Welcome back to another installment of Latticed Learning! Today I'll be sharing the twenty-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
Jesus calms the storm (pages 334-339 in this Bible and 237-241 in this one)Memory Verse
John 14:2 - This is the eighth 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.
We post these on the fridge (and then add them to a mini photo album from the dollar store at the end of the week).
Until set two is out, you can find the first set of cards here.
Saint
We've gone through them all and will just continue to flip through our mini photo album of these these cuter-than-cute cards until we go through them all again next year.Letter
We've now gone through each of these, too. At the moment, we'll just finish out the year by continuing to talk about the letters and sounds and flip through our mini photo album of our phonics cards. You can get your own set of these phonics cards here.Topic to Explore
Jungle/Rainforest (despite the differences, these can be lumped together for Gv at this point in time)Shape
Octagon (I'm kind of going in order of vertices/sides and each one will last for several weeks.)Number
7 (Now focusing on writing the numbers, since our first go-round took care of counting and recognizing them).
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
The Great Kapok Tree was one I read every year in my classroom - it's always fun to drag out each sssssseñor found on the pages.
If Animals Kissed Good Night isn't about jungles or rain forests, but it does feature a sloth and her cub and is overall just an adorable book, so we had to read it.
Rumble in the Jungle is tons of fun - it's full of rhymes that highlight all the sorts of critters that can be found in the steaminess and I just love the colorful, happy illustrations.
In the Rain Forest has flaps to flip and cool textures to feel, along with rich illustrations of some of the inhabitants of this biome.
That's Not My Mom! is another fun flap book that is full of surprises on each page for little giraffe Gerry, who's out searching the jungle for his mama.
Other Great Books We Read
Animals of the Jungle
Rainforest Animals
The Umbrella
"Slowly, Slowly, Slowly," Said the Sloth
Little Monkey Lost
The Crocodile and the Dentist
The Goodnight Gecko
Have You Seen the Crocodile?
Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile
What Time Is It, Mr. Crocodile?
Who Is the Beast?
Red-Eyed Tree Frog
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:
In My Father's House from this album helped Gv learn our memory verse.
The Jungle King from the album I wrote about here is loads of fun.
With so many books about crocodiles, I couldn't help but include this classic in our playlist.
We pretty much had this whole album on a loop all week.
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.
The Jungle King from the album I wrote about here is loads of fun.
With so many books about crocodiles, I couldn't help but include this classic in our playlist.
We pretty much had this whole album on a loop all week.
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
This video has been popular the past few weeks.
We watched this video, this one, and this one to review letters and numbers.
Gv continued to explore different things on this site.
We watched the Magic School Bus episode In a Rainforest.
The Jungle Book is a favorite for all three of us, so we made some time to watch that as a family.
I'd never seen FernGully, so Gv and I checked it out one afternoon.
How We Played
We did a few things to learn more about Jesus calming the storm:I printed out this little foldable, then Gv and I colored it in and used it while I read her the Bible story.
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| This is the swirling storm portion of the foldable (hopefully you can see through all the multi-layer coloring!) |
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| This is where you fold the top down and Jesus makes everything calm again. |
I also printed out this so we could make our own rocking boat.
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| Color, cut, then stick a brad through and rock on, baby! |
I jammed one end of a blue towel under the couch, then had Gv get her little toy boat and shake the beejeebers out of it all, to simulate what it was like in the storm:
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| Beejeebers-level shaking makes for quite a fuzzy photo! (notice, however, that all of our typical "floor mess" in the background shows up crystal-clear!) |
I took an old glass spice jar, filled it halfway with oil, added a few drops of blue food coloring, then filled it up the rest of the way with water. I made a little boat out of two square stickers I found stuck to the bottom of my foot and set it off to sail in the bottle.
Gv rocked it back and forth, watching the boat floating in-between the oil and water layers. It was a big hit.
We also did several things (besides reading books) to correspond to our jungle/rainforest topic:
I printed out these masks from the Jan Brett site (I shrunk them down to print on one page, to conserve paper and ink) and Gv dropped them into an umbrella while I read her The Umbrella.
This puzzle was spread out on the floor, pretty much all week long.
We made some delicious rainforest cookies (because so many ingredients in them come from rainforests) that I adapted from this.
You can find my recipe for these remarkable cookies here.
We stretched out our kinks by contorting ourselves into the yoga poses found here.
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| This one's the sloth |
I put a different spin on the idea mentioned here. I knew Gv would enjoy tracing and cutting out her hands and feet more than messing around with paint (& so would I!), so we made this:
I traced her foot onto red paper and then both of her hands onto yellow, green and blue paper. While she cut all that out, I snipped out an orange beak. We glued everything down together (adding a googly eye, of course!) and hung the happy bird up.
I cut out a paper snake body, then handed Gv some colored-square stickers and told her to make a pattern. I wasn't sure that she understood the concept of "pattern," but it seems she did:
We made a little sloth on a stick. I traced her foot onto brown construction paper, then she cut it out. I cut out little arms and legs and claws and a circle for a face and she glued it all down, then drew on the eyes and mouth.
She went wild with the brown marker and colored in the craft stick, then we glued the little guy to his branch and sat and grinned back at him.
I created a vine maze by stringing green yarn back and forth through the kitchen cabinet, drawer and appliance handles.
Then Gv spent an entire afternoon crawling under, through, and over these jungle "vines" (and yes, she got tangled up and needed rescuing several times!)
We said hello to our paper plate snake from week 2. Yes, this little guy is still going strong, hanging from the ceiling fan in Gv's room.
We continued to play with the animal movement cubes from a couple of weeks ago.
I created this hanging rainforest to stick up next to our fireplace:
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| You'd think I could take two seconds and just finally wipe all that dust off the fireplace, but it's still there... |
It was pretty simple to do, but Gv thought it was the most exciting thing in the world. I just took two sheets of newsprint, taped them together, then added strips of brown construction paper for the tree trunks, green leaves and ground cover, and wound bright green pipe cleaners back and forth to represent vines.
I cut a dark green pipe cleaner in half and wound both halves around a pen to become snakes (I wrapped one around a vine and had the other dangle from a loop on another section of vine).
Three tiny red pom poms made an ant at the bottom and then we added some of our other little projects to the whole thing.
Tissue paper squares with pipe cleaner pieces wound around the middle became butterflies.
We taped the toucan up next to the top of the canopy and added the sloth here, as well.
This giant display proved to be quite helpful while reading many of our rain forest books during the week. Gv could walk over and point to the different layers that make up the rain forest, which was cool to see.
Finally, since anteaters root around on the rainforest floor, I printed out a page of ants, had Gv cut them out, and then showed her how to suck through a straw (anteater's snout) to pick them up and move them over to a container (the colander toy I shared here). This was a fun activity, but she definitely struggled with keeping the ant on the straw the whole time.
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| I can't share this printable because I used non-royalty-free clip art from my Print Shop software, but any ants will do (they'd even be easy to draw!) |
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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