Welcome back to another installment of Latticed Learning! Today I'll be sharing the twenty-ninth 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 walks on water and more miracles (pages 340-350, 357-378 & 405-408 in this Bible and 245-261 in this one)Memory Verses
2 Corinthians 9:7 & 1 John 4:19 & 10 - These are the ninth & tenth songs 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
BirdsShape
Octagon (I'm kind of going in order of vertices/sides and each one will last for several weeks.)Number
8 (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
Feathers for Lunch not only teaches about birds, but plants, too. I also like how it shows off the different feathers for each type of bird it highlights.
Have You Seen Birds? not only uses rhyme and excellent word choice to tell all about different types of birds, but the illustrations are really unique, too. Each one is composed from clay, which ends up being a really effective medium for a book like this.
Have You Seen My Duckling? doesn't have a lot of text (which I love, because it really forces you to pay attention to the details in order to figure out the story), but what little it does have is very repetitive. This is great for beginning readers - and Gv just loves searching for the missing duckling on each page!
If you've been a reader around here for a while, you probably remember that we love Boo to a Goose. It's a fun book to read, with silliness and rhymes and repetition so that the little ones can join in with you!
An Egg is Quiet is another book I've mentioned before, because it's just so pretty. Not every egg that's featured here is that of a bird, but most are and it's really interesting to compare the different sizes, shapes and colors of each one
Other Great Books We Read
The Birdwatchers
Buzzy the Vegetarian Vulture
Chick Life Cycle
Chick
The Chick and the Duckling
Make Way for Ducklings
The Ugly Duckling
Carolina Wrens
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:
God Loves a Cheerful Giver & We Love Him from this album helped Gv learn our memory verses.
This song was pretty appropriate for the week.
This album that I shared in an earlier post pretty great, too.
We've played this album for some of our other Latticed Learning weeks and it was perfect to haul out again.
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.
This song was pretty appropriate for the week.
This album that I shared in an earlier post pretty great, too.
We've played this album for some of our other Latticed Learning weeks and it was perfect to haul out again.
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 learned that we have access to our own ABC Mouse account - for free - when we use it at our local library, so we've been making an extra trip each week to try it out.
The first week, we just used the library's desktops, and besides not wanting Gv to use the headphones that the library provides, she had a difficult time maneuvering the mouse by herself.
The second week, I realized we could use our own device, as long as we were there in the building, so I installed the app on my Nook and she had a much easier time with it all. (Plus, we could sit off in a corner with the volume turned low and not have to worry about headphones.)
Be sure to see what types of learning apps are available at your local branch - just another reason to love the library!
How We Played
We did a few things to learn more about Jesus walking on water and some of His other miracles:First, since so many of the stories this week focused on healing, we made this simple craft:
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| Two band-aids make a cross. Couldn't be simpler! |
We modified an idea from week 24 to go along with Jesus walking on the water:
I folded the bottom of a piece of blue construction paper about a fourth of the way up, then folded it back down again almost all the way and stapled the sides.
This created two pockets, the back one for the boat (that one opened up) and the front one for the water-walkers (that one opened down). It also gave some depth to the whole project.
We used our Jesus and Peter puppets from week 25 and then I cut two slits in the top of the "water" so that the two would have a spot to walk on.
We used lots of imagination when an old sock became a fish puppet. As we read about Peter catching the fish with the coin in its mouth for the temple tax, we acted the whole thing out.
I know I totally could have made a better fish puppet for this, but it was good to work our imagination muscles (plus, I was lazy!) and considering the fact that Gv and I had to take turns telling and acting out this story ten times, I'd say it was still pretty successful.
I really loved this cute loaves & fish idea, but couldn't figure out anything we had around the house that could be the fish snack (no goldfish crackers around here, and even if I made some, I didn't think I could get them small enough), so we didn't do it, even though I thought it was adorable.
We did, however, stick five loaves of toy bread and two toy fish in a basket, just to hold onto for fun while we read the story:
I put together this slightly-complicated-but-cool Jairus daughter craft. I knew Gv would enjoy making her "rise" while I read her the story.
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| "Your daughter's not dead, only sleeping." |
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| "Wake up, my child." |
While I read the story of the blind beggar, Gv acted it out with one of her dolls:
She packed "mud" (play doh) onto her blind eyes, then washed it away so she could see.
Then we did several things to go along with the healing of the ten lepers:
First, I wrapped Gv in a white sheet, like a leper:
We made these little nesting lepers (the flap version):
We had to do some hand-tracing, somehow, so we did this:
As you can see, she did most of this one herself, so let me interpret it: I traced her hands, cut them out, and glued them down, then she drew blue eyes and a red mouth on each one.
That was followed by the addition of hair - and "they have to have beards like Daddy!"
Each hand got a band-aid, since all ten lepers were healed, but only one has the speech bubble saying "thanks," since that's all who thanked Jesus.
Gv colored in the page and we did the poem found here.
And finally, we sang this ten little lepers song.
We also did several things (besides reading books) to correspond to our birds topic:
We made the world's easiest bird feeder:
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| Spread peanut butter over the outside of an old toilet paper tube, then roll it all in birdseed. Tie it up with some string or yarn and wait for the birds to come! |
Then Gv made this colorful paper plate bird:
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| Fold a paper plate in half, squirt one side with glue, and cover it all with squares of colorful tissue paper |
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| Glue on a beak and googly eye, add some curled ribbon for tail feathers, and then fold (accordion-style) some paper for a wing (cut a slit in the plate to hold it) |
Of course, we had to spend plenty of time flapping our wings like a bird:
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| Lots of flapping going on here. Lots of flapping... |
I set up a variation of this idea for Gv:
I covered her kiddie pool with an old blanket, then we hunted up some sticks and twigs from the backyard to help build her "nest." I blew up a couple of balloon "eggs" and then she just hung out, doing the kinds of things birds do.
She had a blast snipping feathers out of construction paper:
I pulled out our bag of craft feathers and Gv matched them up to the birds in one of our books for the week:
She also just sorted them by color:
Then I grabbed the colander so she could do this:
And then I got a bag of buttons for her to do this with:
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| In case you can't tell, she threaded matching-color buttons onto the feathers |
Since the Feed the Old Lady box is still one of Gv's favorite things to play with (I made it for her way back in week 5!), I came up with this bird we could feed using one of our trusty greens boxes:
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| A construction paper head and beak, googly eyes and some craft feathers for flair. Glue it all down and then punch a small hole in the center of the beak... |
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| Then cut a pipe cleaner into thirds, bend the piece up a bit, and feed these "worms" to the bird! |
We spent some time in the backyard watching for birds.
I liked how age-appropriate this tally sheet was for the activity. I knew we'd never see any birds swimming, so I changed that one to "singing."
We got really lucky and witnessed a crazy bird fight. It was just like being at a hockey game or something.
Gv did this cute bird math activity, although I kind of completely changed it.
I printed out the numbered birds and she cut them out, but instead of clipping the appropriate number of clothespins to each one for the tail feathers, Gv glued on that number of craft feathers.
I really love how these turned out. This activity took a looooong time (in a good way!) and it was neat to see how Gv chose to arrange the feathers on each one.
Here are a few of my favorites:
Finally, since Grammy likes cardinals, we made this for her as a Mother's Day present:
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| What are all those specks? Why, glitter of course! Glitter adds a little pizzazz to everything, don't you think? |
(Grammy, if you're reading this before Mother's Day, pretend to be surprised when you open it!)
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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