Mommys Monkeys: Kindergarten Month 1

Kindergarten- Month 1

In our bible time we have been reading through our "101 Favorite Stories from the Bible". The kids and I usually read this during breakfast. Each story is a page long with 3 questions at the bottom. Initially, I was going to skip the question BUT they love them. They are pretty basic "if you were listening then you should be able to answer them" kind of questions. We also have been learning about attentiveness. My kids have serious issues with pay attention. Hannah and Ethan learned that Attentiveness mean "I listen with my eyes, my ears, and my heart".

Hannah and Ethan drive me crazy with their ability to tune me out, so we are focusing on this for a little while. I have a bunch of activities planned but we have only one we have done so far. We played the items on a tray party game. You put a bunch of objects on the tray and have the kids try to remember everything on the tray. Then you remove one item when they aren't looking and they have to guess what's missing. Paying attention takes active work.

Language Arts:

We have been reading quite a bit. These are our Sonlight re-alouds for the last month. The top one "Uncle Wiggily`s Story Book" has been a lot of fun. It tells the adventures of rabbit. We have also been reading a book a week with Ben and doing some activities with him.

Hannah and Ethan continue working on their handwriting. They have had a lot of fun with the "wet-dry-try" method. This is a fun way to encourage proper stroke order and formation.

Ethan especially enjoys learning the letters this way.

After the chalkboard work they do they matching page in their workbook.

They have also been working on some sight words.

Most of our language arts work is with All About Reading. It's a pretty hands on approach to phonics, and reading.

Matching words to pictures.

We use magnet letters to build words.

Rhyming practice.

I've been a little worried that we would be moving too quickly for Ethan but he just chugs along with whatever Hannah is doing. Her fluency is obviously a little better than his but he sounds out better. Regardless, I remind each of them often that they aren't competing against other.

Math:

Learning greater than/less than/and equal too

Working out a problem together.

They LOVE logic riddles. Here they are working on making as many different combinations of red and blue circles with no more than 3 in a group.

Of course we do lots of counting.

They counted out 10 groups of ten to make a 100 things picture.

Social Studies: This year we are adding in Social Studies (mostly just geography). Learning about Canada and where we live in relationship to other places.

Map and globe work.

Learning all about directions and maps.

Health and Careers: I only call it "Health and Careers" because I need to report to Hannah's teacher what we do for this each week. In my mind I called it life and I don't separate it out as a subject.

They have been learning about different jobs in the community. They have learned about " The mayor, fishermen, builders, school teachers and this past week we did bakers.

A natural extension was baking our own bread.

We also spend some time talking about dental care and health. Here they did a picture sort on good food for your teeth and bad food.

Flossing fun with Lego, play dough, and yarn.

Science: I think we have the most fun (I know I do) with Science. Both Hannah and Ethan enjoy learning all sorts of random things. We often follow a tangent just to see where it leads us. I think the highlights for this month have been the experiments we have done with leaves.

Seeing if we could get a sieve to hold water if we lined it with leaves.

It did a little but not a lot.

Tin Foil worked better.

Cutting up leaves into little bits and pieces.

Mixing the leaves with rubbing alcohol and mashing it with the back of a knife.

Then we put a piece of coffee filter into it and watched the colors separate out. This was fascinating and if your interested have a look here a full description on Chlorophyll chromatography. The kids thought it was neat to see that a leaf that looks green also has other colors inside it.

Art:

This hand-print painting was fun.