Syncopated Mama: Latticed Learning: Week 8

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Welcome back to another installment of Latticed Learning! Today I'll be sharing the eighth week of our journey with you. You'll get a chance to see what we did, the resources we used (click here to see what we're using week after week), and hopefully come away with lots of fun ideas for things to do with your own little one!

Bible Lesson

Baby Moses (pages 92-97 in this Bible and 71-77 in this one)

Memory Verse

Luke 2:52 - This is the eighth song on this album, which I've raved about before. I also created this card:

to post on the fridge each week (and then add to a mini photo album from the local dollar store when we take it down) and I'm amazed that Gv can say this first verse - minus the reference - by herself already!

You can download your own copy of this card for free here! Want the whole set right now? Get them here.

Saint

Hilary (I know nothing about the lives of the saints, but when I saw these cuter-than-cute cards, I decided they gave me the perfect excuse to learn! They're honestly more for me than Gv at this point, although she can put the name to the card after having it up on the fridge and talking about it all week.)

Letter

H (Print out your free "H" phonics card here!)

Topic to Explore

Feelings (& Monsters)

Shape

Ellipse/Oval (I'm kind of going in order of vertices/sides and each one will last for several weeks.)

Number

7 (Like I said in this post about the alphabet, we'll talk about all (well, maybe not all) the numbers every week, but I'm choosing one to focus on each week and you'll see some repetition as time goes on with a few of them.)

Best Books We Read This Week

The Way I Feel is easily one of our favorite books ever, so of course we spent lots of time reading it this week. G and I were so surprised to see how easily Gv started naming her own feelings after we'd read this book to her just a few times while we were camping this summer.

If You're Happy and You Know It is another family favorite - and the first book that Gv really started interacting with. She can totally "read" it by herself now and often keeps herself busy singing and dancing along as she turns the pages. A bonus for this book: it gets everyone up and moving!

*

Go Away, Big Green Monster - a good friend gifted us with this book when she was culling her retired teacher stash last summer and I'm sure a day hasn't gone by when we haven't read it! It's just so fun to flip through the pages and watch the monster appear and disappear.

When Sophie Gets Angry - Really, Really Angry has always been a book that the students in my class were drawn to, but I'd never actually sat down and read it myself until this week. Gv kept requesting it again and again and I can see why - Sophie gets upset and has a very real reaction to her difficult situation. In her anger, she takes off and runs right out the door - which at first seems like a poor choice for how to cope with such big feelings. However, the great big world begins to calm Sophie down, and we learn that this strategy is one way that helps you feel better when facing such big, red rage yourself.

One Lonely Sea Horse is a clever little book that not only covers emotions, but counting and food, too. You'll be amazed at the photos - all the objects are created from things like mushrooms, fruits, and vegetables!

Songs We Played By

I went through all the children's songs on my iPod and created a playlist just for this week. Here are some of the best selections from our list:

And Jesus Grew from this album helped Gv learn our memory verse

Lucky Seven Samson from this

This album by Hap Palmer was perfect for this week's topic, as was this one by Jack Hartmann.

We danced around to this song quite a bit to go with our monster theme.

And so many more, but I'll let you search through your own music collection to see what types of songs you can add to a playlist.

Videos We Explored

This video matched up with our Bible lesson (and served as a preview for next week, too).

We did "H" things on this site.

We watched this clip and a few of the others for the letter "H."

This video fit perfectly for the number 7.

When I tired of reading the book myself for the umpteenth time, I let Gv watch this.

I naturally considered having us watch this movie, but decided to wait until Gv's a bit older before sharing it with her, especially because she kept requesting that we watch this one, which I felt fit in pretty well with the theme of feelings, since about half of the little dudes featured are named for emotions..

How We Played

We did a few things to coordinate with the Bible story of baby Moses:

We made a baby Moses in a paper plate basket (Gv insisted on calling the reeds his hair!):

This takes two plates - cut them both in half, color the outsides and then staple them together. Then, cut out a baby Moses from construction paper and slip him inside the paper plate basket. Add some reeds behind him (or, as Gv says, "hair.")

I printed out the first page of this cute Moses coloring pages set, then cut it out for Gv so she could color it and then go glue-stick crazy placing it onto a sheet of blue construction paper. Then I traced two sets of her hand prints onto green construction paper and we glued down just the bottoms below the picture to be the reeds.

Gv loved uncovering the baby and shouting, "Peek-a-boo!"

I once again created a mini book for this story, but haven't had the chance to get it past the sketch stage yet, so I'll come back and add it when it's all finished. Gv has enjoyed reading the rough version of it, so I know she'll be happy to get the completed book soon.

Finally, we dumped Gv's markers out of their storage box, nestled one of her swaddled "babies" in it, then sent it floating down the river (blue yoga mat) amongst all the reeds (construction paper scraps).

We also did some things (besides reading books) to correspond to our feelings (& bonus monsters) theme this week:

For starters, I'd had this great idea to take photographs of Gv showing expressions for all sorts of feelings (and then we'd stick them in a photo album from the dollar store to name again later), but once the camera was trained on her, every single emotion was portrayed like this:

She's suddenly got the "Cheese!" thing figured out during photos

I'd come across this social worker's post and loved the idea of coloring in a heart with the emotions bottled up inside. I knew Gv was still a bit young to complete the activity in the way described, but I came up with this modification for her:

First, we colored in the five squares and labeled each color the same way as in I Am A Rainbow (book linked above). The only difference is that I substituted orange for pink and decided that it should represent "happy."

Next, I had Gv choose one of the crayon colors, tell me what emotion the color represented, and then use it to color in the heart.

As she was coloring, I asked her when she felt that way. For example, she said she felt scared when she heard thunder, or sad when she got a boo-boo.

Another thing we did was place another dice game - which Gv loved playing so much, she got her friend Minnie to join her:

In case you missed it, you can read the post I wrote about this fun game - and print out your free download so you can play it at your house!

Since Halloween is looming on the horizon, I decided to take the opportunity to read some of our favorite monster books as well as creating some kooky friends to decorate the house with:

Since Gv loves Go Away, Big Green Monster so much, I cut out all the pieces needed for her to recreate her own green monster. We actually used them to do more than just make our own monster with - first Gv flipped through the book and placed the pieces in the cut-out spots, just like a jigsaw puzzle. Then we read through the book and assembled the monster on the black paper. Finally, when Gv had done these two activities several times, we went ahead and glued everything down to make our own monster.

You can download your own free set of monster pieces here.

We also created a letter monster for the first letter of Gv's name:

I did the cutting, but Gv chose the colors, googly eyes, and where to place everything when she glued it all down. This will definitely be an activity that will work when she's older, but it was still enjoyable for Gv to try now.

Gv was asking for more things to cut out and write on this week, so I found a couple of really cute printables to give her:

Pages 6, 7 and 8 of pack one here had unique prewriting paths and some cute monster pattern cards to cut out and arrange.

Page 18 of pack two here was a cutting practice page.

Page 25 of this tot pack had fun shapes to trace.

Then, when Gv was asking for still more things to cut later in the week, I gave her this set of monster cards (the monster mash activity on the download). Since they were outlined, I knew she'd be able to cut out all the little rectangles and this activity kept her quite happy for a while.

Looking for all the great posts associated with this concept in one place? Check out my Latticed Learning page here!

What's your favorite thing that we did this week? I'd love to hear! Either leave a comment below or email me at lisahealy (at) outlook (dot) com.

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Latticed Learning: Week 8