This week we changed our approach to homeschooling, we've switched to themes for the week. This week was Truck Week. First of all, I learned it's really important to choose a theme the kids are actually interested in! That being said, it was still a success. Here are some of the highlights:
The border of this dump truck is all the lower case letters. Clothes pins have upper case letters, he has to match them. He was very successful at this activity, which surprised me, this kid knows more than he's letting on! This was repeated several times since he's working on lower case letters still.
I made a huge parking lot/road system in the kitchen and dining room. Each parking spot was numbered or lettered. For Ruth I put spots with numbers like 76 as well as some sight words. Then I'd have the kids find a specific kind of car or truck and have them park it in whatever spot I selected. What I loved about this is that the kids came back to it over and over on their own.
We created a little town that was on fire so the kids could rush their fire trucks over there and save it, which was especially fun since we went to the fire department last week.
Then we added to our road system by creating letters that Will had to trace...he was over the car thing at this point and opted for the paint brush! We also made a junk yard where they had to pile up specific numbers of trucks on the number it was labelled. And Ruth had to help the junk yard boss by counting how many cars he needed to get different amounts of tires.
Then I cut up a bunch of foil with letters, numbers or sight words that the kids read to me and then molded onto small cars...and then we had a monster truck event!
Using pattern blocks to fill in truck outlines I made. Then they created their own monster trucks with the pattern blocks. We also did this with paper squares, rectangles and circles.
Our favorite library book about trucks was "Minerva Louise and the Red Truck," really great, silly and so fun even if you aren't in to trucks.
And finally we blended up water and dish soap for a few minutes to make "snow" for the trucks to slide around in.
We also had lots of friends to play this week which is always good. I finished reading 3 books this week as well, "The One and Only Ivan," "Milkweed," and "12 Years a Slave." Last week I read "The Book Thief." All of them made me cry. I also made myself a maxi skirt and Ruth a pink rainbow cape and Will a yellow rocket cape. Brad fired his front desk manager and has learned a whole ton about the hotel. And the kids practiced gymnastics and piano every day this week. It was a good week. If only every week were this fabulous!
