Welcome back to another installment of Latticed Learning! Today I'll be sharing the fifteenth 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
King David (pages 186-193 in this Bible and 151-157 in this one)Memory Verse
Philippians 4:13 - This is the fifteenth song on this album, which I've raved about before. I also created this card:
We post it on the fridge (and then add it to a mini photo album from the local dollar store when we take it down). I'm always amazed how quickly Gv can say her verse, minus the reference, each week!
You can download your own copy of this card for free here! Want the whole set right now? Get them here.
Philippians 4:13 - This is the fifteenth song on this album, which I've raved about before. I also created this card:
We post it on the fridge (and then add it to a mini photo album from the local dollar store when we take it down). I'm always amazed how quickly Gv can say her verse, minus the reference, each week!
You can download your own copy of this card for free here! Want the whole set right now? Get them here.
Saint
Odilia (I know nothing about the lives of the saints, but when I saw these cuter-than-cute cards, I decided they gave me the perfect excuse to learn! They're honestly more for me than Gv at this point, although she can put the name to the card after having it up on the fridge and talking about it all week.)Letter
O (Print out your free "O" phonics card here!)Topic to Explore
OceansShape
Rectangle (I'm kind of going in order of vertices/sides and each one will last for several weeks.)Number
14 (Like I said in this post about the alphabet, we'll talk about all (well, maybe not all) the numbers every week, but I'm choosing one to focus on each week and you'll see some repetition as time goes on with a few of them.)Best Books We Read This Week
Fishy Facts not only has cool, colorful graphics, but great little tidbits of information on all sorts of underwater critters.
Sharks is typical Usborne wonderfulness: the perfect blend of child-sized facts in a visually appealing package. Gv and I both enjoyed reading this one.
Little Otter's Big Journey is a sweet tale of a little otter who gets separated from his mom and meets all sorts of other ocean critters before being reunited with her at the end. It's full of adorable illustrations and lots of love.
In the Sea is a collection of poems focusing on twenty different ocean creatures and unique, bold artwork.
An Ocean Adventure is another tale of parental separation (obviously a popular theme for the underwater sort). What sets this one apart are all the sparkly foil inserts on every page. This was one of the earliest books that really appealed to Gv as a baby and it's still one she enjoys flipping through quite often.
Kermit the Hermit not only includes rhyming verse, but tells the heartwarming tale of a curmudgeony crab who learns what it's like to give love to others.
Other Great Books We Read
Turtle in the SeaCoral Reef
A Dolphin is Not a Fish
Ocean Tails
One Lonely Sea Horse
The Underwater Alphabet Book
What's Under the Ocean
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:
This soundtrack was an obvious choice for the week
The album I wrote about here had a couple of really fun and appropriate songs on it that we enjoyed
This album also had some ocean-themed songs that we played
The album I wrote about here had a couple of really fun and appropriate songs on it that we enjoyed
This album also had some ocean-themed songs that we played
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 a playlist.
Videos We Explored
We did "O" things on this site.We watched this clip and a few of the others for the letter "O."
Gv watched this cute video. Even though the Bibles we're using don't cover David and Bathsheba, I figured it related and would help give her some background knowledge later on, when we do read about it.
I let Gv watch this movie (makes sense, right?) She has since requested to watch it every day...
How We Played
I decided to just focus on Psalm 23 for our activities, although we didn't do many, since we were still up to our elf ears in Christmas fun:We made the shepherd, sheep and palm tree from this cute set. We didn't even bother with using the toilet paper rolls. I just printed them on regular paper, Gv colored them, then I rolled and taped them. She ended up using them kind of like finger puppets, which I thought was a clever way to play with them. I can also see printing out the rest of the Nativity Set in the future, because I know she'd like to make and play with those, too.
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| Little tip: Always take photos of things immediately after finishing their construction. At this moment, the palm tree is missing. |
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| Found it! Here Gv's demonstrating the puppet quality of these fun cut-outs. |
We also did a few things (besides reading books) to correspond to our oceans topic:
We constructed this fun paper plate sea turtle. Pretty much because Gv had all things Nemo on her mind after watching the movie. I cut out some flippers and a head from green construction paper, then we glued them on and she cut out squares of green and brown to glue onto its back. Some googly eyes completed the project and she was all excited to hang her very own Crush up on the wall!
