Hi! I’m Leslie- a homeschooling momma to a 5 year old girl and 21 month old boy. The 2 are as different as night and day. I share our adventures here to both inspire learning at home and chronicle our lives, because honestly, I never started the baby books and my kids will just have to look back on their childhood through this blog… ha! #keepinitreal
“Momma, can we learn about parrots today?”
Absolutely! I pulled out my bird bag from our Mother Goose Time: Family & Pets box.
Bam. Math games, craft lesson, even a book with sight words to begin our reading-all ready to go.
Add in the plethora of parrot/bird books on my shelf and we are set.
Since we had just listened to lots of songs while studying our memory work for Classical Conversations, I decided we needed some game time. So I started our bird day with our math game, Feed the Birds. I had a ton of these little bottles from my breast feeding days with Everett and they made the perfect containers for this game.
MGT sent these cute birds with numbers, tweezers and yarn (I used pipe cleaners I had already cut for Everett). All I had to do was put the little birds on jars and add some dry beans for the game. Although MGT suggested using number cards in our pocket cube, I have really loved using these big foam dice (also from MGT). They really help with one-to-one correspondence. Avaleigh tossed the die seeing how many pieces of bird food she needed to retrieve with her tweezers and which bird was to get that amount.
Everett didn’t use tweezers (although he wanted to) but he worked on his pincer grip and pouring.
Both kiddos had a blast and kept at it until all the food was given to the birds.
After a fun activity like that, it’s great to have some quiet time.
Our Literacy lesson was perfect!
Our new I Can Read book came with pointers and sight word cards.
The pointers I placed on a key ring (8 for a dollar at Dollar Tree), and
I grabbed a $3 pocket chart while at Target this summer! Perfect for the sight words!
I first went over the sight words with my girl and we practiced making the sentence “it is a…” and then used the picture card. After practicing our sight words, I had her open up the
I Can Read book: What Is It? and she began reading all on her own! I had to help her a little on the last page, but the words were unfamiliar.
We are really working on reading this year, but taking it very slow.
We read the book again, this time using our pointer to point to the word “is”.
I love how the very last page gives the kids something to do that is kind of like a brain break.
She was getting tired, so it was the perfect time for my girl to draw her pet,
our golden retriever Bailey.
“Why did you use orange?”
“Because that is the color of Bailey’s fur, momma,” Avaleigh said as she pointed.
“There wasn’t enough room to write my name, so I wrote it this way.” Yall, she wrote her name backwards. I’m really impressed.
After outdoor time, lunch, and putting Everett down for a nap, it was time to do our
Invitation to Create: Birds.
MGT sent us everything but the markers, glue, and outdoor materials.
We observed the picture of the birds and talked about them. Avaleigh decided she wanted her picture to look like the one provided (I am not surprised), so we went outdoors to gather sticks, leaves, and acorns.
“Momma, make a bird with me. You can make one and I can make one.”
Done. First she created “stairs” on her bird, then all of a sudden, my girl said,
“These are tears (blue lines) because my bird doesn’t have a momma.”
“My bird can be his momma,” I said. “Maybe they can be tears of joy.”
Later when Avaleigh told her daddy about the picture, she mentioned that her bird had tears of joy because he had a momma.
Her finished piece.
Love it.
Happy learning friends!
