Insects
This week we started on a study that’s been a long time in the making. This week we’re studying insects! We will eventually get to all the classes of animals, but the creepy-crawlies and other invertebrates are first! Since my kids are pretty good with creatures, except things that sting, I started with the beloved butterfly. Who can be afraid of a butterfly, right? Check out the books we used, and all of our resources for Animal Classification HERE!
Weekend News
On the weekend the kids had an egg hunt in the public park and we took some pictures. No great ones, but they were some cute in all of them. HA! By the way, we take out the sticky, or hard candies for the most part and donate to the youth group, so there is that. The 5 year old actually got the ‘winner’ ticket as well and won some summer fun toys! Prior to that, we actually decorated for Easter and took old window clings and made them into placemats. It was a 2 for one type of deal. No one whined about decals that no longer stick and bonus Easter decor!
After that we fed them lots of veggies and they played outside. The older one went to a library event. The new birdfeeder got hung, also our rain gauge which we’ve had waiting for a post for years. The birdhouse my daughter built from her Christmas gift kit was mounted, too! My husband had the idea of using leftover concrete to make a handprint stone with the kids. It took a couple of tries to get the mix right, but in the end, we have some handprints! I took some more photos of spring wildflowers, including Dutchman’s Britches. They’re so cute. Two of the kids waved palms on Sunday and 2 stayed home with various illness issues. The baby wore shoes for the first time! We also moved the playset equipment around so it is all in one place, hopefully easier to mow around.
The Daily
Monday was a fantastic day. I think they were ready to get back to unit studies! As is usual for our younger grade kids, we found some Magic School Bus videos and books, and items from the Cat in the Hat learning library to help make the ‘hard stuff’ fun. I snagged a Reading Rainbow video, which showed beautiful videos and information on Monarch migration. We read some great books on insects and finished with some cracked egg art. We did this when we studied dinosaurs, too. It’s only paper, so no real mess to clean up! We will probably do this for every animal class, honestly. Hey, the duck billed platypus needs love, too! They even had a butterfly life cycle lunch!
Tuesday was less stellar, but we took a break and painted! We tried the Pin where you use cut veggies to dip into paint? I let the 3 year old watercolor along with us and everyone had a good time. Check out the pictures. After that we kind of lost the thread of where we were in the worksheets I had printed (see resources) so we set those aside and got our workbooks out. We have a few things to wrap up, namely the math sections that are not arithmetic based. Both kids found telling time and measuring in inches using rulers pages. After cleaning up paint I was more than done for the day. After lunch I started renewing books and ordering more books, as well as kitchen chores and well, by then it was dinner time. We ate early and sent the kids off to swimming lessons.
Now for something completely different:
Wednesday was DEAR day or drop everything and read day. I actually like to call it read everything all day because it spells READ but I’m weird. We started with some of the Pigs Will Be Pigs books by Amy Axelrod that focus on math skills and fun. This helps tie up the loose ends on the time/money/math. We added final details to paintings, then we read the Cat in the Hat ‘Insects’ book and I set them loose with a dozen or so books apiece about butterflies, bugs and more! I mowed half the front yard. My 5 year old helped me make pizza dough, and we discussed measurement and fractions. She said she wasn’t supposed to be learning. It’s our family joke. They’re not allowed to learn outside of school. Later they played outside and went to the library’s ice cream social to celebrate National Library Week.
More Daily
Thursday we went over the parts of insects, learned how to draw a cartoon butterfly (and I taught them how to draw a bunny from a 10 gallon hat, too!) and read some more books. During math we caught up all our time/money workbook posts to try and fill in the last gasp of those type of pages. Then I set them loose with a bunch more insect books. The 3 year old even got in on tracing some letters, coloring by looking at what color the printed words are, etc. She did well!
Next week will entail some vacation, a weather day at a local ballpark. I am seriously excited for my kids, I bet they will be so thrilled! Since we only have one day after that to ‘school’ we may do a whole lot of nada and have a true break!
Linking up with Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers for their weekly wrap-up! Head over to see more blogger’s posts and to get the information on how to play along.
Other Reading
My K-1st kid’s books for the year
My 2nd-3rd kid’s books for the year
