Syncopated Mama: Latticed Learning: Week 11

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Welcome back to another installment of Latticed Learning! Today I'll be sharing the eleventh 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

Joshua (pages 124-135 in this Bible and 98-105 in this one)

Memory Verse

Psalm 34:13 - This is the eleventh song on this album, which I've raved about before. I also created this card:

We post it on the fridge (and then add it to a mini photo album from the local dollar store when we take it down). I'm always amazed how quickly Gv can say her verse - minus the reference - each week!

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

Saint

Kateri (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

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

Topic to Explore

Marsupials and Australia

Shape

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

Number

10 (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

Koala Lou is a classic Mem Fox book that not only highlights many of Australia's unusual animals, but drives home the point that a mother will love her child no matter what.

Zoo-Looking really only has one marsupial in it, but it is written by popular Australian author Mem Fox and Gv just really enjoys being able to name all the different animals and say the repetitive line "and the ___ looked back."

Katy No-Pocket has the same great illustrations as the Curious George books and is the cute tale of a pocket-less kangaroo in search of a better way to carry her son. She obviously needs someone to hook her up with a Tula or something (then people really could scream, "Tula in the Wild!"), but luckily she runs into a man with loads of pockets all over his apron who can help her out.

What Do You Do with a Kangaroo is an extremely silly book that I find hard to like (it's outright preposterous), but it gives Gv the giggles every time we read it, so how can I not include it on this list?

Koala is like a little critter biography - the book follows the true story of Karen (a koala bear), from just before her birth, throughout her childhood in the Lone Pine Koala Sanctuary in Brisbane, Australia, to her ultimate relocation as an adult at the San Francisco Zoo.

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:

Keep Your Tongue From Evil from this album helped Gv learn our memory verse

Koala Bear Diner from the album I shared about here

Waltzing Matilda from this family favorite

A couple of songs from Bob & Larry's Sunday Morning Songs by these fun guys that went along with Joshua

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

I discovered this video from a great new series, which we'll be watching for future lessons, as well.

We did "K" things on this site.

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

Gv had her introduction to Veggie Tales when we watched this video

And I couldn't resist pulling out the big guns for our Australia topic, so we watched this full movie together for the first time.

How We Played

We did a few things to learn about Joshua and the fall of Jericho:

We spent a ton of time hanging out in our sheet fort, which represented the tabernacle. I had planned to do this last week, but ran out of time and figured it would work just as well now.

We covered two toilet paper tubes with construction paper so that Gv could go "spy out" the land with her binoculars.

We played "find the spies" with our peg people from way back on week 4 and some random plastic cups. Basically, I just channeled my inner street scammer and played the shell game with her, but don't worry, no money was involved.

We put out a red rope like Rahab so that we'd be safe when the walls came tumbling down.

And the best activity was when we stood up the couch cushions, grabbed something noisy to blow (Gv opted for her beloved duck whistle) and re-enacted the march around Jericho, ending of course with much wild floor rolling, once the walls were down.

And I'm still planning to get back to creating my mini books for these Bible stories (at least we'll have them for next year), but after all my work on the phonics cards and Bible verse sets, I've gotten way behind.

We also did a few things (besides reading books) to correspond to our Australia & marsupial topic:

I pinned a washcloth onto Gv's grocery store apron so she could carry around her "baby" just like Katy No-Pocket did.

I printed out another copy of this week's phonics card, then cut out the kangaroo and taped a little construction paper pouch onto her belly. Then I printed another copy of the card, but shrunk it down. I cut that little guy out to put in the mama's pouch. Gv was so tickled by this and has had to run to get it to show anyone foolish enough to stop by our house this week (grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, the mailman, a random solicitor...)

I printed out the little critters on pages 6 and 17 of this pack, because Gv was in the mood for cutting some stuff out (when is she not?) and I figured the least I could do was give her something cute and related to work with. Plus, I keep hoping that if I continue to provide her with exciting things to cut, it will prevent the inevitable self-bang-trimming that all children with access to scissors must engage in. I know, just keep telling myself that, right?

We jumped around and acted like a kangaroo. I didn't even bother trying to take a picture of this, because we all know by now what this would look like. See this example here:

I pulled out the paint so Gv could create a cool piece of Aboriginal-like art. I traced her hand onto black construction paper with a white pencil, then told her to cover the lines with dots of paint (using the back of a paintbrush). I had her add more dots to her hand with other colors, then swirls of white outside the hand, and finish with filling in all the background space with bright blue.

If I had been smarter, I would have snapped a photo of this masterpiece the second the last dot was placed, but no-o, I had to run and clean up - just for a second - and when I returned, Gv had the paintbrush turned the other (normal) way and was happily blending all her colorful dots into one big, muddled mess:

Finally, we grabbed a paper towel roll and held our own little didgeridoo concert. I'd originally planned for us to decorate it first, but after all that intensive dot painting we'd just done, we just went with the natural version and increased the volume of all our "wawhr-wawhr"ing.

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 11