We worked together to create this fun scene with Nemo and Dory:
I painted her hand in orange and white stripes (but not the thumb) for Nemo, then two tones of blue with a stripe of yellow for Dory. She kept wanting to spread her fingers (since that's the way these hand prints usually go), but finally got the hang of keeping them fairly squished together.
She added a googly eye for each (although she kept wanting to give them two eyes, which led to this whole discussion of how fish eyes work), and then we cut out some green grass strips and brown and gray stones. We added some bubbles, she glued everything down, and then she hung up one of the cutest pieces of art yet.
Gv made this adorable seahorse at our playgroup. You can find all the directions here.
I printed these cute memory cards for Gv to cut out and match. Kimberly has all sorts of other neat ideas on her blog, so I'll definitely be poking around there more in the future.
I printed page 49 of this fun pack so that Gv could refine her cutting skills a bit. She's been cutting out our round circles for our Celebrate the Season trees each day, but I thought these little spirals would help give her some more practice.
I just loved this ocean I Spy game. Gv just recently discovered a page like this in a magazine from my classroom, so this printable was perfectly timed.
I downloaded this oceans pack and printed pages 7 & 8 of the Tot 1 collection as well as pages 4 & 5 of the Tot 2 collection. The zig-zags and loops were just right for where Gv's writing skills are at the moment.
But we spent the majority of our time this week making merry with all sorts of Christmas crafts:
We repeated the Christmas Tree and Reindeer Print activities from last year.
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| This year's version got an upgrade of googly eyes...which you'll see became the overall theme... |
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| Last year's trees. This year, Gv chose the stickers from the drawer herself, so the tree is pretty much entirely obscured by neon pink "Sign Here" stickers from my old Highlights Magazine teacher's kit. |
Gv made a little thumbprint candy cane:
We made this cute little simple Santa:
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| A review of triangles! Construction paper, pom poms and googly eyes help make this Santa jolly. I think he could use a little cotton around his face for hair and a beard, so we might add that final touch later today. |
We created a little elf puppet, although Gv wanted to hang him up on the mantle with the rest of her Christmas friends:
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| Add green buttons to the main part of the bag. Use the bottom of the bag for the face and glue on some hair and a hat. Then add elf ears to the back. Googly eyes and pom poms make this little guy more fun! |
She decorated her own gingerbread man at the library one day. The craft table just provided stickers for the face, but when we got home, Gv took it upon herself to add some googly eyes and pom poms for the nose and mouth.
We constructed this elaborate (but easy) snowman to hang on the wall next to the front door:
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| Glue together 3 paper plates. Add a construction paper hat, nose, scarf and mittens (trace around your child's hand to make them). Attach the mittens to large craft sticks and then glue them to the back of the snowman. Add 3 large pom pom buttons (or use real buttons), a line of little pom poms for the coal mouth, and two large googly eyes. |
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| Color the front & back of a paper plate. Fold the sides so they meet in the middle and glue them together. Trace and cut out hand prints and glue them to the back. Add a head, some googly eyes and then some hair. Gv used a glitter paint pen for the hair, but maybe some yarn would have looked better. She also added glitter embellishments to the angel's gown. I went for a singing look when I drew her mouth on, but she ended up just looking surprised. Maybe a simple smile would have been best. |
This might be our favorite decoration of the bunch:
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| Glue two craft sticks together, then glue a brown triangle and yellow heart to the back of them. Put your little Jesus on the front, at an angle. |
We also made glitter snowflakes out of craft sticks:
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| One stick was dark blue, one light blue, another silver, and the top one was a mixture of all the glitter we'd shaken off the other layers. |
We decided to hang this on our tree, so I added an ornament hanger (aka a paper clip) by hooking it onto some dental floss I'd wrapped around the back stick:
It was a busy week, but so much fun.
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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