Nature Hike, Playing with a friend and Lessons

Jewelweed

Ryan and I went on a nature walk Monday afternoon to collect some acorns for our Math gnomes lessons. My friend Kim introduced me to the fun of popping jewelweed seed pods. When you lightly squeeze the pods between your fingers it pos open and curl back - it is pretty cool. Here is a great website about it : http://www.wildmanstevebrill.com/Plants.Folder/Jewelweed.html. I showed Ryan this on our walk and you should of seen his face after it popped in his hand! He was hooked we spent a long time hunting for seed pods.


Our collection of acorns, jewelweed seed pods , a feather and a leaf starting to change colors before it fell off the tree.


Our old neighbor friend came over this afternoon and they had a great time playing dress up and working in the play kitchen.



LESSONS:
This week we started our intro of upper and lower case letters. Ryan knows all his letters already so this is a review plus we will be learning the sounds of each letter and eventually work on word families.

This week is the Letter Aa and Bb. I read the story of the Magic spindle monday afternoon and then the next day we drew a picture to go with the story: You may notice that the capitol A is in the haystack and the lower case a is the girl's head.

I could not figure out how to turn my picture right side up.
We also worked on "writting" the letter Aa in different ways - here it is with the silks. We also used the playdough wich eventually lead into Ryan making several Aliens while I made a forest of trees.
For Math gnomes this week we used role playing and puppets.
On monday I pretended to be the Elves that needed help counting and sorting the acorns to help the animals of the forest. Ryan wore a different color scarf coordinated to math each of the math gnomes and he became that gnome while I asked for his help to add the acorns - or divide them, ect... He enjoyed that.

Today we used a puppet show scenario with the same idea as above. Ryan also wanted me to write problems for him on the chalkboard for him to figure out and then he would write the answer in his "book" - that was his idea.



I am soo happy that our lessons are going well so far. We spend the mornings for lessons and then the rest of the afternoon is for the park, nature walks or visiting friends.