My Father's World - Creation Week 2

This week we finished up our introductory creation unit.  It was quite a short week with a public holiday Monday, our usual homeschool group on Wednesday and then visitors on Friday.  So only 2 days to finish up days 5, 6 and 7!!

DAY 5
On day 5, God made the fish of the sea and the birds of the air.

Our favourite activity to day was making nutella and cornflake bird feeders for our magpie friends.  We covered toilet rolls with nutella and then rolled them in crushed cornflakes and hung them outside in the trees.  Samuel decided he wanted to try and hand feed the magpies and spent quite a while sitting on the ground holding onto his feeder while 3 or 4 magpies took it in turns to come and take some of the food.  He was so excited!

After watching him do this for a while I though I would see if Nathanael wanted to join us.  Turns out he decided he quite liked the taste of the bird feeder and had licked his clean!!  Oh well, that was morning tea taken care of!

Day 5 also saw the fish being created so we did some crayon resist pictures.  the night before I drew some underwater scenes in white crayon and then had the boys paint over them with blue dye.  They were quite amazed to see the picture appearing as they painted.  After they finished painting we glued some fish onto their oceans.

For our sensory play today I made an ocean box with coloured gelatin fish, and starfish.  Both boys loved this and spent close to an hour scooping, pouring and squishing until we were left with a gooey, soggy gelatin mess!!

DAY 6 and DAY 7

On day 6, God made the land animals and man.  On day 7, God rested.

After a really busy week we didn't have much time to do much school work so our activity for day 6 was nice and simple.  I had some large animal stickers so we simply stuck them onto a piece of page.  Fast, simple but still fun for little ones!!  For Adam and Eve we used our foam "paper dolls" and made one man and one woman.

For day 7 we made a picture of a bed!!  We then played some games with our creation timeline and matching pictures of what was made each day.

We had a fun two weeks reviewing the creation story and are really looking forward to beginning the first of our unit studies next week!

Linking up at Homeschool Creations Preschool and Kindergarten community link up. 

My Father's World - Creation Week 1

So it has been a while since I have posted anything we've done.  I had great plans for this year, but things have not quite gone as planned!  We have had a rocky start to the year with family, business and housing all turning our lives upside down.  We have only gotten through by the grace of God and the love and generosity of our brothers and sisters in Christ.  We are not through it yet but life and school must go on!  Now that we are starting to swim again, instead of drowning we have been able to get some routine back in our days and started back up with our school work.

I have started using a new curriculum with Samuel and Nathanael.  We are using My Father's World Kindergarten (pre-primary for Australia) We looooove, looooove, looooove all the My Father's World levels we have used so far but this is the first time I have used their K one.  So far it looks just perfect for Samuel.  It is very Charlotte Mason in its style so is a very gentle approach to learning that doesn't push academics at this young age.  It feels like it will be just the right speed for my special little boy.  Nathanael will join us for the Bible and Science parts of the program  and I will work just with Samuel on the Maths/language parts.

The first two weeks of the curriculum is an overview of the creation story before launching into individual units for each letter and learning to read.  Here is a look at what we did this week.

CREATION - WEEK 1

DAY 1
On day 1, God made day and night.

We started off reading the creation story focusing on Day1.  After reading it we found the darkest room we could and took turns saying, "God said, Let there be light!" and turning the torch on to make light.  It  is amazing how much fun something so simple can be for a 5 year old and a 2 year old.  They would've spent all day doing that if I let them.

We also practiced our cutting skills but cutting out the number 1 for our creation wall poster.  Nathanael made a "light and dark" collage while Samuel and I reviewed our letters and numbers and then we made  our day and night painting for their creation booklet.

We also started journal writing.  Samuel drew a picture and dictated a story to me about my birthday and Nathanael drew a duck and a triangle!!

DAY 2

On day 2 God separated the waters below and the waters above. 

We painted and cut our our number 2 while I read the creation story again and then we made rain clouds.  We used a jar of water with shaving cream clouds on top.  Then the boys took turns dropping blue water onto the cloud until it started raining into the jar.  This experiments looked really cool and even the big kids had to get in on the action and have a turn.

After that the boys painted clouds with fluffy shaving cream paint.  For our creation booklet page they painted the ocean and stuck on cotton wool for the clouds in the sky.

When we were done we went outside cloud spotting.

DAY 3

On day 3 God created dry land and the trees and plants.  

After reading our story and colouring and cutting our number for the creation wall poster we went outside and collected some leaves and twigs.  We used some playdoh and shaped it into a continent and put it in the middle of our "sea" of food colouring and the planted all of the leaves we had collected.

Our creation book page involved lots and cutting and gluing of water, land and trees.

DAY 4

On day 4, God made the sun, moon and stars.

