Primary and Secondary colours

I found this great idea for introducing colour blending!

You can check it our here.

First make a batch of play dough with the three primary colours.

I printed out a picture of a colour wheel as a control from here.

Then mix the primary colours (Note: little hands get fatigued very quickly here)

To create a completed colour wheel!

Shavuot

In our household we have just celebrated Shavuot. The feast of weeks. Firstfruits. Pentecost.

In the past it has been a meal that has come and gone but as we seek to disciple our children by obedience to the feasts of the Lord as they appear in the Old Testament, we think a little more about what these feasts really mean.

Shavuot is the commemoration of the ingathering of the harvest. Being as we live in the Southern Hemisphere and it is really not harvest time here we made a meal with seasonal vegetables, creating our own harvest to thank the Lord for.

This resulted in a conversation about northern and southern hemispheres, what 'seasonal' vegetables were and so forth but it also helped Lamb to understand that all good things come from the Lord (James 1:17).

Penguins

Our trip to Tasmania created an interest in penguins as we visited a little blue penguin nesting site there. Lamb loves to mimic the noises they were making!

We got several penguin themed books for our book basket including one of blue penguins which nest exclusively in Australia.

I made some 'breeds of penguin' cards for our shelves and we have spent some time talking about their similarities and differences. Lamb's favourite word at the moment is 'similar'!

We did some penguin themed activity sheets.

I found this poem about penguins and typed it up with the number words in red.

We go through the poem identifying the numbers and the words that match and take a cartoon penguin away each time. I have introduced Lamb to addition but not subtraction, counting upwards but not counting back so I thought this would be a good start.

THEN we got the measuring tape out and drew some penguins in chalk.

Here Lamb is clicking the lock over so that the tape doesn't move while Mummy draws a penguin at the correct height.

And here's Mummy drawing the penguin (Lamb took the photo, pretty good job I thought!)

From left to right....little blue penguin, adelie penguin, chinstrap penguin and emperor penguin (please forgive the crude drawings: chalk on brick is a very unforgiving medium!)

And then Lamb and Cherry 'painted' the penguins with water thereby cleaning the wall.

And finally we watched 'March of the penguins' which really was fabulous. Lamb asked an incredible amount of questions all the way through but was surprisingly stalwart in the face of penguin eggs, chicks and their parents meeting their ends. Highly recommended family viewing!

The sense of taste

For the sense of taste I made a felt mouth on our little roll up felt mat.

While it might help Lamb learn the basic parts of the mouth and the names of the teeth, I did it more for a counting exercise as he places the teeth. He gets mixed up from 14 through to 18 so I thought a little practice wouldn't go astray.

We also added the next row on our five senses chart.

Lamb was able to read 'hot' and 'cold' and glue the correct pictures into their squares but he needed help deciphering the other words. Once he knew what they said, he knew what picture needed to go where.

Snails

Our look at Matisse's 'Snail Trail' created a love in Lamb....snails. We have spent quite a bit of time in the garden watching them move around (you know that means poking their antennae and watching them come back out again)

So we got a couple of books out from the library.

Did some colouring in.

And baked some scrolls for snails.

Cherry rolling out the dough

We filled our scrolls with caramel sauce and walnuts, rolled it up then Lamb cut the roll into pieces. He felt very important being allowed to use the sharp knife. You might be able to tell from the look on his face!

Et voila!

Snails. Yum!

Math

A couple of the math activities that we do regularly.

Until now Lamb has been focussing on building a staircase with the cuisenaire rods and learning their progression  by naming the colours.

Today I introduces the concept of naming them by numbers rather than colours so that we can start to do meaningful equivalency activities with the rods. Here Lamb is working out what the number for each coloured rod should be by counting the 'ones'.

We found this book on halves at the library so I set up an activity for Lamb with buttons so that he can work out what the half of a certain number is. Here is placing one button on each semicircle until all ten are placed at the end of which he says "Half of ten is one, two, three, four, five".

I did a few other cardboard circles to introduce the idea of thirds and quarters too and while doing them Lamb ran to get the pieces of his Melissa and Doug pattern blocks to make up the hexagons in the same way.

Whole, halves and thirds.

Lamb's language

 One day a few months ago while going through the sandpaper letters Lamb said to me, "I know all of this already, Mum". I explained that I can't know if he knows it unless he shows me which was fine at that moment but it made me wonder if I wasn't failing to see the cues for 'moving on'.

My husband's take on it was "Just move forward until you can see he's reached his limit". A friend of mine who was a teacher for many years in a whole body school which used Montessori and Waldorf activities said much the same thing except that he focused on the potential harm on not moving on in that you might miss a 'sensitive period' for the next thing or that you might inadvertently teach them that the status quo is where they should sit.

So I still do the odd beginning sounds activity with Lamb.

We used the moveable alphabet to find the beginning letters of each of these pictures (from a National Geographic Little Kids Magazine).

But the focus lately has been on three letter phonetics. I tried to use the picture cards from Montessori Print Shop to help him build the words with the moveable alphabet but he never took to that. He likes to sound them out when building rather than copy them.

We started sounding out some words in a little animal book we have and Lamb was enthralled with the idea of 'reading' so I used the phonetic picture cards to make these...

Flashcards with the word on one side to sound out and then a picture on the reverse so that Lamb can check himself if he was right. I store them in a little cardboard box that I covered with black paper for the sake of aesthetics. He loves these but is reaching the end of this too. He gets the concept so I think perhaps we're ready for blends....

I also got a couple of pre-readers from our local library. The type that repeat "I can" and "I like" and the child can work out from the picture and perhaps a first letter what the noun is. He is very much into these but after reading them twice wanted to know if there were any new ones!

So again, it's me trailing!