Syncopated Mama: Latticed Learning, Week 35

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

Paul (pages 488-503 in this Bible and 343-357 in this one)

Memory Verse

Romans 8:28 - This is the nineteenth 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

General math fun

Shape

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

Number

14 (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

One Was Johnny has been one of our favorite books for quite some time now - it's even one I can "read" to Gv while driving around in the car!

Ten in the Bed is a song we'd been very familiar with, but we hadn't read our copy until this week and it added a whole other dimension to the song.

Five Little Ducks is another favorite action song of ours - this book has fantastic little peek-through holes to engage readers as they turn the pages.

How Much is a Million? is great for helping kids understand the concept of really big numbers in a clever way.

Math Fables and Math Fables Too are the best Greg Tang books for early learners.

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:

All Things Work Together for Good from this album helped Gv learn our memory verse.

This album, this one and this one were perfect for this week of numbers.

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 short cartoon on Paul.

Then we watched this video, this one, and this one to review letters and numbers.

Gv continued to explore different things on this site.

We continued using ABC Mouse for free at our local library.

Be sure to see what types of learning apps are available at your local branch - just another reason to love the library so much!

We watched several of these Schoolhouse Rock videos for some math fun.

We also watched several of the alphabet songs on this channel.

How We Played

We did a few things to learn more about Paul:

First, we learned about Paul's conversion. We made a double-sided mask:

We left the unhappy side black and white, but colored his eye scales gray.

We fully colored in the happy side, the glued them on back-to-back with a craft stick in between to use as a handle.

We made this neat little craft, which shows how the scales fell off his eyes:

We made this a bit simpler than the original: I just shoved two paper clips through slits above his eyes and then wedged the scales in them.

To make the scales fall off, I just pulled up on the paper clips, and they fell off. It was so easy to do this, Gv could continue to put them on and take them back off again all by herself.

I also taped black construction paper to the inside of a pair of Gv's sunglasses, so she could see what it might have been like when Paul couldn't see:

Next, we talked about Paul's different missionary trips while looking at a map of them in our Bible. I got out a map of the United States and then we traced different routes we'd taken around the country on car trips together:

We read about how Paul and Silas were put into jail for sharing about Jesus, then we made a craft that combined this idea with this one:

We printed out the picture of Paul & Silas, Gv cut it out and glued it onto a sheet of newsprint. Then I folded a sheet of construction paper in half three times and cut a rectangle out of the center, along the fold. We unfolded the paper and glued it down to make the prison bars.

Gv ran over behind a headboard and said she was in jail, too:

Then we made a paper chain and talked about how it must have felt for Paul to have to wear them. She really got into the dramatic side of this one:

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

We practiced creating numbers first, beginning with bending pipe cleaners into a number and then threading the appropriate number of beads onto it:

We just used the same pipe cleaner over and over to make each number. If your child isn't ready to try making the numbers, you could just create a set of numbers yourself and then they'd be ready for threading.

Then we made numbers out of Unifex cubes:

And then pattern blocks:

Gv did a few of the squares on these number formation printables.

And then she spent time working with these sticks:

...which I'd made her along with some for the alphabet (& these puzzles), just to have as toys.

We did a few pattern activities - both free-form with the cubes and blocks above, as well as using counting bears and these printable cards:

We made some coin sticks:

Just glue play (or even real!) coins to craft sticks and label them.

Everything else we did centered on shapes (because we'd talked about them in previous weeks, but hadn't really done many activities with them).

First, we made this shape book:

Then we went on a shape scavenger hunt (like this alphabet hunt) around our neighborhood:

We also looked for shapes while doing our weekly shopping.

We built shapes using toothpicks, playdough, and these printables:

We built shapes out of cubes, pattern blocks and clothespins:

I had to help her with a few of these, but it was still great fine-motor-skills practice!

Gv counted up shapes on this printable:

I just act as scribe when we do something like this, so I was wondering if Gv would catch that other square on her own - which she did, but only after asking me if the buildings counted for the rectangles.

And then she did several of the pages from both this pack and this one:

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 35