Kindergarten Week in Review #11
This past week we had a blast with our Thanksgiving unit study. While we didn’t quite get all our subjects wrapped into it, a lot of our week revolved around it.
Of course, we made some great Turkey crafts. Here’s our cereal box Turkeys:
And here’s Madeline working on her Thankful Turkey, followed by the finished product (I helped Erik make one too):
We read a couple of Thanksgiving-themed fiction books (“Thanksgiving on Thursday” from the Magic Treehouse series, and “Kit Learns a Lesson” from the American Girl series). We also read a few non-fiction books about the Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving. I think my favorite of the ones we read was “The Thanksgiving Story” by Alice Dagliesh. Unfortunately I realized after I started reading it that our copy is missing the first couple of pages. I like it so much though I think I might buy another copy to have one that is complete! (mine came from a garage sale).
While we were reading some of our Thanksgiving books, Madeline colored some Thanksgiving-themed coloring sheets. We did a few other Thanksgiving printable sheets of various types as well, and we’ll be assembling them all into a book sometime in the next day or two!
Here’s where I found some of the resources and inspiration for our Thanksgiving study:
Free Activities from Creative Teaching Press (November/Thanksgiving download)
ABC Teach Thanksgiving Theme Unit
The Pilgrim’s First Thanksgiving unit at Hubbard’s Cupboard
Thanksgiving Printables at Itty Bitty Bookworms
Thanksgiving Unit Study at Ecclectic Homeschool Online
Pilgrims/Thanksgiving Unit Study by Cindy Downes
Besides our Thanksgiving study, here are a few other things we did this week:
Bible/Character: We read out of “Leading Little Ones to God” as well as covering our fruit of the Spirit, which was Gentleness. I think we’ll focus on Christmas related topics during our Bible time in December, though we will also finish up our last fruit of the Spirit too. Then we’ll start a new series of Character topics in January.
Reading/Phonics: We did a review lesson in Alphabet Island, and covered a special lesson about “Goofy G”. I guess I had totally forgotten or perhaps never learned that there is a somewhat complex set of rules as to when “Goofy G” should say which of his sounds. I had a bit of a hard time getting my mind wrapped around all of it first, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is hard for Madeline to remember. I bet there will be many phonics rules that will catch me by surprise as we are going through all the Alphabet Island lessons — perhaps not so much in our current book, but definitely in books 2 and 3.
Science: The next topic in our science book was Mammals, so we read several library books on the subject. This was also the topic at our co-op this past week. We took a field trip to the zoo today, and we had fun discussing different animals and whether they were a mammal, bird, reptile or fish.
Math: We started working on some simple addition — adding “+1″ to a variety of numbers, as well as reviewing counting by 5′s and having fun with the Tangrams.
We’re pretty much taking this week off from school for a Thanksgiving Break (Today was a trip to the zoo, tomorrow is new tires for the car and formal Christmas portraits for the kids, Wednesday is our day to cook and clean, then it’s Thanksgiving Day with my family at our house, followed by a trip to see Tony’s family)…we’ll be back to our regular school schedule on Monday, 11/30!