Can't Catch a Break

Sickness hit us again last weekend, so my plans of hosting school were a bit thwarted. Thankfully, Ev lives 2 houses away, so I was able to get her all my plans and supplies on Monday morning. We stayed home and the others participated in school down at her house. This winter has been a DOOZY for us in the sickness department. Here's to hoping for spring's early arrival!

By Thursday, we were on the mend over here so I asked everyone to come to our house for part 2 of week 23. I just felt like it had been AGES since we hosted school, and I had already done all the prep work. It turned out to be a really fun morning. Take a look...

After our normal calendar time, Bible story, and song, I decided to take the Bible story a step further. I assigned "roles" and the kids took turns acting out the story of Jesus calming the storm.

Here you can see our "boat". Noah is playing Jesus taking a nap, and Jack and Eisley are disciples.

 

In comes Addison as the waves and Annabelle as the rain (she has maracas).

 

We switched it up a few times so everyone could have a turn playing the different parts. And the kids did great following my directions. I think we should try to incorporate more role playing in the future.

 

For snack we went fishing like Jesus' disciples. We used a piece of celery with peanut butter on the tip as a fishing pole and tried to catch goldfish. While the kids ate, I read My Q Book, My 10 Book, and Ten Little Sleepyheads.

 

 

 

Doc especially enjoyed eating everyone's leftover peanut butter :)

 

 

Next we worked on a coloring sheet. The girls are especially interested in coloring. They are using multiple colors now, and they are getting quite good at staying in the lines. Coloring is definitely not the boys' favorite activity. They willingly participate, but they typically only use one color and they are "finished" in a few minutes. I find it fascinating to see the differences between the boys and girls play out as they get older.

 

Next was a counting activity. We've got 1-5 down pat, so I wanted to spend some time working on numbers 5-10 today. Each child chose a chunk of playdough and 5 pipe cleaners. I instructed the kids to stick their pipe cleaners into the playdough so they were straight up in the air and in a row (this took a minute). I put a bowl of cheerios in the center of the table and asked each child to count out 5 cheerios (this also took a minute...they each wanted me to watch them count). Then they put all 5 cheerios on the first pipe cleaner in a stack. Next, they counted 6 cheerios. The idea was to put them on the next pipe cleaner in line so we could see how much taller 6 was than 5. In my mind, they would create a graph of sorts to show the difference between the numbers. Yeah...not so much. The girls got the idea after the first few stacks, and the boys gave up counting and tried to make as tall a stack of cheerios as they could. After a couple attempts to redirect the activity, I finally just let them stack the cheerios however they wanted...hey, it was good fine motor practice anyway, right? ;)

 

 

 

Eisley did a GREAT job on this activity. She sat there long after the other kids went out to play and finished all 5 stacks of cheerios. She showed excellent concentration, and she put the right number of cheerios on each pipe cleaner. Great work Eisley!