Loads of Learning in the Deep Blue Sea

Have you noticed a few changes I've made to the blog?  If you know me, you know I love digital scrapbooking/family history preservation and one of my favorite online places for kits and classes is Jessica Sprague.com.  She is currently have a sale on all of her online classes through the end of the month (60% off and you get lifetime access, as opposed to some sites where you have to keep paying a membership to access content).  I decided to take her Bloom Your Blog class and spiff up my run-of-the-mill Blogger site.  What do you think?  The header paper and cute little clipart are by one of my favorite designers, Carina Gardner.  By the way, I'm just putting this out there because I really love her site, not because I get any kickbacks, although that would be super cool...

Back to school stuff.  We were happy to have one of our friends back with us on Wednesday, although Miss M was running a slight temperature which kept our other friend understandably at bay.  Next week should (hopefully) see everyone well and learning more math, science and literacy skills as we talk about cool sea critters.

For math this week, we introduced the number 8 and talked about octopi and their eight tentacles.  I did not know they used two as legs to push off of things and the other six as arms but I guess it makes sense.  See, even the big people can learn new things from this curriculum.  We also played a fun game with a die and bingo markers that had them counting a lot to fill up our octopus with all its suckers.  We had to do a little training on how a game works (Miss M kept trying to give her bingo chips to her friend, which was nice sharing but not exactly part of the game).  When Littlest gets past the stage of putting everything (and I mean everything!) in her mouth, this would be a fun game to be able to have available for Miss M to play on her own to practice counting but for now it does require supervision.

The kids had a great time cutting, coloring and counting stickers for their octopus windsocks.  I showed them the theme day photo of the octopus and its suckers (which prompted a discussion of how these suckers are different than the ones they got at Easter).  I got some clam shells out of the manipulative set for the month and showed them how an octopus would use its suckers to open the shell and slurp out the insides.  If you thought teaching your child science meant having to do messy, potentially dangerous experiments and introducing complicated topics, it's not true.  Talking about how the world works is science.  Introducing animals and their behaviors is science.  Pretending to be an octopus opening a clam shell for dinner is science (when you're 3).  Science doesn't have to be intimidating.

For literacy, we introduced the sight words WHAT, AM, and I, then read the cute included book "What Am I?".  It was repetitious (perfect for teaching littles), stimulated the use of prediction and fun.  At the end, they got to draw their own ocean animals and read the books to daddies later that night.

We also got caught up in our monthly journals.  I really love this part of the curriculum.  It is a great way to review the skills that are introduced and gives the child something they can look back on later.  We are doing very simple journals right now, mostly practicing pre-writing skills, color identification and shapes but we will be adding in more dictation and sentence "writing" in the coming months.