Chinese New Year

We read these two books "Max celebrates Chinese New Year" by and " This next New Year"  by Janet S. wong and R really Max celebrates chinese new year. And just like Groundhog Day I couldn't get the other books in time.

We had made chinese lantern last year so we made this dragon from FamilyFun website.R really liked the dragon and wanted to make some more again.

Groundhog Day

I forgot to reserve and get the books for Groundhog Day. So I could get only this book "Groundhog Day Book of Facts and Fun" by Wendie C. Old.

We colored a groundhog picture and made him pop up from a cup.

Letter S - S for Snowman

We did many Letter S activities from Confessions of a homeschooler, a fabulous site.


1. Letter S writing- Since R has been writing both uppercase and lowercase letters, so he practised the letter on a traced line.

2. Numbers and counting - I got the snowman numbers from Confessions of a homeschooler and I asked R to put that many marshmallows under the snowman.

3. Dot to Dot -

4. Letter S poking - I wrote the letter S on a paper and asked R to poke with a tooth pick If you look up through the light, you can see the holes.

5. Snowman lacing-

6. Size sequencing - Arrange the snowmen in the order of their size

7. Letter S hunt - Circle all the letters S on the page.

 

8. Pattern making - To practice pattern making, I made some patterns with the erasers  and asked R to copy and make the same as mine. He did a pretty awesome job with it 

9. Letter S scavenger hunt - We had sheep, spoon, soda and socks

Arctic Waters

We read "In Arctic Waters" by Laura Crawford and Ben Hodson,

and also "What lives in the Arctic?" by Oona Gaarder-Juntti.

We made a penguin shape craft. I had cut the penguin body shape, flippers(wings) from the black construction paper, chest from white construction paper, beak and feet from orange construction paper.This was pretty much an independent task for R.


An eskimo craft for which I had cut the jacket and pants from blue construction paper, his jacket hood from coffee filter, face from a brown construction paper. We glued cotton on the jackets and pants for the fur.

We didn't get the time to do the Igloo craft by using cut styrofoam ball and marshmallows. Also, I wanted to do the Iceberg activity from here.

However, inspired from My Montessori Journey, we also made a book of arctic animals. I had downloaded pictures of arctic animals form the internet. R was wasked to cut and color and paste them on the paglets to form a book. The animals which we used in the book were polar bear, walrus, seal, arctic fox, aractic hare, beluga whale and arctic fox. R also wrote the names of the various arctic animals underneath their pictures. This was good writing practice for him.

We also did a Polar maze as they are good for fine motor skills, which I got from 2 Teaching Mommies. They have lots of printables for each theme. I also liked their footprints matching printable. Hopefully we shall be doing it next year.

Also, the arctic tub of polar animals would be a great add to this unit. 

Snowflakes, snowflakes and snowflakes

We read many winter books. Some of them are

The First Day of Winter by Denise Fleming
Snip Snap snow by Nacy Poydar

We made many snowflakes in different ways. First was from coffee filters. First fold the coffee filters in triangle shape and then cut many traingles. Open it apart and then decorate with glitter and color. We hung them later on a string.

We made snowflakes from painters tape. We taped in snowflake on the paper . R colored blue and purple and with some glitter. After drying, we peeled off the tape , ta da they were so beautiful.

This activity was inspired from makinglearningfun.com. I had cut some sbowflake patterns from the site. I also cut different shapes like hexagon, circle, traingle and oval from felt.
By using blue felt as the background, R has to copy the same patterns as in the cards using the felt pieces.

We also freezed food color and had fun apinting with them. The colors came out beautiful.

And we also enjoyed bike riding when the weather permits.