Starfall Station Day!

        Part of our curriculum is from a company called Starfall. It's probably most well known from more.starfall.com which is a learning site you pay once a year for, and has a ton of learning and games and even more than I realized! We bought different parts of the Kindergarten curriculum they offer, and I really love all of it. They don't offer anything past Kinder curriculum-wise, so after this year it'll just be fun and review, but definitely awesome. Today for their Starfall lesson, we did 4 different stations. The boys have never done stations for school before, so I wasn't sure how well it would go with one of them wanting to do whatever the other is doing. We didn't have that problem at all, so I was really happy and they had a lot of fun! The stations were: starfall computer time, high frequency word matching game, color by high frequency word, and working with sentence strips for reading. They matched A, a, the, at, an, me, and see in the matching game, which is always fun even if its learning... lol. For the coloring they had to color different areas different colors depending on the word that was found there, with four of the words from before. Their favorites by far were the sentence strips and the computer time. I'll talk more about the sentence strips another time, they deserve a whole post of their own. They had unlimited access to anything on that website and they found some really awesome stuff (including shape sorting, books, counting and measurements), and even played on it about 20 minutes after I told them they could be done! If that doesn't prove they're having fun I don't know what does... LOL! :-)

Nature Collage!

         Today one of our activities was to create a nature suncatcher. Well... that'd be great, if I had gotten the clear contact paper I was expecting rather than the white that I have... so instead we made a nature collage today! The boys and I went outside around our house and picked different things from nature; flowers, grass, leaves, pinecones etc. Then we came inside and while they played I cut the middle out of two paper plates and cut a circle of contact paper(sticky paper) and stuck it to the bottom of the paper plate so the sticky side was up. Next I called the boys over, and they started sticking their stuff down to the sticky paper and putting it just how they wanted it. Again, since I didn't have the right paper, I had to improvise some way to stick something on top of the picture so it would all stay, but I couldn't use the white paper I had, so instead we went with clear packaging tape on top. It doesn't look quite as clean as I was hoping thanks to the tape, but they still look pretty good and they boys had fun which is always the most imporant part!!

Here is the link to what I was trying to do...maybe we'll try again soon!

http://handsonaswegrow.com/craft-for-toddlers-nature-collage-suncatcher/

Does it Dissolve? A Science Experiment

         Today we continued week 3, which included a little science experiment. We tested whether different substances in the kitchen dissolved in water or not. First, we watched a little video of a similar experiment to what we would do so they understood what we were doing and why. Then we moved to the table and started trying different things to see if they dissolved. First they predicted what we thought would happen, then we tried it. We used baking soda, white sugar, wheat flour, salt, corn meal, corn starch, white flour, bread crumbs, onion powder and oregano for the substances we were trying to dissolve in the water. The boys did a great job! They correctly predicted almost all of them! They had a lot of fun, and it reminded Wade of our baking soda/lime juice experiment which he wants to do again! Oh boy... lol! :-)

Here's the links to the experiments I used:

http://www.coffeecupsandcrayons.com/does-it-dissolve-kids-science-experiment/

http://www.turtlediary.com/kids-science-experiments/dissolving-experiment.html

Finishing Up Week 2 and Alphabet Book: B

        We are finally all caught up and ready to rock for Week 3 to start tomorrow! We've done great so far and have even completed more than the necessary amount of hours for the work they've done so far which is awesome! This weekend they finished up some number review, made shapes with playdoh, color word matching, read "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" by Laura Joffe Numeroff, and did their Alphabet book page B as well as their journals for the week. They LOVED the book and insist we read it again before it goes back to the library. :-) They seem to really like doing their Alphabet books and had a lot of fun doing that again this week, and they're looking great! :-)  Here we go with Week 3! <3

Fishing Fun!

        Today was Andrew's day off so we decided to go find something fun to do, and all the boys decided we should go fishing! We hadn't gone since we moved, so everybody was pretty excited. We didn't end up catching a ton, but they had a good time, and we ended up getting a pretty good one! It was a good day, and a nice break from school, but back at it tomorrow!

I read a sentence!

           Yesterday we were doing some work in our Starfall curriculum (www.starfall.com), and part of the lesson involved using a cute little book and sentence strips to help read the book. First we went through the sentence strips one by one, and read the sentence. We've been working on the sight words A, is & for, so the only things they couldn't read had pictures. I was actually pretty impressed with how fast they picked it up! It was also pretty great to hear them get excited and say "I read a sentence!!" and "I read a story!!!" :-)

Lime Juice and Baking Soda Experiment!

         I know I'm a few days behind... but it's been... well... interesting around here the last few days. Haha. Wednesday was Andrew's only day off so we had a mid-week weekend day where we went to the splash park near us and they had a blast. Yesterday I didn't get around to posting since I had to deal with a kid in my condo complex stealing a box I had gotten from Origami Owl... yeah... bad evening. ARGH. But...moving on. Before all the madness the last few days, we did a super fun science experiment that turned into an art project (well sort of...haha). Here is the link to where I found this experiment:

http://www.pisforpreschooler.com/home/lime-juice-and-baking-soda-experiment

       I got some little metal pans from the Dollar Tree, 2 for $1. Then I just spread a thin layar of baking soda on the bottom of the pan, and grated chalk onto it in different colored stripes. In retrospect, I think next time maybe I'll stick with 2 colors...after using 4 colors for a few minutes it just kinda turns into a really unattractive green/brown color. After I got that all ready, I called them into the kitchen (by the way you're REALLY gonna want to do this in the kitchen or somewhere fairly easy to clean...) and showed them the pans. Then I used that super handy flavor injector again and used it to squirt the whole pan with lime juice! It fizzed and bubbled and was pretty cool, and once we added enough lime juice, we used it to finger paint! The boys LOVED it and asked me to do it again the next day! I kinda had to go with a no on that one because there was baking soda everywhere! These pictures are totally for fun, and thanks to a constant flow of baking soda falling off of them when dry... not really able to be kept. But it was FUN!