Before FIAR - Corduroy

Preamble:
We'll be rowing four bear books in a row so I can keep out most of the Montessori work out for the month and rotate in new works.  Corduroy, We're Going on a Bear Hunt, Blueberries for Sal (there's a farm where we can go blueberry picking right down the street!), Jesse Bear, What Will you Wear, and finally Goodnight Moon (which has the story of the Three Little Bears as part of it).  Goodnight Moon will transition us out of the bear theme and into the moon theme.  We may row some books outside of the FIAR book list to extend the moon theme. Of course, we may be tired of bears by then, so we may have to change course, but I keep finding more and more fun stuff for bears!

 Here is our bear habitat sensory bin. 

 Lisa counted all the coins in her piggy bank.  J-jo gets to put all his coins IN his piggy bank.

Bear sorted all her coins and then counted them with my help.

 Above you can see various Montessori trays to go with Corduroy. 

From top right clockwise: coins in the piggy bank, small, medium, and large bears (J-jo does this work with me and I simply ask him to cuddle, kiss, tickle, pass me, etc one of the sizes), buttons in a box for sorting, counting or making patterns, basket of pairs of matching textured fabric with a blindfold, coin sorting, and the bear habitat sensory bin.

 French: animal puzzles.  This was mostly J-jo's work.

 Corduroy inspired preposition presentation and work for Bear.  J-jo and I also played with this minus the grammar symbols and preposition cards.  I would ask him to put the bear on the bag, in the bag, under the bag, etc.  He loved it.

 Button patterns and the animal classification cards for Corduroy from Homeschool Share.

Rolling the die and finding the right colored bear card(from abcteach)  We also played memory with these bears.

And of course, if I had thought it out right, I would have coordinated the button work we did to be done the same week as Corduroy!

To finish off the week we watched the Corduroy movie on YouTube.  There are two parts.  Here is the link to the first part.  It was neat to talk about what was the same and different as the book.

Here are some other blogs with Corduroy activities:
Delightful Learning
Homeschool Blogger
My Pursuit of

and Mrs. Kilburn's Kiddos has lots of links for bears.

Linked to Tot School at 1+1+1=1; Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations; Mom 2 lil Posh Divas; Beneath the Rowan Tree and the Weekly Wrap-up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

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Corduroy inspired Montessori Grammar Work

Usually, the Montessori presentation for prepositions is done with a silk flower and a vase; however, since we have been rowing Corduroy this week for J-jo, I changed up the presentation a bit and used a small teddy bear and a tiny shopping bag.

 I followed the presentation from a file called "The Primary Grammar Cabinet" by Josh Galarza but presently I can't find a link for it.  He presents a story for each symbol explaining why the symbol is what it is.  The stories help both Bear and I remember which symbol is which.  The article triangles should really be lighter blue than the adjective triangle, but I didn't have any light blue in my stash of foam.

 After Bear has put the teddy in/on/under etc the bag, she pulls out the grammar symbols.  I made these from foam sheets, just eyeballing it, no patterns.  We use these in conjunction with the grammar symbol guide I printed from here to help us remember which symbol is for what part of speech.  Bear is quite good at simple sentence analysis.

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Five in a Row - Gramma's Walk

A few weeks back we rowed Gramma's Walk, which means we read it every day and then did activities to go with it.  This book was perfect to row at the same time as an ocean unit.  Many of the activities you will have seen in these posts.

One thing I struggle with with the Five in a Row and Before Five in a Row books is the lapbook portion.  I am trying to find a way to make these more Montessori friendly - something to leave out on the shelf for self exploration so that the activities can be more accessible to J-jo who can't participate much in lapbooks. I didn't achieve this so much with Gramma's Walk, but I've been working on it for the other books we've been rowing.

Gramma's Walk is the story of a boy and his grandmother who is in a wheelchair and how they use their imagination to take a walk along the seashore.  Using their five senses, they describe their walk and it feels like you are right there, experiencing it all.

We played memory with some animal track cards.

I also found this match the tracks to the animal online game and some other matching cards.  Here are the matching cards I printed out (scroll down a bit) for our memory game.

