Pourquoi Pas

We've been awfully busy making new school supplies these last two weeks, and when Ava and I came across these parts of the flower cards we thought "Why not?"  They are pretty, Ava loves learning French, so really Pourquoi Pas?  Indeed.

Three letter words

Cyrus and I have been having a lot of fun coming up with new ways to put three letter words together.   These two different activities work to build phonics and reading skills with out feeling like anything more than playing a game.  A game that we made together.

We first made a set of three letter word picture cards using images from the internet.  He chooses a vowel sound set, lays out the images, then puts the letters to build the word underneath.

a sound words: ham, dad, hat, fan, cat, bat, pan, bag

e sound words:  jet, hen, ten, pen, web, net, egg, bed

i sound words: pig, ink, lid, tin, pin, six, dig, bib

o sound words: cot, fox, box, log, mop, pot, dog, top

u sound words: sun, cub, mug, bun, jug, rug, nut, tub

With the same three letter word idea in mind we made these letter blocks.  Roll the dice, and place them in order (order of the rainbow) to build new words, or sound out the nonsense word.

Lemons

Our Meyer Lemon tree is a very happy, very productive tree.  We are so overwhelmed by the sheer numbers this tree keeps on producing.  Overwhelmed, but pleasantly so.

Fairies and Gnomes

 

first read

Something very magical happened in the early part of this year. 
Ava began to read whole chapter books.
Like a switch was flipped, she just turned on to reading. 
And she reads a lot. 
In the car, in bed, at the table, on the couch.
She's a reader.

Dinosaur Lapbook

Our first adventure into lapbooking was with dinosaurs.  Cyrus helped me with each step finding the items and information that we wanted to include in his lapbook.  (for more information about lapbooks go here)  There are so many fun (and free) printouts, and activities to chose from.

This project took a large part of our afternoon, and we all enjoyed it very much.

We included:
*basic definition of paleontology, and paleontologists
*graph of dinosaur length
*dinosaur memory game, colored by Ava and Cyrus
*paper skeleton puzzle
*t-book of reptile facts
*dinosaur printouts

White.

Black Tie Optional

Like I said, it's optional.

Small Stuff

To add to our alphabet box:
I ordered this group from Montessori Services. (posted about here, and here) I love these little language tools.  We've used them for quite a few activities, and have plans for many more.

And for our continent box:
I picked up this Safari Toob at the craft store the other day.  The little buildings work nicely in our continent boxes.  I have them paired with matching information cards that I happened to already have, and when I didn't have one I made one!