Co-op Sick Day

October 28th, 2013

Our kids came down with a mild case of Hand, Foot & Mouth which we decided not to share with our co-op. Since we were missing a day of learning about plants, we headed outside for a nature scavenger hunt.

We saw lots of great plants, leaves, rocks and bugs, but this was the highlight: we now have TWO Catherine the Wooley Bear Caterpillars. One for each hunter. 

For Halloween I changed up the "Roll a Pumpkin Game" we played last year. Instead of one die, we used two. Seth would have to add the two dice together to find out what to draw. Great addition practice and fun watching Seth's pumpkin get covered with all kids of crazy things. 

I decided to use the white board to help Seth practice reading some of his sight words in context. He's really good at reading them off a list but tends to stumble over a few of them when they're in a sentence. I tried to make it fun for him, but he still doesn't really enjoy reading for school. I'm learning to kind of back off and just give him lots of chances to pick things up on his own. Comic books are great for that (we love Tiny Titans), and we also love the Fly Guy books. 

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs!

July 12th-August 10th, 2013

We had a lot of fun learning about bugs this summer!

We went on a bug hunt in our house:

(I put the bugs there myself and they still creeped me out)

The mighty hunters, ready to go: 

Loading up their nets: 

Nets full of bugs: 

Once the bugs were all found, we sorted them into piles: 

Then we graphed them by lining them all up and comparing the numbers: 

Finally, we matched our bug flashcard pictures to the piles of bugs: 

We also went on a real bug hunt outside! 

Our coolest discovery: 

A hoard of caterpillars devouring the leaves of this tree!

But the best way to learn about bugs is to have one as a pet:

 

Seth adopted a wooly bear caterpillar which he promptly named "Catherine"

We learned what this type of caterpillar eats and what it likes as a habitat.

Eventually, our caterpillar made a cocoon:

We deposited the cocoon outside where it hopefully produced a moth one day!

And, because we love caterpillars so much, we made our own:

Catherine wanted a sad caterpillar: 

Bugs are a lot of fun to learn about, especially during the summer!