Fox Unit Study

It’s Fox Week here at Homeschooling in the Rose Garden!!

Today started out with a storybook study/nature study on the wild red fox.  I base it on this book by Shirley Woods:

This story is amazing!  In fact, I would highly recommend any of Shirley Woods naturalist series.  I have all of them and we will be spending most of our time going through these for our storybook and nature studies this year along with Trickle Creeks, Ecojournals.  If you enjoy nature study and Charlotte Mason these are the books to get!

We are pairing these two wonderful resources with a few Homeschool Share Lapbook materials.  I pick and choose what I use with this to what would help my children specifically.  Slowly, throughout the book, we can fill out different portions of the lapbook with answers.  For example, the first three chapters we covered several varieties of prey that foxes hunt, two different dens that foxes use and live in, and two different types of barks that foxes will use to warn young and mates.  This gave us information for a whole section of the Lapbook and we hadn’t even gotten half way through the book!

Fox Lapbook from Homeschool Share

Here are some videos we found very useful and fun for our Fox study:

Fox Sounds:

5 Wild Fox Kits Playing:

Aesop's Fables about teasing.  Aesop's Fable Lapbook (we only used the Fox and the Stork portion).

Aesop's Fables - The Fox and The Stork:

And the last one, just for fun, Foxes jumping on a back yard trampoline!

And that’s just for starters.

Waldorf math for the youngest

I have been gearing up for math with Logan.  He is ready for the concept introduction, but I wanted to do it in a super gentle, fun way so he doesn’t feel like math is drudgery like so many of us adults.  Enter the Waldorf math Gnomes.  These little guys were the same ones I used when teaching colors two years ago and they have been played with quite a bit since.  I used them, (along with a rainbow mat), to help Cyan with place value as well.  They have been wonderful members of our learning family and I am proud to say, they have now come out to teach Logan the four main operations in mathematics! 

Some of these poems were inspired by others online (none are exactly the same) and some are made up by me, but each has a lesson in the story.  For this unit, we use floral gems as manipulatives and each little gnome is present for their specific operation.  The idea being that connecting a concept with a story is the best way to keep that concept clear in your mind.  Especially for young children.

Divide is my favorite:

Good King Equals is a character made up to help with the idea of things on either side of the = sign being equal, regardless of what they look like.  2+2 = 4 and so on. 

The stories that go along with these characters can be found in this wonderful curriculum (free) from Serendipity.  And although I do use quite a bit of this story when teaching beginning math, I am not opposed to worksheets and basic kindergarten math when doing this.  I think it all goes into the same box in the brain and it all helps when doing real world math problems!  And that’s what it is all about!  These little guys do make it super fun for Logan and easy to understand the four main operations in math.

More inspiration came from here:

King Equals poem

Drawing inspiration

God’s Eyes and Apple Eating

This morning’s handwork was making Eye of God and/or a woven spider web.  The kids enjoyed it so much they continued to make them for most of the afternoon, especially Cyan.  She has made 4 so far.  All more beautiful than the last!

This is Alex’s:

Isn’t it lovely!?! I just love how he used the blue in the midst of all these drab colors.

This afternoon was dedicated to using up the last of two laundry baskets of apples we had gotten from a dear friend.  I made batch after batch of applesauce.  And after I was done and tired of it, Cyan took over and made yet another batch.  We now have 18 quarts in the garage and more in the kitchen and still had enough left over for some for dinner tonight!

In Logan’s last workbox today was ‘make fresh apple pie with mommy’ and he just loved helping me prepare a pie for the family.  We made the whole thing from scratch and fresh apples.  No store bought dough or pie filling in this baby… Logan really honed his rolling pin skills!

With the left over dough he got to make his own little ‘pielette’. He just LOVED that!

As I put the kids to bed this evening I realized that even my ‘treat’ to myself tonight was apple:

Tis the season!

Happy FALL!!!

First day of school learning

The first day of school went well.  We were a little bit off schedule as we had an unexpected (but welcome) visitor.  Our first order of the day was to change out the nature table from ‘summer’ to ‘fall’!  The kids handed me stuff as I arranged it on the nature table.  I am sure we will have many more things to add as we take nature walks and get more into the fall season but for now, it’s just lovely and clean.

Box #1: Nature Study!  Today we got to compare bird nests that we have found over the summer.

This was a all kid activity.  They each got one and they described it as the others wrote down what they said on a comparison and contrast worksheet.

Box #2 - Animal Farm Game - was just for Logan.  He read all these and placed them so fast that I think I may have to make some harder cards for him!  The farm is expanding!

 

Box #3 was our interview box.  He wrote his name (with no help, I really wanted to see his progress between now and the end of the year), and then drew a picture of himself.

The interview was here.

Box #4 was a jar and some craft sticks.  Each day we put one craft stick in the jar.  Each tenth day we bundle the craft sticks together showing counting by tens.  However, today we only had one craft stick in our jar.  Hardly picture worthy. 

Box #5 - Cyan and Logan played number dominos!  They were both really good at it.  I am going to have to get a set of real dominos and look up the rules for another day.

Box #6 was wet on wet watercolor.

This was a Cyan and Logan activity.

Box #7 was the Dolch Word Kit.  We just worked on review for today.

