Syncopated Mama: Latticed Learning, Week 33

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

Appearances & Ascension (pages 459-472 in this Bible and 333-339 in this one)

Memory Verse

Galatians 5:22 & 25 - This is the seventeenth 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

Structures & architecture

Shape

Reviewing all shapes

Number

12 (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

Cross a Bridge was always a favorite in my classroom. It's all about different types of bridges and even gives examples of where you can find some of them.

Look at That Building! is by the same author as Follow That Map! and it's just as fun and informative - a great introduction for children.

Iggy Peck, Architect - not only is this a fun rhyming story about a boy who loves to build, but it showcases over a dozen of the most famous structures ever built. (I loved this book so much, I may or may not be secretly reading it myself while Gv naps!)

The Three Little Pigs: An Architectural Tale - I thought this book was simply genius and it's the one Gv wanted me to read the most out of our stack. It's the traditional tale - with an enhanced ending - but what I loved most about it was how each page was filled with clever architectural details (famous buildings, furniture, etc).

Building on Nature is a mini biography on Antoni Gaudí that highlights his most important works. Gv enjoyed seeing that I had photos I'd taken of pretty much all of the buildings this book introduced her to.

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 Fruit of the Spirit from this album helped Gv learn our memory verse.

Across the Bridge (2 versions) from this album was appropriate.

Building Bridges from this Hap Palmer album was great, too.

Strollin' Down the Road by the artist I talked about in this post was another addition to our civil engineering focus.

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 not only worked for last week, but this week, as well.

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 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 Jesus' appearances and ascension:

First, I traced Gv's hands (you know how much she loves that!) and we used a heart punch to show the spots where the nails had been, since that came up during our readings on Jesus' appearances after the Resurrection.

This prompted Gv to ask why Jesus did this for us...

Since our Bible talked about how Jesus told the disciples to throw their nets on the right side of the boat after a night where they caught no fish, Gv did some "fishing" with a kitchen spider while I told her which hand to use (to practice right and left, although she's known that for a while).

This craft reminded me of something we did back in week 17, but it was fun to make again while we talked about The Great Commission:

Then we made several things to illustrate Jesus' ascension:

Gv enjoyed the Zacchaeus craft in week 31 so much, I figured she'd enjoy this reversal:

This simple windsock was fun for Gv to flutter behind her back while running around the house shouting, "Jesus! Jesus is alive!"

I quickly hung it up on the mantle after G and I had to rewind our episode of The Mentalist for the fifth time because we still couldn't hear what Jane said.

A sheet of white paper taped into a cylindrical shape with this glued onto the front, then tape some strips of tissue paper to the bottom and you're all set! So easy!

Poor Jesus was probably worn out after Gv sent Him up and down, up and down half a zillion times while playing with this cup craft:

Going up...

I know this photo is fuzzy beyond belief, but it should still give you a better idea of how to create this craft - just glue some cotton around a plastic cup, then punch a hole in the bottom to thread the yarn through. Tape the Jesus printable to the end of the yarn and then pull Him up, up and away.

We also did several things (besides reading books) to correspond to our structures/architecture topic:

We first made houses for the three little pigs:

Straw

Sticks

Bricks

Then we spent some time building with all sorts of different materials:

Craft sticks and clothespins

Corks

Cups and craft sticks

Mega Blocks (and regular blocks, but I guess in addition to taking a bazillion fuzzy photos this week, I also forgot some!)

Empty toilet paper tubes and random ribbon spools

Straws and Play Doh

Toothpicks and cranberries (this one was far messier than I'd anticipated - be prepared for stains!)

In addition to the books we read this week, we looked at this site and these cards to see some famous world structures.

We did this fun paper tower test. It was so easy and I can already tell that it will be one Gv requests a lot in the days to come!

We used the same set of books for each test. The cylinder held 8, the rectangular prism held 6 books and the triangular prism held only 2.

The triangular prism has some extra folds because Gv was trying to "fold it myself" and copy what I was doing to fold the rectangular prism. The extra edges might have affected the test's results, but I figured it really didn't matter for us today and decided not to waste another sheet of paper!

Then we did this awesome bridge test with some blocks, two sheets of cardstock, and some glass stones.

This will definitely be an activity to repeat with Gv when she gets older. She's still a bit young to come up with new bridge designs on her own, but she really enjoyed her job of carefully placing the stones on the bridge!

A two-block bridge failed with 3 stones

Doubling the block supports up helped, but only allowed us to add one more stone before failure occurred.

This bridge held all of our stones, although I'd bet that it would fail with just one or two more. There are three groups of block supports, with two blocks side-by-side for each (6 blocks total).

It took three block supports on each side to hold the arch up (that's one strong arch!). I think this might have held more stones if we'd been able to make the supports wider, but as we only had 6 of these red blocks, the stones just slid right off the sides.

This one (2nd sheet of cardstock folded like an accordion) not only held all of our stones, but it was the most stable.

We cross quite a few bridges when we head to the mountains each summer, so I'm anxious to point out the different designs to Gv, now that we've done this test!

Finally, we did this activity to illustrate how foundations work. We obviously don't ever have any snow around here and I didn't feel like digging up half our yard for the dirt, so we just used rice:

After our paper tower test, I thought about trying this with both cylinder blocks and square columns to see if that made any difference, but then the oven dinged and my stomach told me to eat dinner instead.

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 33