We did a survey of how many handicapped parking spaces were at our Walmart, library, and Publix and then graphed it (this idea came from Sowing 3 Seeds).  We talked about how a big store might need more of those spaces than a small store or building.

We played in the sand.

We acted out the story a lot.  Retelling stories through play-acting is one of Bear's favorite things to do.

We colored sandpaper.

 We made a barnacle (I made it - file from homeschoolshare.com)

 J-jo matched shells to shell outlines. (The only way to get him to do certain work is to offer it to him at snack time.)

We did some shoreline experiments (it was a flop).  Basically, the different pans represented different types of shorelines and walking with them was supposed to show displacement of water and you could see which type of shoreline might have the most weathering from wave action.  We couldn't tell anything but it was fun to do on a hot day.

We even went on a ferryboat on our first day in Quebec and saw a buoy too!

(The kids are hugging their cousin.)

If you do BFIAR or FIAR and have rowed Gramma's Walk, please feel free to leave a link in the comments.

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A Photo Canvas to Admire

 I really enjoy photographing my children with my Canon EOS.  I've slowly been replacing all our framed wedding photos with those of Bear and J-jo.  One thing I had never tried was turning one of our photos into a canvas print.  When EasyCanvasPrints.com offered me a canvas, I jumped at the chance.

I love our canvas.  I love seeing the children smile at me all the time, being loving with each other.  When I'm feeling discouraged by their behavior, I come look at this (and say a quick prayer!) and I feel much better. 

Our canvas was incredibly easy to create and took only 4 steps.  Delivery was fast with the canvas well wrapped for protection during shipping.  The print is an 8x10.  It looks great and I am completely satisfied with the quality.  I actually zoomed and cropped the photo as part of my 4 steps in creating the canvas and was really worried that zooming so much would affect the quality, but it didn't.

As you can see, 8x10 is quite small.  I do recommend going bigger with a canvas and the gallery thickness (I went for regular).  It just looks more impressive.  If I do order another canvas print later, I also want to try something more creative like what Maureen did at Spell Outloud.  I really love her scrapbook page canvas.

Disclaimer: I received a free 8x10 canvas from EasyCanvasPrints.com in exchange for this review; however, the opinions expressed are my own.  Also, the Amazon link is an affiliate link.  

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The Button Box - Sun Prints

Bear and J-jo really love the book The Button Box.

We did some fun button activities to follow the book, like threading buttons, sorting buttons, carrying buttons around everywhere (for Mommy to find strewed all over the house).  We also glued buttons to make collages.

But a really fun thing we did with the buttons is make sun prints on special sun printing paper I bought with a coupon at JoAnns a long time ago.

 The sun turns the paper all white, then you "develop" the print in water to prevent the paper from being further exposed.

You may be able to do this with cheap construction paper, but you would probably have to keep the collage in the sun all day.

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The United States - Montessori Inspired

 Sorry for the lack of posts.  Our summer has been incredibly busy.

We'll be studying the United States this year.  We're memorizing the States and capitals for Classical Conversations.  Bear has bit the bullet and has already memorized them all!  All the credit goes to Kathy Troxel, whose States and Capitals Songs I purchased.  We've been listening to the songs all the time in the car to the point that I'm begging both Bear and J-jo to listen to something else! Even J-jo asks for "Nited Stays" as soon as he sees the car.

I set up our geography shelf with some United States work.

• First, I used 1+1+1=1's (I thought they were Carissa's but I am having a hard time finding them again to include the link) geography flashcards and printed them reduced size (select more to a page on your printer settings).  These small states are perfect for pin pricking, always one of Bear's favorite activities.  Bear puts her finished ones into the baby food jar.
• The States flashcards are form the Target dollar section.  
• I also have the American president flashcards, but need to buy another business card holder to display them.
• There are two US landmarks from the Landmarks Toob.
• Lastly, a Target dollar section lift-the-flaps book of the U.S.A.

