Syncopated Mama: Latticed Learning: Week 32

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

Holy Week (pages 427-458 in this Bible and 303-339 in this one)

Memory Verses

Proverbs 15:3 & 17:22 - These are the fifteenth & sixteenth 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

Woods/forests/meadows/bunnies

Shape

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

Number

11 (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

In the Forest is similar to a book I shared back in week 28 - full of fun flaps and textures to explore.

Bambi's Fragrant Forest is one of my beloved books from childhood. My favorite page? The one where Bambi smells the sage.

Bunny's Noisy Book has the most adorable little bunny in it - the illustrations just make you want to go pinch somebody's cheeks because they're so cute!

Little Bunny Follows His Nose - I just shared this in my Top 5 Favorite Children's Books post, so obviously it would wind up here, as well.

Little Mouse and Friends is a sweet book about a little mouse who wants to do something nice for her grandparents.

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:

The Eyes of the Lord and A Joyful Heart from this album helped Gv learn our memory verses.

Two songs from this album, The Cat & the Bunny and Here's the Bunny matched the theme of the week.

The song Mister Rabbit from both this album and this one were great, too.

Over in the Meadow from this album was one of our favorites.

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 covered pretty much every aspect of this week's Bible story.

We watched this video, this one, and this one to review letters and numbers.

Gv continued to explore different things on this site.

This movie, sad as it can be, made sense for this week, as well.

We learned that we have access to our own ABC Mouse 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 headphones with it, 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, 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 so much!

How We Played

We did a few things to learn more about Holy Week:

First, I printed out this so that Gv could make a clothespin donkey:

I loved how she insisted on using an extra Jesus from one of the crafts below to ride it!

Next, we did some hand-tracing and made this palm branch:

Just stick a bunch of green hand "fronds" on a couple of craft sticks and your little one will be waving for hours...

...which Gv then spent plenty of time waving at Jesus riding on his donkey:

Such vigorous waving, she blew Him right over!

Since one of our Bible stories centered around the widow's two mites, we hauled out the balance to help illustrate it:

Gv had to hold the balance for the photo...but when it was on its base, the effect was much more drastic.

We filled one side of the balance with all sorts of (play) coins (These were plastic.) Then, we placed two real pennies on the other side and talked about how since they were all the widow had, they were worth more than all the other surplus coins.

Next up was washing the disciples' feet, which meant that Gv rolled up her sleeves and acted it out with her baby:

We had some bread and juice to remember the Last Supper:

In remembrance of Him...

When we talked about how Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, we wrote the names of all the people Gv loved on a piece of paper and then proceeded to plant kisses all over it:

I'd thought Gv would have fun putting on lipstick and kissing the paper, but she ended up being scared of the lipstick and wanted me to do it. :/

We got out some random play doh, rolled it into two ropes, then intertwined them to make a crown (I saw the idea here). I handed Gv a few toothpicks, told her to break them into pieces, then she stuck them all over the crown to turn it into Jesus' crown of thorns:

We made this neat display:

Our grass didn't grow, but it still turned out neat.

Then this paper plate craft:

We did this a bit differently than the original. I just folded the plate in half, then cut out the entrance to the tomb and glued Jesus inside. We stapled the plate shut and added a brad to help rotate the stone.

Gv was not happy with where we had to glue the angel - she said he needed to be sitting on the stone, but I couldn't figure out where to situate him and still be able to open it.

I printed out these characters (these are really cute, too), Gv cut them out (I went back and trimmed them) and then we glued them onto craft sticks to have Easter puppets to play with:

These were a big hit and she continues to play with them daily. She was also very happy to get everyone situated where they belonged - notice that the angel is on the stone!

Gv matched up the letters for this sheet:

We did two Easter sequencing activities:

This one was our favorite:

But this one was cute, too:

I really liked this felt banner idea, but decided not to make it. Instead, we did another handprint craft that I based off of this.

A little Holy Hand (& Foot) Print book...

A footprint donkey and hand palms for Palm Sunday.

Feet with water to signify washing the disciple's feet during the Last Supper.

Hands showing the nail marks to stand for the crucifixion.

A dark tomb to represent His death.

A hand- & footprint angel to announce that He Is Risen!

We also did several things (besides reading books) to correspond to our forest & bunnies topic:

We made these shape bunnies together:

These took us a couple of hours to make (that was a good thing!). I cut plain white copy paper into the various shapes & ears, then cut pink inner ear pieces and skinny black strips for whiskers. Gv used an old scrapbooking punch to make the pink heart noses, then she glued it all down along with some googly eyes. She also felt the need to add some crucial details to a couple of rabbits, and as you can see, the rectangle bunny was already well played-with by the time I got them all arranged for this photo!

I printed out these bunny opposites cards and Gv found all the matches:

"Fast" & "slow" were pretty difficult to discern on the cards, but luckily those were the final two to match.

Gv liked using them for a game the best - we set one of each pair out in front of her, then turned the rest face-down in a draw pile. Gv would take a card, then find its match.

We also played a game with these bunny positional printable cards:

These cute cards are really colorful, but we were in cheap mode today and just printed them in black & white.

We set them all out in front of her, then I asked her to find "the bunny who is..." (and picked a position) I really liked how this exposed her to a few new positional words than we'd discussed before.

We headed outside to play a variation of this "rabbit hole" game:

Oooh, a mid-air shot of my little bunny bouncing into her rabbit hole!

We just threw the hula hoop on the ground and then took turns jumping into it - first on two feet, then one.

While we were outside, we tramped around the yard for the nature hunt found here :

Luckily, we have a big backyard full of most all of these outdoor things.

Gv also made some bark rubbings of our backyard trees:

She was so tickled at the difference between the oak and the palm tree - and even how the rubbings of different types of oaks turned out!

I printed out this game:

I think this is the 3rd time we've played one of these graphing games and she announced right away that the "porky-pine" had the most. I love how she's learned these math concepts without any type of direct instruction, but just by playing a game for fun!

Then Gv completed a couple of pages from this pack and one of the pages from these math printables:

This was just the 2nd time we'd done a sheet similar to this, but Gv knew exactly what to do without any direction from me - she had it all cut and glued down before I could blink. I was surprised that she knew the owl right away (I think I'd choose a better representation for the "o" sound, because this one is really the dipthong "ow." See this post for more on phonics differences like this)

Here's where using something like a worksheet occasionally can be helpful to me - notice that she started to circle the "6" instead of the "9" - that tells me that she's still working on distinguishing between these two written numbers when they occur in print. I hadn't noticed this before, so it was helpful to be aware of.

Again, I'm glad I have her do an occasional worksheet (which she still thinks is fun, since they're pretty rare) to "assess" some skill that I'm wondering about. She started to choose several "same" pictures on this one, which tells me that this skill could use more practice.

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 32