It has been incredibly hot here this past week, in fact, it has been of the hottest weeks (if not the hottest week) of the entire summer! As a result, we haven't quite felt up to jumping into our fall theme just yet and decided to continue with our ocean theme, which is okay since I have quite a bit more planned :) We integrated our Ocean Theme into different academic areas, but also did some other work in reading, writing and math...
Reading...
Smiley continues to do a great job with his Hooked On Phonics Program. We're half-way through the Kindergarten program. This week, we learned the sight words: with, what, has. I printed them on paper and Smiley decorated them with candy, his favorite sight word activity ;)
(I took the picture before we shook the candy off)
We also continue to like a word family pockets. This week we worked on -op and -ox.
Math:
We continued in our Singapore Early Bird Workbook and came to the number writing. Smiley did great with number one, but struggled with number 2. I really don't want to push him too much at this age and handwriting is the area that is most difficult for him... He grasps math concepts easily and the Early Bird book is too easy for him in this regard; however, the writing part is tricky. I saw that numbers are actually covered in our Handwriting Without Tears pre-K program, and decided to just skip the numbers for now and work on it once it is introduced in HWT, so it all happens in a more step-by-step fashion :) I think a math program that is more hands-on will be a better fit at this time, and I am looking into purchasing some montessori manipulatives for Smiley... In the meantime, we're doing our own hands-on math activities, here with sea snails and shells :)
Writing:
As I mentioned, handwriting is the most difficult area for Smiley, so we are focusing a lot on fun fine motor activities, and keeping the worksheet activities to a minimum for now.
We had lots of fun making a sea urchin from play though and spaghetti, also incorporating pieces of a real sea urchin and a glass eye :) Smiley adored this activity and spent about an hour playing...
We also continued to work on our Handwriting Without Tears program, which we both really enjoy. Smiley built a mat man with the wooden letter pieces :) He LOVED this!
He also learned how to write the letter L and did really well with it.
we did some extra practice in shaving cream, which, of course, was a big hit.
Hours upon hours have been spent playing Legos this week. The boy is obsessed ;)
Science:
We learned why it is easier to float in salt water than fresh water. Read more about
our experiment here.
We continued to learn our daily ocean facts during calendar time. You can find Carisa's awesome
Calendar Connection cards here.
We read tons of books about animals and looked at our ocean posters daily (which was part of an ocean book that we got from costco a couple of weeks ago).
We spent lots of time playing with sea shells....
We spent lots of time in the kiddie pool :)
and did a float or sink experiment while we were at it ;)