The other shelf has 

• an activity book (from the Target Dollar section).  It has dot-to-dots of each state and Bear loves those, as well as a line for practicing writing the names of each state.  She's already half done the book in just one sitting!
• The Scrambled States of America card game.
• our North America box.  I later decided to only take out the postcards and other items that pertained from the States and display those and put away the box.

We'll be watching 1+1+1=1's USA Geography Power Point show too and I am hoping to win a copy of Confessions of a Homeschooler's Road Trip USA to use as well for our study of the USA.

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More Ocean Ideas

I asked Bear what she wanted to learn next and she said she wanted to keep learning about oceans, so here is some of what we did last week that I didn't get time to post last Friday.

We were rowing Gramma's Walk for Five in a Row.  The book went very nicely with our beach and ocean theme. 

This past week we rowed The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.  I'm going to do a separate post about the activities that went specifically with those posts.

Sifting ocean animals out of the rice to match to the cards.  This work was out last month, but adding the practical life twist to it has given it new life.  We tried it with the net-like spoon, and also with just our hands.

I turned this into a French lesson for Bear in which she had to repeat phrases to me.  I would ask (in French) "Did you see a ___________ at the aquarium?" and she would have to answer correctly in a sentence in French.  "Yes, I saw a __________ at the aquarium." Or, "No, I did not see a ________ at the aquarium."  Since she is a highly visual learner, I wrote out the sentences for her on a small white board and it helped a lot in her pronunciation of the words.

Coloring on sandpaper we cut into starfish shapes.  We did this after reading the Let's Read and Find out Science book called Starfish. 

 The printable above came from 2TeachingMommies.  We used our goldfish snack to measure the sea creatures.  J-jo was not into using his snack for anything other than snack.  Bear enjoyed it.

 After reading The Little Island, we made an island in our sandbox.

 Then we made a lake.

 After reading Gramma's Walk (one of our selections for FIAR) we I made this barnacle pop up card.  Barnacles are very interesting.  They swim as larva, then glue their heads down on a rock or a whale and stay stuck the rest of their lives.

 We painted with ice cubes. Then cut the paper out using a seahorse template from Making Learning Fun.  I forgot to take photos of those seahorses.  That was to go with the book Mr. Seahorse by Eric Carle.

 Even our 4th of July activities were kind of sea themed as we spooned and poured and tweezed star beads onto sea star bath things. 

This post linked to

This post linked to stART

Read.Explore.Learn

and  Kids Get Crafty

Tot school,  Preschool Corner., Weekly Wrap-up

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Bear's Magic Head

Bear: Mommy, do you have a magic head that lets you hear things?


Me: Umm.  What do you mean, "let's you hear things"?


Bear: Like in the book.  I can hear the words.  I just turn on my magic head (she puts her hand under her hair by the nape of her head and pushes) right here and then I can hear the book in my head.  Can you do that?


Me: (Smiling) Yes! You mean silent reading. Reading in your head.  I can do that.  You can do that?


Bear: Yes, Mommy.  Of course.  I have a magic head.


Later....


Bear: Mommy, I need to turn my magic head off when I'm not using it or it might run out of batteries.  

I love it when she comes up with these really neat ways to describe things.  I was unaware that she had figured out how to read silently.  Apparently she's been doing that for a while now. And I never even realized:)

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Godly Play - Tower of Babel

Before the story of Abram and Sarai comes the story of The Tower of Babel.  While J-jo loves our Noah's Ark play set, Bear loves our Tower of Babel set. I printed out Our Country Road's "script" and Bear reads it as she retells the story (although now she no longer needs the script).  Our set is very similar to hers.  It's very simple and I think the simplicity is what draws Bear's attention.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of her playing with it, because I was usually busy retelling Noah's Ark to J-jo.

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Godly Play - Abram and Sarai - the Great Family

In my search for Abram and Sarai Godly Play ideas, I came upon these three great resources:

First, a YouTube video of the entire lesson.
Second, Judy Jower's flickr photo of her set.  I love how she just gathers things that work together.
Third, the script for the lesson of The Great Family.

Hope you find these helpful.  I'm off to gather a desert, a piece of blue felt, rocks, and Abram and Sarai.

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