Latticed Learning: Week 22

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

The birth of Jesus (pages 266-295 in this Bible and 191-197 in this one)

Memory Verse

1 Thessalonians 5:11 - This is the second song on this album, which I've raved about before.  I'm also creating cards for this second set of verses and will let you know when they're available.  

Until then, you can find the first set here.

We post these on the fridge (and then add them to a mini photo album from the local dollar store at the end of the week). 

Saint

Veronica (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

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

Topic to Explore

Music  

Shape

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

Number

1 (Starting back over to focus on writing the numbers, since our first go-round took care of counting and recognizing them all 1-20.  I printed four of these to a page, then slipped the sheets into a page protector and let Gv trace the numbers with a wet erase marker.)

Best Books We Read This Week

Welcome to the Symphony - First of all, let me say that I've never actually seen this book in person, but I want it, because it is just frankly genius.  Usually these musical books are full of annoying sound effects that kind of go along with some poorly-adapted Disney story.  But this one includes the sounds of the different instruments in an orchestra - how cool is that?

 

Peter and the Wolf - this book with accompanying CD got even more awesome after we'd watched the little movie of the story (see below).

 

Vivaldi and the Invisible Orchestra - my favorite composer and I'd had no clue he'd had this little orphan orchestra thing going.  Such a cute story that taught about a famous life at the same time.

 

Yankee Doodle - I'd thought this book wouldn't interest Gv until she was older, but it was probably the one she wanted me to read the most - and since it was pretty much just the verses to the song, that meant she was able to "read" it all to herself by week's end.  The pictures are so detailed, but that translates into this book consuming loads of time for your little one.

 

The Philharmonic Gets Dressed - this book had me laughing like crazy when I first read it to Gv.  G asked what was so funny about it and I told him - the book really is about the symphony players getting dressed!  Despite the name, that was totally not what I expected!

 

The Story of the Orchestra - the first of two amazing books that will just get better and better as Gv gets older - we got both from the library, but you can bet these are going on my must-purchase list!  This one came with a CD to play at specific points in the book to go along with facts about different composers and instruments.

 

Those Amazing Musical Instruments! - the second of two amazing books I now must own.  This one includes an interactive CD-ROM, but to be honest, we didn't even explore that, because the information in the book was plenty to keep us busy.  (Must save something new for next time, you know!)

 

Other Great Books We Read

My First Music Book

Lives of the Musicians

Froggy Plays in the Band

Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin

Getting to Know the World's Greatest Composers series (you pick a composer, there's pretty much a book for him)

M is for Melody

I Know a Shy Fellow Who Swallowed a Cello

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:

Encourage One Another from this album helped Gv learn our memory verse

This site has a great list of classical songs to listen to (and even download!) for little ones.

At first, I was a little put-off by Kids Meet Composers, but then when I realized that it was putting fun facts to different composer's tunes, I completely changed my mind. 

I still think the albums I wrote about here are genius, so we listened to all of them over and over again.

We also played Bibbidi Bobbidi Bach, Heigh-Ho Mozart, & Mozart TV constantly, as well.  I mention them a bit more in this post.

We also tried listening to my entire Classical Music playlist, but seeing as how it's 2.5 days of music, we have yet to get through them all.
 
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 your own playlist.

Videos We Explored

We watched this to focus on the nativity story.

Gv did "V" things on this site.

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

This site lived up to my usual BBC expectations - we both enjoyed exploring the sounds and stories together this week.

We checked out what different instruments sound like here and also here - which also had a fantastic section on composers, tons of games, and lots of information on the symphony!

This was so perfect and so cute, we couldn't help but watch it every day...and then I discovered this most excellent version (because, David Bowie!) and that became our replacement.

Besides Peter and the Wolf, the rest of this DVD was great, as well.

And this fancy set is equally fabulous.

And, of course, this movie was an absolute must - which we got to watch on our new tv, which a friend of the family blessed us with this week!

How We Played

We did a few things to learn more about the birth of Jesus:

We talked about our Celebrating the Season printable (since Christmas has not yet completely faded from our minds) and did a little mini-review of many of the days - see this post for more information.

We continued to play with the adorable nativity set that Gv got for Christmas (don't you wish your Grammy made you a super-cool play mat/carrying bag combo for it all to go in, too?)

Gv made another of this adorable craft (even though we just did it two months ago).

We tried out this cute idea to shine on the wall when we read our Bible story each day.



Since Gv still loves her "Joseph" craft stick puppets, I printed these out for her so she could have more.

Besides cutting out the characters and gluing them onto craft sticks to create puppets, we stuck the barn onto a paper bag and I cut out the interior to create a stage, kind of like we did for this week.

While she was playing with it all, Gv kept trying to stick the angel up on the top of the barn by the star.  I cut a double slit on the back side of the bag so that the angel would have a better spot.

Then, Gv insisted on my cutting "pockets" for the Holy Family inside the barn, as well. 

We also did several things (besides reading books) to correspond to our music topic:


Gv has loved to "play" my piano ever since she could stretch waaaay up on tiptoe to reach the keys, so we played around with some of the lessons on this site all week.

She's still definitely young for this, but enjoyed "learning" nevertheless.

We spent some time drawing to the music we were listening to, like this site suggested.

We went a bit of a different direction and drew on a chalkboard for this activity.

But mostly, we just listened all week and spent most of our time exploring all the different instruments and musical toys in our house.

Like the piano...

...and a keyboard...

...a guitar...

...a violin...

...and a big, old cello...

...G's saxophones...

...various noise-making toys...

...and that instrument pretty much everyone possesses, the voice:

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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