Summer themes

Like most of Kindergarten, I'm keeping my Summer approach very light and fun. This doesn't mean that learning doesn't take place.  I have been picking themes that I thought would be fun for Summer and unlike my themes that I had them do during the school year my Summer themes have an open end approach, meaning we start them when an opportunity arises and we continue for as long or short a time as we like or the kids are still interested... or I run out of fun ideas and projects .  The first theme we covered was/ is butterflies. Now this is something that Kayiah knew a lot about already the whole metamorphasis thing, but like I said my goal for Summer is fun learning I'm not trying to put too much pressure on the girls for the Summer.

 After reading A Place for Butterflies, I asked Kayiah to choose a species that she would like to replicate. Well ok I kinda helped her choose according to the paper supply I had and also what I thought might be do-able for a 6 yr old.  So Eastern Tiger Swallowtail it was. I thought she did pretty good and I only had to help her a little.

 The girls loved doing this project and I lvoed the way they turned out, definitely a "saver" project. A simple lesson in symmetry, free painting and creativity.

Oh and this was a fun one too. Got this off of make learning fun website. Used pear cuscuos for the eggs( they said rice) and rotini pasta for the caterpillar  they say to use shell pata for the chrysilis and bowtie for the butterfly but I didn't have those so we used cotton ( going more for the moth type cacoon) and stickers for the butterflies and that made the girls really happy.  Since we are going to the beach next week at least for a day I think I will start a unit on Sea Life and tidal habitats, Kayiah has already expressed interest in that so we may study that for several weeks.

Creative Writing

For some writing practice I had Kayiah think up a story so she could make her own little book.  I really like letting her just do creative writing at this age b/c she will have plenty of years to write papers on specific themes.  If I can get her interested in writing and let her see that this whole grammar thing can be fun then I'v done my job. 

 She dictated her story (which she wanted to be about Hello Kitty) to me and I wrote it out for her to copy correctly. She probably could have written about half the words by herself, but I wanted this to be more about creativity and letter practice than seeing if she could spell words from memory

year of the rabbit

Yes I know I am seriously slacking with the homeschool blog.  We had a great day celebrating Chinese lunar New Year. This was the year of the rabbit. Kayiah wore red because it is a lucky color for the good luck in the new year.  The girls ate chinese noodles with chop sticks. The long noodles represent a long life. 

 Milenah chose not to stay in red  and wanted to eat with her dino fork instead of chop sticks so we pretended it was a dragon fork, thats ok b/c I had to cut her noodles anyways so we just skipped the whole chinese superstitions with her : )

 A few years ago we took the kids to the Asian festival downtown, Kayiah loved the dragon dancers and loved how the dragon batted his big eyelashes so she had lots of fun making her own good luck dragon. The girls took turns playing with it while we watched Ni-hao Kilan's new years special on tv. 

We learned how to say  happy new year ( sounds like " sing yen quai lu") we watched several you tube videos of little chinese children singing and dancing to new years songs they were really cute.  We also prayed for China b/c they are not a free country like us they also only let you have 1 baby instead of letting the parents choose and they are not allowed to believe in Jesus like we can. We had lots of fun learning about China this day!

The New Year

Kayiah took her 1st "test" last week to make sure she knew how to write all her lowercase letters, I probably made sure she was overly ready but I didn't want her to fail her 1st test. of all things it was j and q that tripped her up giving her a 92% but I was proud of her and she was proud of herself, she did them from memory with no other help.

 Last week we were also studying the 5 senses.  In Kayiah's Science journal I told her to draw her favorite thing to see, it could be anything she wanted. What a tender moment when she presented the book to me 
and said my favorite thing to see is my family. How awesome is that????!!!!! I still write out the sentences for Kayiah so she can copy them for letter and sentence practice. The previous page was about her pupil observation in light and dark.