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!

M is for Moon

In a little of my spare time I've been searching for blogs specifically about homeschooling. I haven't really found one that I want to keep following. Let me know if you have any suggestions for me.

I have enjoyed reading YOUR blogs about your home school adventures so I decided to start documenting ours!

I am going to skip our first two weeks. I'm not too excited about back tracking and I didn't take too many pictures those weeks. AND, I didn't really add too many extras to it, so it was a little boring. This past week, I really ramped it up and we had more fun!

Our curriculum (My Father's World) focus' on one letter and one main theme per week. This week was the letter M and we learned LOADS about the Moon. We also learned that "I am the light of the world." Just as the moon reflects the sun's light, we reflect the light of Jesus. This has been a fun lesson for us!

This week we:
Made a Space Ship in the living room and read books in it about the moon. We read about Neil Armstrong and Apollo 11.

We measured how high Gavin can jump and then multiplied it by six to see how high he could jump on the moon.

We learned the phases of the moon, made a chart of what of the moon looks like each night (this will continue for another week), we made a book of the phases of the moon and we baked sugar cookies in the shapes of moons.

We made a Space Mobile to hang in the kids room and we made a moon out of marshmallows (we ate quite a few, too!).

We read the book "Little Bear" and made a space helmet to travel to the moon just like a chapter in the book.

We made a get well card for someone we knew was sick so that we could be "the light of the world."

We did three experiments to demonstrate 1.how the moon reflects the suns light 2. to see the distance from the earth to the moon and 3. to see why the moon seems to change shape. For these experiments we used a mirror, a flashlight and playdough. It was pretty fun to see Gavin start to understand how it all works.

I would have loved to plan a trip to the Adler Planetarium here in Chicago, but it didn't quite work out this week. I hope to get there soon, before Gavin forgets we even studied this!

In addition to all of that we also followed our reading plan, did our letter worksheets and worked on our handwriting (Gavin's WORST subject!!!).

Here are some pictures of our cool school - week three! I wish I would have taken more!
I Can't wait to post about week 4!