Box #8 was Digraph Sorting from Pinterest.

 

Box #9 was a “September Me” from A Year of Kindergarten Writing.

No box #10 today…  just lunch!

All in all it was a great day!

First day of school ~ Interviews

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Interview with Logan ~ First day of Kindergarten

“I HAVE A LOOSE TOOTH!!!!”

Favorites:

Color - Golden

Season - Winter with the snow, but wait!  Halloween!  Those are both my favorites!

Food - Pizza!  Corn chowder and mac & cheese, and tomato soup.

Animal - It’s a River Monster - an Alligator Gar - but I haven’t watched all their seasons yet so I don’t know.  Something could be cooler.

What do you want to learn about this year?

I want to learn two things - piano and ninja moves.  I already know one.  I know how to build stuff pretty well.  I didn’t say I want to learn it…  just that I know how.

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Interview with Cyan ~ First day of 6th Grade

Favorites:

Color - Peach (Like a sunset)

Season - Depends on the sun or snow.  Seriously, it depends on how much sun or snow there is.  Cuz if there’s lots of sun yu can go swimming and if there’s lots of snow you can go snowmobiling and that’s tons of fun!

Food - Potatoes

Animal - Horse

What would you like to learn this year?

More history with my friends.  I think the books “Love that Dog” and “Hate that Cat” were really good so I want to learn more about poetry and stuff like that.  I want to do singing lessons because I want to be a singer and I want to be a babysitter for dogs and children.  Like taking care of dogs.  Kinda want to learn how to make crepes because Alex doesn’t always want to do it… and pancakes!  I want to learn more about how to be in movies.  I think that would be cool. 

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Interview with Alex ~ First day of 10th Grade

Favorites:

Color - Ocean Blue

Season - Spring - I love all the colors.

Animal - felis domesticus - Cat

Food - Sliced apples and pickles

What do you want to learn this year?

I want to learn how to socialize and how to blow things up with chemicals.  I want to learn how to play the piano and how to actually draw stuff.  I want to learn basic gymnastics cuz I feel like I’d be good at it but I’d be terrified to do a flip cuz I feel like I’d break my neck!  I also want to learn to write fancy (calligraphy) and how to sing.  OH!  Walk a tightrope.  And photography.  That’s all.  Oops, I forgot, I want to learn to dance, too.

Let the school year begin!!!

Back in the saddle again. :)

We are stating light with a unit study on Little House in the Big Woods and a quick study of our maple tree out back that is having some trouble.  We only did 6 workboxes today so we could have our sunny day (one of our VERY few this summer) set aside for cabin building (we are making a playhouse!!).  I figured we would learn as much from putting the siding on our playhouse than we would from sitting inside doing worksheets. 

I am substituting my reading aloud for audio books right now to get in the groove of schooling again, and it’s working out beautifully. I will get back to having my school read-aloud time with them in a few weeks, but for now we are really enjoying Audiobooks.  Today, we listened to the first two chapters of “Little House in the Big Woods” narrated by Cherry Jones.  If you haven’t heard this version, I highly suggest it!  She does such a wonderful job!  She has a husky tenor voice that it easily believable as Ma, Pa, or any of the children.  She does the singing and the fiddle music playing behind the story is just lovely.

We were all enthralled. 

After the chapters for today were complete, we started the Little House in the Big Woods lapbook, starting with the cover pages, the smoke house, and the log cabin on the back. 

Next up was nature study.  I had marked the page in Fun with Nature Trees, Leaves, and Bark to the page that had the maple tree on it and I sent Logan out back to discover which tree was the Maple.  It only took him a few minutes to come back in with a maple leaf!  I went out with him and we looked at the pictures and compared the maple tree in the book to our maple in the yard.  We came back in with a few leaves and spent some time making leaf rubbings for our Nature Notebooks.

We did two on top of each other with different colors so you could see the different sizes of the leaves on the tree right now… then we marked the date and wrote down the words ‘Maple Tree’ on the page.

Next up was a Montessori activity called “Animal Farm”.  Since Logan is reading 3 and 4 letter words pretty well now I just let him do the whole thing by himself. 

The only one he needed help with was “Lamb” (of course) because he was trying to find ‘sheep’.

After this we worked on Logan’s sight words while Cyan worked on her spelling list.  He is having a little trouble with blends and digraphs so I pulled out the ones that are in the first two lists of the Dolch Words chart and we worked on those for a few minutes. 

Then I moved over to Cyan as Logan played with the counting manipulitives in the next workbox.

She is doing spelling words from a note she wrote back in may where she misspelled them.  I had her write them correctly twice and then practice them out loud, then we did the test.  She only missed two, but she wrote those out 5 times while saying them aloud at the same time.  We will use this same list for the whole school week.

Logan’s last box for today was number recognition.  This was something he was really having trouble with when we started our break.  He doesn’t seem to have any issue now.  Even so, I made it so that he was using stickers instead of having to remember the number, remember what it looked like, and then trying to recreate that with his 5 year old fingers at the same time.  lol!  Next time I will add in him writing them, because it seemed that this was super easy and went very quickly.  But he enjoyed the success!

Kindergarten and 6th grade have begun!