Wednesday, November 03, 2010

L is for Leaf

"I will live and grow in Jesus"

This week (okay, week and a half) we learned all about the letter L and Leaves. Who knew there was so much to learn about leaves! We learned the different names of them, what their function is, how they can not live apart from the tree (just like we can not live and flourish apart from God) and many more things.

We made a chart and charted the different colors of leaves that we collected. We also sorted our leaves by sizes and shapes.



We did leaf rubbing. That was fun because while we were doing it Gavin said,
"This is awesome, MOM!" I loved that moment.

We made a book of leaves that we traced and named.

We painted leaf outlines.

We made a stained glass leaf picture - also very cool!


We read the book "A tree is nice" and Gavin made his own book retelling the story.

We also ramped up our math this week. I had Gavin doing some worksheets from mathisfun.com. He seems to really enjoy math and learning about numbers.

We preserved some leaves.

We had a great object lesson all week with a plant that we took care of. We ripped one leaf off of the plant to demonstrate how it can not live apart from the plant, just as we can not live apart from God. We sang, "Read your Bible pray every day". Charlotte and Gavin have been singing it together a lot this week. It's been SO CUTE to watch them.

We also did our letter worksheets, practiced penmanship (it's getting better) and played lots of games with the alphabet.

We've also been working on our phonics and reading. Reading with Gavin has been a long drawn out process. I feel like we've stopped and started so many times b/c he was just getting so frustrated with it. I was so afraid he was going to hate reading so I never really pushed it. Once we started homeschooling, I started all over again with our book "Teach your child to read in 100 easy lessons." I think we've started and stopped this two or three times. The part that kills me is that the book really works, he just wasn't all that into it. This time around has been different, though. He loves it, he's flying through it and reading GREAT! He is reading the stories in the book pretty quickly, without even having to sound out each letter. He has even started reading street signs and really anything he can figure out. It's cute and SO FUN! I finally feel like he's getting it! YAY!!!

Well, that was pretty much our lesson on the letter L and Leaves. I think it was my favorite one so far. Probably because I added so much to the curriculum this week. I felt like I was going a better job of teaching him and he was having more fun, too.

Our next lesson is A, Apple - "If I stay in Jesus, I will have much fruit". I'm not sure when we will be starting it, though. I think we'll be taking a week off after baby gets here!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

AWESOME! Looks like you guys are having SO MUCH FUN! Thanks too for the math website, I'll be checking that out.

Reading has clicked for Chloe in the same way too! I'm so glad we started so long ago as now she's got quite a base of knowledge and is really flourishing in reading. Now I just need to keep at it with her so I keep pushing her forward!

God's grace to you during the next weeks!