Weather Chart

For the month of January Holly did a lot of work with weather and the winter season. One project she did was a month long graph of the weather. I had her only fill the graph in on days we were doing school work, so about 20 days she did the graph. Then she had to answer some various questions about her graph.

What month did you watch/graph the weather?

How many school days total did you track it?

How many days were rainy?

How many days were sunny?

How many days were cloudy?

Tell me which weather had the most blocks filled in? How many were filled?

Tell me which weather had the least blocks filled in? How many were filled?

This great weather chart can be found from a wonderful site: http://confessionsofahomeschooler.blogspot.com/

Love Bug

Holly created a Love Bug in art this past week. She enjoyed painting, cutting, creating and learning the order in which this project would work best... gluing eyes on really wet paint or trying to stick 'sticker' hearts - doesn't always work. Having patience and creating in steps is sometimes best.

First Time

Holly experienced her first time weaving, at least from what I can remember. She is old enough now that she was getting the pattern and catching her mistakes. She spent some pretty good concentration on this little project and before gluing it all down she discovered a few mistakes and corrected them on her own. I am impressed with how quickly she took to this classic little project and really enjoyed it! I think we'll try this one again with St. Patrick's Day colors and smaller strips.

Tissue Heart

We have been very busy with a lot of Valentines art project. This one is an oldy but goody for us! Each time Holly does a project with crumpled tissue she has more patience and is more thorough with her art. This time she wanted the little holes all filled in just perfect.

This is an easy project. Cut a medium to large sized heart, depending on the child's attention span. Pre-cut a lot of little squares of colored tissue. Have a little dipping bowl filled with white glue. Then I crumple one little tissue square to show how it is done, a light crumple not a tight one or it will take forever to complete, dip in glue and start to fill the heart up.

It turned out so pretty!

Time Will Tell

Holly has had a bit of an introduction when it comes to clocks, nothing solid though. Today we are officially starting to work on learning to tell time. I chose to use a Kumon book geared towards basic skills a long with some books, practice clocks, a Judy clock, flash cards and various little skill projects too. However, the key here will be repetition I am sure.

To start off Holly is focusing on the placement of numbers on the clock by hours. Today she did some work with that, we read a book and she practiced moving her clock to hour positions from flash cards. Then she cut out a circle and placed her own hours on the clock and compared them to an actual clock to see how well she did on spacing. She really enjoyed all of her work with clocks and is very excited to start understanding how to tell time.

Breaking Down 100

Holly has pretty much mastered her 100 board, counting by tens and is working on counting by fives more comfortably. She has the 'numbers' memorized however we are focusing on the physical quantity of one hundred by 10's and 5's. So, she has been taking groups of 100 items and counting them out by groups and then transferring them to her 100 board. Some of this is repetition, however she is feeling a lot more comfortable now with her number patterns and is starting to move up into the hundreds a lot more comfortably without just the memorization, but skill.

Library Days

We visit the library at least once a week, if not more! We have a pretty good routine down of our plan when we visit - Holly does all the 'work' part. She sorts our books, movies, music and cd's and puts them in the book drop. We then discuss what items we will look for first (we have already made a list of interests), check out our 'on hold' shelf and then she scans all of our materials for check out and loads the bag to head home. We adore library time and could probably go daily if it were possible.