Welcome back to another installment of Latticed Learning! Today I'll be sharing the twelfth 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
Judges (pages 136-151 & 156-163 in this Bible and 109-127 in this one)Memory Verse
Matthew 22:37 - This is the twelfth 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.
Matthew 22:37 - This is the twelfth 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
Lawrence (I know nothing about the lives of the saints, but when I saw these cuter-than-cute cards and wonderful eBook, 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
L (Print out your free "L" phonics card here!)Topic to Explore
Fruit of the Spirit/Character TraitsShape
Square (I'm kind of going in order of vertices/sides and each one will last for several weeks.)Number
11 (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
Pretty much all of the books we read this week focused on a specific positive character trait.Titch the Tiddler was the book Gv chose to read the most out of our pile - despite being snubbed by the other ocean critters, cute little Titch is happy to help them out when they need saving.
The Way I Act is just as fabulous as Steve Metzger's The Way I Feel, which I've shared in the past is one of our family's all-time favorite books. This one focuses on positive character traits and is so helpful for introducing new vocabulary to little learners.
The Rainbow Fish is a classic tale of a fish who learns what it really means to be a friend. Plus, it's got rainbow in the title, so you know I like that!
Solomon the Supersonic Salamander is a little cheesy for me and G, but Gv loves it, so that makes it a winner. It definitely has a great message, but I'm just warning you to have some crackers on hand to go with all that cheese...
Other Great Books We Read
The Crayon Box That TalkedThe Berenstain Bears Pick Up and Put Away
The Little Engine That Could
George and Martha
Owl Moon
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:
This album is full of character-building tunes
Then this album had all sorts of great songs for this week, with our favorite being Down in My Heart
Then this album had all sorts of great songs for this week, with our favorite being Down in My Heart
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
We did "L" things on this site.
We watched this clip and a few of the others for the letter "L."
This video fit perfectly for the number 11.
How We Played
We did a few things to learn about the Judges:First up was the story of Deborah and Barak. Gv geared up for battle (which involved simply donning a plastic fireman's helmet, because that's the best we could do for "armor") and then recreated the last scene in this Bible story - yelling, "Go! Attack them now! God is with us!" and poor Linus-Aquinas (as Barak) just looked around, confused.
Next, we used a fluffy baby blanket to portray Gideon's fleece. We just pretended it was wet and the ground was dry and then it was dry and the ground was wet, but we were very thorough with our fleece-wringing, let me tell you.
We followed that up with making a paper-towel-roll torch (which meant we just shoved red and orange tissue paper in its end) and blowing our trumpets (funnels from the kitchen). I drew the line at any jar-smashing, but Gv and I really hammed it up while we pretended to be one of the 300 men in Gideon's army.
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| Blowing her trumpet, raising her torch, and sitting on the fleece |
Then, we talked about Samson. I printed out this fun Samson character and we colored him and added a long yarn braid. Gv pulled him out whenever we read his story this week.
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| Why yes, that is quite the colorful braid of hair he has! |
To go along with the story of Hannah's prayer for a child, we printed, colored, and assembled this foldable. Gv got all excited about having this on hand not only when we read Hannah's story, but any time we prayed.
Finally, we played a game to go along with the story of Samuel and Eli. So that Gv would know what to do, I first demonstrated her part in the game. I told her I was going to go hide and she'd need to call my name. When she did, I came running, shouting, "Here I am!"
After that, it was her turn to play Samuel. She'd go hide (no clue where) and I'd call, "Gv!" and she'd come running, with her "here I am" usually difficult to decipher, amongst all her wild giggles.
To round things out, Gv and I had fun with some of the songs from this book, which will continue to be a great resource for future lessons.
We also did several things (besides reading books) to correspond to our fruit of the Spirit/character traits theme:
We created this little poster, which I like so much, I might turn it into a painting on canvas for her room. Even though it's a future Bible verse, we played this song a lot this week and Gv loved running over to point to all the different hearts during the song. I'm sure we'll use it again later on, when this is our weekly verse.
We ate a fruit salad, composed of grapes, blackberries, raspberries, strawberries, cherries, apples, banana slices, cantaloupe chunks and blueberries (just because that's the fruit we had on hand). As we cut up and added each one, we talked about which fruit of the spirit it represented and also what other positive character traits it was similar to.
Some of the positive character traits we talked about were generosity, forgiveness, cooperation, tolerance, helpfulness, compassion, empathy, honesty, thankfulness and trustworthiness. These were also the main ones we looked for in the stories we read this week, as well as the ones I tried to point out when we naturally encountered them during the course of the week.
Gv really loved talking about cooperation, because that's one of the words on an app she enjoys playing on my Nook, called Endless Alphabet.
I also created goofy little fruits for Gv to collect and tape up onto our mantel to smile at during the week. You can find out more and download your own set for free by checking out the post here.
I considered doing all sorts of other activities for each specific fruit/character trait, but decided this little introduction was just right for Gv right now and we have plenty of time to delve into them a bit more in the future. Plus, we've been doing all sorts of extra holiday crafts during these past few weeks (like these, these, and these that we did last year) and so that's been taking up quite a bit of our time.
We also pulled out the pattern blocks to make a turkey like this one. Ours was just temporary, however. You'd better believe no gluing took place with my fancy shapes!
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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