Nathanael is space mad at the moment, so this was by far his favourite day.  After reading our story and reviewing all the things God had made so far we looked at some of our space books and talked about all things space.

Together we made some sparkly space slime to which we added our astronauts and rockets.  Not exactly creation but lots of fun!!  The boys played with this for over 45 mins and probably would've spent longer but I left the glitter down and when I left to go and work with the older kids, Nathanael took the lid off and dumped the whole jar onto the slime.  Needless to say the slime was packed away after that!!

Once the glitter and the boys were cleaned up we made our creation booklet page by painting on side of the paper black and sprinkling on some of the glitter off the floor for stars, sticking on a moon and drawing a sun on the other side of the paper.

All up we had a great first week back and I am really looking forward to finishing off our creation unit next week!

Linking up at Homeschool Creations preschool and kindergarten community

Geography Corner

So Christmas is over and we are nearly through the January birthdays so I am in planning mode!  I looove planning for the new school year and rearranging our learning space.  I think it must be the teacher in me, I was always a planner!!

We will have a big focus on geography this year as my kids are slightly geography obsessed.  So it made sense to set up our geography area first. This set up is mostly for Liam and Samuel.  Liana does geography at our Home school group and is way beyond this.  She can pretty much locate most of the 196 countries and know about 50% of their flags too.

We have a subscription to Little Passports this year.  We will be receiving the World Edition for Liam and the Early Explorers for Samuel.  Each month I will change the table to focus on the continent that matches our Little Passports country.  I plan on using a lot of the ideas from Living Montessori Now for Sam as well as some extension activities for Liam.

The first month is a general introduction, so our table is focusing on the continents and oceans.

Here is a look at our table

We have our World map to track Sam and Sofia (from Little Passports) as they travel around the world, Our Montessori inspired continent 3-part cards,  our Little Passport suitcases, A world pin map - one side is colour coded for easy matching and the other side is plain to make it a bit harder.

Then we have our felt continents map complete with labels for the continents and oceans.  Through the year we will keep adding things to this map like landmarks, animals and flags for the children to locate on the correct continent.

So there you have it, our geography corner.  Next on the list is our science corner!

Truth in the Tinsel - Week 1

We had great plans for our first week of Christmas activities and then we were hit with a gastro bug on Sunday night.  One by one we fell, and by the end of the week Nathanael was the only one left joining in the activities.  So  we didn't even begin most of the activities and we got a bit  behind with our Truth in the Tinsel ornaments but Nathanael and I had a catch up on the weekend so we are ready to go again Monday morning!

One of the plans we had was to introduce our Blessing Buddies.  I stole this idea from Ang at Home.  Unfortunately we didn't get around to actually doing any of the acts of Kindness we had planned due to being house bound and after the first two days of hiding them I kind of ran out of steam. So we have put this idea back on the shelf to try again next year.  Sam and Nathanael did enjoy finding them on those two days though!

Day 1 - Candle

The first TinT activity was making a candle and talking about Jesus as the light of the world.

Day 2 - Crown

The next day we talked about Jesus as king and made some crowns to hang on our tee pee.

Day 3 - Zechariah

Day three we read the story of Zechariah and Elizabeth and made a Zechariah head.  Nathanael was quite pleased with his finished product!!

Samuel decided to paint a picture of Zechariah instead of making the ornament and Nathanael decided to join him.

Then we checked out the Nativity sensory box, which I discovered is a really bad idea to have out when I don't feel up to supervising.  We spent today vacuuming up the peas and beans that have been carted around the house all week when I was too sick to care!!!

Day 4 - Angel

Today we read all about the angel Gabriel and Nathanael made a paper plate angel.  Poor Liana and Liam were both sick in bed by now and didn't join in any of the activities except on the first day  :(

Samuel decided against the craft again ( he really isn't that interested in making crafts, unlike his brothers and sister) and instead decided to paint a swamp monster!!  All the while loudly singing Christmas carols as shown in the first picture!!

Day 5 and 6

We were all out of action and spent the days watching Christmas movies and generally just doing as little as possible!!

Nathanael and Liam managed to get in some playdough time with our sparkly playdough and that was as Christmassy as it got!!!

Day 7

Nathanael was happy to play catch up today and had a great time finishing off the last three ornaments of the week with mum all to himself!!

First we read Mary's story and made a Mary paper doll.

Then we got out the water colours and Nathanael painted Mary and Elizabeth while I read the story to him

And finally, we read Mary's song and decorated a CD with glitter glue and sparkles.

Our Truth in the Tinsel tee pee at the end of a very long week.  Hopefully we will all be back on our feet this week and all of the children will get to join in some fun Christmas activities before we go away!!