Everyone is coloring the coloring sheets for the coloring contest, and hopefully I will join soon after I get the idea of the lesson plan prepared.
Thanks to Scholastic, we are pulling the inspiration for today based on the lessons they have put out for free. For the preschooler – Animal Babies and the first grader – Physical Science – Sound and Music. While these topics don’t marry together as well as yesterday, I thought we would roll with it and see how we could do the separate lessons on the same day.
Sticker Animals: Found these reusable sticker creations of animals in our learning cube (aka the storage cube that I put learning activities in) and started our day making creatures from shapes. Worked on shape identification while making the animals.
Chore: Doing double duty of figuring out what craft stuff we had, and to organize it, – our chore of the day was to go through our craft bins.
Sticker creations: The above activity led to the girls raiding the sticker bin while we were organizing. So, decorating pages with the oodles of stickers we have collected over the years. They “wows” and “ooooh”s coming from the table as they discover new stickers and add them to their creations is adorable. Working on fine motor skills and sharing – plus hoping we can mail these creations out to family and friends across the world after.
Creative Time: The Lunch Doodles with Mo Willems was a hit yesterday, and was requested to be done again today. So Day 2 of Lunch Doodles it is for FREE on YouTube. If you haven’t watched any, you should! He goes beyond just doodling and actually shared images from the personal drawers in his studio. He also validated the nervous feeling that the kids are picking up on.
Lunch: Turkey soup again – stretching that turkey we made over the weekend. I can see the appeal for bigger meals on the days off to make use of stretching those meals over a week. Added a handful of cheese added to the soup to create a French Onion soup like feel.
Virtual Field Trip at 12:00 PST: Back to the Animal Babies theme, we tuned into the Cincinnati Zoo again to watch and learn about the Ocelot. Per their website, they will be loading every video on the Zoo Home Safari page after each Facebook Live, and I really hope they keep these posted for future use.
PBS Kids: Loaded the “Counting Critters” Sesame Street episode for FREE courtesy of the PBS Kids app. This was purely done because I had to do a chart review for work, but finding an animal show from our favorite learning show was a bonus.
Exercise: It’s raining and windy outside – so dancing to random music from Amazon music for 30 minutes. Getting the mood-lifting endorphins going, and asking Alexa for random music is hilarious.
Scholastic Lessons: Divvied up the devices to do lessons.
Today was a much more relaxed day of crafting with a sprinkling of lessons, and the three of us enjoyed it. I’ll be diving into more resources available for free, making a long list, and then creating lessons for next week which I think will help.
Things we didn’t do but had planned to:
Flexibility is definitely key when it comes to this new found homeschool thing. There wasn’t a lot of time to prepare, buy curriculum or research, so still learning the flow and how best to do it. If the day had gone as planned, would have done these two things an addition to the lesson:
Science Experiment: Paper Bag Bang experiment from the 101 Coolest Science Experiments book. A simple experiment using a paper bag and cornstarch, we were able to discuss sound making.
Sound exploration: What family doesn’t have some toy that makes sounds? We used the drums and jingle bells we have to discuss tympani and sounds, in addition to rhythm.
