Finishing up our creation book

So, we got our Creation book all done. I kind of cheated on the last two days. My kids can’t draw, and I don’t have a large collection of magazines to tear up for a collage. Or at least not ones that would help with what we needed, so what did we do?

STICKERS!

Who doesn’t love stickers? My kids certainly do.

So for Day 5, creating birds and fish draw a wavy line down the middle of the page. Then color the water and start putting stickers on.

 

 

 

Day 6 we just loaded up with animal sitckers. As you can see I meant that quite literally. Superman had a blast just putting stickers all over the place. Eventually the page ended up about an inch think. Okay, probably not really, it just seemed like it.

 

 

And that is where I let some control freak parts go, and let him put the bird on the wrong page because “Nests go in trees Mommy.” So, apparently according to Batman on Day 3 God also created 1 bird and a nest to go in the tree.

And for Day 7 when God rested we have a nice blank page. I thought about putting a picture of the kids sleeping, but I rested instead, and didn’t print it off.

Our Creation book is now done. I have put packing tape at the top of the pages and 3 hole punched them, and they’re going into our calendar notebook to keep and review frequently. I’ll get a post in about calendars later this week.

We had a lot of fun making it, and a lot of fun talking about the different things and discovering lots.

For more We Made It posts go to Ramblings of a Crazy Woman.

Preschool Corner

At first I didn’t think we did all that much in terms of great preschool activities last week, and then as I started posting I realized we did lots of great preschool stuff.

LIFE SKILLS

Watering plants, this is also science because we got to actually pick some of our vegetables this week

 

 

Getting ready to help clean the garage

Sweeping the garage. This caused a few fights because I didn’t have 3 brooms, only 2.

 

 

READING SKILLS

We played Bingo. I need to make several more gameboards. When I do I’ll upload them to share.

 

 

We matched letters as a game. I would give them a letter and they had to find it on the poster. This is wildly popular, and we also got to practice taking turns.

 

MATH

We counted animals, actually we counted lots of things.

We also used this activity to sort things. Depending on your state standards this is a math or science activity. Here it’s part of a math activity.

 

BIBLE

We’re learning about the Days of Creation. Learn more about that here.
I just love the look on Superman’s face, it almost says to me “Come on Mom, why one more picture?”

ART

We painted…….. For more about that see this post.

We also worked on our Creation book

Creation Days 2 and 3

So, we started off our learning about the Creation week with a bang! First we learned about light and dark in day 1 and then painted about it.

We kept up with our crazy Creation book, so here goes.

Day 2 God created separated the sky from the waters, so I followed the instructions in the “My Father’s World” curriculum to make the craft, and have suggestions for changing it if you do this.

Here’s what we did:

Get paper, blue and green.

Tear blue and green papers in half. Glue the blue on the top half and the green on the bottom. Then color blue all over the green paper. This didn’t turn out well.

Instead I’d suggest a piece of blue paper and you color the bottom half with paint and crayons. Coloring with the crayons first and then using water colors afterwards to do a crayon resist.

What did work for us: We added cotton balls at the top to represent the clouds that formed.

Day 3

So on Day 3 God made separated the waters from the land and made all of the plants and stuff. This takes a little prep ahead of time.

A couple of days beforehand pick some leaves. Find a nice big phonebook and stick them in there between some paper towels.

The day of gather cardstock, blue and green construction paper (use the other half of the sheet from Day 2), glue, markers, and a small cup or bucket of dirt.

Glue the blue paper on the bottom, cover part of the blue with the green for the land.

If you’re Batman, you need all of your green paper, and then all scraps of your brother and sister. It took a lot of glue for that all to stick down.

Now take your papers, a bottle of glue and go outside for the dirt. Paint glue randomly on the green area.

Then happily sprinkle as much dirt on your paper as you can.

Show off what you’ve done so far.

Then, while they’re napping, you come in with the super breakable plants, why did I pick feverfew? It’d break into little bitty pieces if I let them do this part. Spread the glue all over and put the little pieces of plants on. Actually I know why I picked it, because I think it looks like a tree on the paper.

For more great kid crafts go to Ramblings of a Crazy Woman.

For the last part go here.

Preschool Corner: our plans for the year

This year I’m actually using a curriculum. I’ve bought the “My Father’s World” Kindergarten to use with my kids. It’s intended for ages 3-6, so Princess is a little young, but I’m doing it more for the boys. With her I’m going to have her play along and she’ll do different workbook activities. I don’t think they’re ready for a super hard core kindergarten with lots of workbooks or something, but this seems like a good way to step up what we’re doing a little.

Here’s our list of themes for the year:

Sun
Moon
Leaf
Apple
Nest (animal homes)
Turtle
Us (five senses)
Dinosaur
Octopus
Water
Insect
Goat (farm animals)
cow (farm animals)
horse (farm animals)
elephant (wild animals)
penguin (wild animals)
kangaroo (wild animals)
zebra (wild animals)
rock
jewel
butterfly (life cycle)
frog (life cycle)
fox
vegetable
quail (birds/contentment)
yellow (colors)

I like that it includes a list of books and some activities, it also has a very good plan for getting kids to read. It kind of reminds me of “Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons”, I’ve seen people rave about this book, but it didn’t work for me personalitywise. I’ll also be supplementing with any and all cool activities that I’ve found on various blogs (I’ve become quite the Evernote addict). My plan is to post about what we’ve done a week later, rather than trying to frantically post that same week.

We’ll probably start up with sun in a week or so, it’s a boring post, but I thought it could be helpful to know what we’re up to in the near future. Or, at least I like to know what other people are doing.

For more great preschool ideas go to Homeschool Creations
For what other people are doing this year go to Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers

Open Ended Art: yellow and painting

We were going to start talking about the first day of Creation and how God created light and dark, so these dove-tailed together perfectly. I told them about how on the first day of Creation God created light and dark and separated them. Then I gave them yellow and black paint and let them paint their own masterpiece. They could use any of our painting materials. So we got some interesting ideas from it. After they finished their first piece I let them have as many colors as they wanted. The other artworks will be saved to use for wrapping paper.

Princess experimenting with a brayer

Batman used mostly black for his first painting with this small little spot of yellow. He explained it was the dollar store. They’re obsessed with it right now because that’s where they get to go for being dry all night.

Superman’s second piece was this super cool multi-colored masterpiece that was completely covered. His also was the Dollar Store.

Superman showing off his dry diaper

PART 2 of creation book.