F is for Flower

We homeschool year round.  Arin has finished her kindergarten year and I have ordered her first grade materials, which she will be starting at the beginning of May.  When I ordered her books for next year, I also ordered a few things for Ella's preschool year.  Ella loves school and asks for it daily.  For this reason, we started her new materials this week, even though Arin is taking a short break.  Ella is loving all the one-on-one time and that all the school time is focused on her :)
She started her Get Ready for the Code primer A.

This book starts with the letter F.  We chose flowers as our theme this week.
Over a four day time period, Ella completed all of her "f" work in her workbook.  She would have loved to do it all in one day, but I have to pace her or she'd be done with the book in a week!

In addition to the above workbook, Ella did the following letter F and flower themed work.

Day One:
Ella worked on flower puzzles.  This is Arin's puzzle and it was Ella's first time using it.

She got frustrated that the pieces kept moving, so she asked to use her (much easier) flower puzzle.  This puzzle has grooves to keep the puzzle pieces in place and Ella liked that much better.

Day two:
Ella really loves worksheets, so we worked together on a few more of these.  She located all the Ff on the sheet and then wrote the letters.

She also matched upper and lower-case letters with this worksheet.

Together, we colored a color-by-shape flower themed worksheet.

I colored the picture on the left and Ella colored the picture on the right :)

Day three:
We took a field trip to our local, public gardens so that we could look at a variety of flowers.  We talked about the differences and similarities of the flowers, their colors, shapes, sizes and whether or not they were fragrant.

We also started the classic science experiment, showing how water moves through the flower's stem.  We did this by picking white flowers (we have gardenias growing in our yard) and putting them in water dyed with food coloring.  We left the flowers overnight, and by the next morning, they were no longer white.  Instead, we had a blue flower, a pink one, and a very pale purple flower.

Day four:
Ella worked on a sequencing activities, which also gave her cutting and gluing practice.

She worked on a few more flower themed worksheets.

And finally, we incorporated a little math into the mix.  I printed six flowers and wrote numbers 1-6 in the middle of them.  Then, I gave Ella plastic linking flowers and a dice.  She rolled the dice, counted the dots, linked together the correct number of flowers and placed the chain under the correctly numbered flower.  Later, Ella and Arin played this together, each with their own set of numbered flowers and linking flowers.  The first person to complete all six chains was the winner.

F is for Frogs

Arin wanted to learn about frogs for Ff week, so we made a lapbook.  To make this lapbook, I taped three pieces of cardstock together. The materials for the lapbook came from a few different places (mostly from here and here).  Activities included in the lapbook were a frog dot-to-dot, frog mini book, life cycle of the frog cards, frog questions, frog that eats bugs, -og words, Five Little Tadpoles song which had clipart frogs and tadpoles (I velcroed these to the folder so that Arin could use them while we were singing the song.  She loved this song), a frog craft, sight words (used the front part of this book and wrote Arin's sight words on the inside pages), and a frog maze.

In addition to the lapbook, the girls also did the following activities:

Both of the girls also made frog lacing cards, which can be found here.

Arin started learning how to count by 5's by using these cards.  I put the same numbers on clothes pins.  Arin matched them to the cards.  Then we practiced saying the numbers in order.

We put these frog life cycle cards in the lapbook.  They came from here.

Ella played a color matching frog game, which was found here.  This was a bit advanced for her, but too easy for Arin.

I made a frog color matching game for Ella which she liked much better.  I simply cut lilly pad shapes out of different colors of cardstock.  Ella then matched our plastic frogs to each lilly pad.

Arin and I played a game called Splat the Frog (found here).  She loved this game.  It kept her giggling the whole time we played!  We divided the cards between us, then each flipped a card over at the same time (like you would if you were playing War).  We kept flipping cards over until a frog was turned face-up.  The first person to slap the frog card got to keep all the cards.  The person with all of the cards at the end of the game was the winner.

We also read several frog books (mostly fiction).

Firehouse Field Trip

Today, Andy's brother set up a field trip to a firehouse for us.  It was a great, educational field trip for the girls and for us, plus it was a lot of fun!

As a thank you gift, we made fudge for the fire fighters.  We made regular fudge, using this recipe (I did substitute about 3/4c. marshmallow creme for the regular marshmallows). We also made cookies and cream fudge, using this recipe.

For lunch, we kept with the theme by eating at Firehouse Subs.

Thank you Uncle Mike for setting up this awesome field trip for us!