting and “Jack’s Garden” by Henry Cole.

The idea for this flower craft came from here.

I got the idea for having Olivia grow her own grass from here. She had a lot of fun gathering the rocks, putting in the dirt, and spreading the seed, but it was very difficult to get her to water it every day…it grew anyways and she got to even trim it down (probably her favorite part). Then about a week later we visited Aunt Lyn and Uncle Glen where she got to dig up worms to put into her newly grown grass…that was actually her favorite part!

Reading

We did a few printables from You Can Read…

…and then Olivia took some time to read to Isaiah.

Math

Building “stairs” on her Abacus. This activity goes along with our RightStart Mathematics curricuulum.

Dot-to-Dot to 100. I have to admit this is a task better for me to step away from. I never realized how much of a perfectionist I can be, but it’s really difficult for me to watch while her pen curly-ques around looking for the next number (o:

We talked a lot about quadrilaterals, rectangles, squares, and even perpendicular and parallel with our RightStart Mathematics. I was really impressed that a 5 year old could keep up no problem with the big math words…but, I think I am going to incorporate lots of review games over the summer so we don’t have to start all over again the Fall.

I pulled out a shapes/pattern activity from our McRuffy curriculum. We’re not consistently using this one, but every once in a while she seems to need something a little different.

We have also started reading some Living Math books. She loves to read, so this was a perfect way to reinforce some of the math ideas we have been working on. I have been getting ideas from here. This week we read about patterns in “What’s Next, Nina?” by Sue Kassirer and about time in “It’s About Time, Max!” by Kitty Richards.

Other

Learning to tie her shoes…oh what agony it was for her…she would fall over and pretend like she couldn’t get up, she would complain that she just couldn’t do it, she would ask me to just do it for her…but when she finally got around to trying it she got all the way to the final step by herself!!!

Puzzle time…the kids love puzzles…

Olivia loves, loves dinosaurs, and I have a great science unit about dinosaurs planned for the Fall. But during one of her computer game times she came across the craft for a diorama. Of course it was Nick Jr. from the show Dino Dan. Once I printed it out she went to town coloring, cutting, and pasting. I was so proud of her! I tried to find the link to the craft, but I think she had to play one of the Dino Dan games…not sure which one…and then this was the “reward” at the end.

Tiny Tot

One night…really, really late when Isaiah was not tired…he “lined” up all his Noah’s Ark animals. It had JP and I almost rolling on the floor laughing it was so cute. He would very gently and very carefully place an animal and then break out into dance laughing…over and over again for each animal.

Isaiah is in a stacking phase. Here I caught him after he had snatched some yogurt containers from the grocery bags while I was unloading. He spent probably 10 minutes stacking these yogurt cups in various locations around the apartment until I decided it was time to get them refrigerated. His other favorite thing to stack is the coffee creamers at IHop during our weekly family outing there (where Olivia always gets the Silly Face pancake…you know, the chocolate chip pancakes that are more like dessert). But he will try and stack everything!

Isaiah also loves putting things into containers and taking them out. So one day I gave him matching bowls (okay…the red, yellow, and blue ones are half of giant plastic Easter eggs) and counting bears. He didn’t get the matching part, but it kept him busy moving the counting bears from bowl to bowl.