Before Five in a Row

One of my most favorite things that I've discovered since last year is the Five in a Row curriculum.  Delightfullearning.blogspot.com was where I first fell in love with this.  Five in a row means that you read the same book five days in a row and do different activities from ideas out of the book.  

We have started with the pre-school level called Before Five in a Row for our three year old.  This is a book compiled/authored by Jane Claire Lambert.  She has taken many classic children's books such as Yellow Ball, Blueberries for Sal, Goodnight Moon and The Snowy Day and came up with many ideas of teaching moments and ways to make memorable experiences with your kids.  Most of these books I can find at the local library.  We learn about countries, foods, animals, colors and bible verses.  All things pre-school.  I always make sure we cover a letter with each book using THIS website.  I also try to make sure we have a field trip, a food lesson, and learn a new poem with each book.  We have taken a lot more field trips this year than last year.  I had a hard time coming up with ideas for field trips last year, but with this curriculum it is easy.  This is not our only curriculum, but some homeschoolers use is as their sole resource.  I also don't do this everyday either.  We only do it on Tuesdays and Thursdays and instead of five days of activities I only come up with four.  I love how it has added so much more variety to our homeschool and the kids look forward to it.

This last week we "rowed" We're Going on a Bear Hunt.  I get a lot of my ideas from THIS Blog-Roll.  Here is just a few of the things that we did.

I'm not musically inclined, but this worked out anyway.  We sat at the piano and made up music to go with each of the obstacles the family in the book goes through on their bear hunt.  We made scary music for the cave and trills for running up and down the stairs and so on.

 I let the girls squerch and squelch in the mud like they did in the book since we have a lot of it around the house lately.

 We taught Aydri (our preschooler) about the letter U.  Kendi practiced her handwriting while Aydri did a do-a-dot from THIS site.

We did a sensory activity with cornstarch and water.  We are also learning about the water cycle and solids, liquids and gases.  I showed Kendi how corn starch can technically be both a solid and a liquid because of surface tension.  They loved this.

We took a field trip to the creek and took off our shoes like they did in the book. We got lucky with a beautiful day for wading.  The girls loved playing in the water.  We have done so many random activities as a family because of these books.  I love it!

We also made our own obstacle coarse and used the words from the book: over, under and through.  We talked about how every family is different and drew diagrams of a lot families we knew.  We watched this video of the author's rendition.

I like to have the kids narrate the story back to me and I type it out so they can add an illustration, but this time we decided to make our own video of the story.  I can't get it to work on youtube, but the kids had a blast with it.

For our food activity we made mud pudding and dipped teddy grahams in it.  While we waited for the pudding to set up we constructed a cave to eat in.  These are the kinds of learning activities that I've always wanted to do with my kids, but had a hard time coming up with them on my own.  This is how I always wanted homeschool to be.  I can't wait to move up through the Five in a Row and then on to Beyond Five in a Row with chapter books.  There are some people with really great ideas out there.  THIS LINK is a good place to start.

First Grade Science

This year for First Grade Science we have chosen to go with R.E.A.L Science Odyssey: Earth and Space.  So far we have done a Weather Unit and started a Water Cycle Unit.  The girls have had a lot of fun with this coarse.  It is the most hands-on curriculum I have found for science.  There is usually one lesson page followed by several labs.  We do about two a week and there are also suggestions for keeping a science journal along the way.

Here are the girls with the rain gauge we made.  We also made a weather vane, an anemometer (to measure wind speed) and recorded the temperature changes for several days.  We have also made rain, clouds and proved that there is water in the air.