Home-SU-Cool

Every unit excites me in different ways (granted.  There are some units, that I just do. Not that much stuff). Some units, I LOVE the fact there are great crafts or fun activities. Others (like the last) I love the hands on. This unit, I am stretched in my spiritual learning. Because I never cared about the dinosaur. I AM A GAL! I never cared when they lived, if they still lived, and how that contradicts (or not) with the bible. I shrug it off with "God knows and I don't" But here comes a time when I'm confronted with it and I got to teach it to my kids and I better learn it. And boy, learn it I did and how grateful I am! Just by reading this AMAZING article by Ken Ham who made the whole dinosaur thing SOOO easy to understand, my faith grew a notch! Can you believe it! My God is awesome! His Word is true! Do yourself a favor and read it. Anyhows, here's the unit plan (besides the usual Language drills)   1. Teach about the dinosaurs well. I did

The drawing blindfolded game struck Ian cos he draws like a thousand trains everyday. And yet he was not able to draw it well when blindfolded. He loves the food pyramid and started drawing his own. The Ice Cream math game was appropriate for Taste Day.  I added the Number words to it, cos he has finished learning the words. I like it that we learnt at the end of the 6 days how wonderful we were made! It really reinforced that well

I really like the different easy experiments in this unit. But the kids got a little wary of me by the "Taste" day cos they have smelt some really smelly stuff and now they're tasting things like vinegar (AGAIN??!!!) haha. They really like Tactile Pudding Letters. For obvious reasons. And we REALLY liket The Eye Book and the Ear Book.  So cute! And oh! I forgot! There's a Sesame Street Ernie/Elmo Song that HAS to be heard in this unit. So appropriate and great!

This is a week I'm glad we have 6 days for the unit! It's a really fun unit with lots of hands on and Science stuff. We're doing less worksheets for this unit. Here's our booklist The shape of me  The ear book Eyes, nose, fingers and toes : a first book all about you  The eye book Super senses  Here are my hands  The luckiest one of all  Super Senses has all the fun experiments. I wish we had more Christian books cos this is a great topic to talk about God creating us. Also, I realized There is the Nose Book too! (I didn't reserve it).  And we read this one ( Hands Hands Fingers Thumb ) before and we LOVE it! (didn't borrow it this time) We also have a set of books on the body by Scholastic (a gift from a friend) that I thought is pretty good. And here's the plan: TOUCH (Day 1)   What's in the bag (Feel an object and guess)  Ice/warm water experiment (from Super Senses)  Picture cards page  Tactile Letter (Write alphabet on pu

Some extra things I thought interesting to share. 1. Extra books We found these Little House on the Prairie books that we like in the library! They are a nice find. 2.One morning I had to put the youngest baby down for nap. So I asked the brother and the sister to do the morning board on their own since they have been doing it for a while already. They were drawing and playing then. It was a real surprise to hear the brother say (after some minutes that I was in) "Come, Colleen, let's do school" and they did up the morning board all by themselves! so proud of them. (besides the mistake of "4+1" they did a great job!) 3.Our dear boy turned 5 today. It was soooo wonderful to have him in our lives and he is the pride and joy of his parents! 4. So a review on this " Pretend and Play Snack Shop " toy we bought him. It is WONDERFUL!!! You really get to learn A LOT of things!! (and our boy REALLY likes to open a "shop") Math, social skills

The most interesting of this unit turned out to be the Tortoise and the Hare story. We read it many times. We dramatized it and the kids ADORED it. It was super funny when E (my 11mth-old) crawled along and became the small turtle. We did a retelling of the story and I put up the verbatim version of Ian's retelling. In his broken English. Very funny. Besides the normal drill, we *Learnt about the turtles online *made a turtle art (which was wrong before, cos I put the front legs as back legs, but we rectified it) *did some prewriting practice and also the turtle puzzle and the turtle color match *put up a piece of paper that said "Ian, you perservered" and "Colleen, you perservered" and everytime I seeing them doing so, I write it down. This unit we were quite intentional about putting that character trait to practice.

We enjoyed a couple of fun things in the Nest Unit   *We used the Nest counting cards to do Math at different level. C counted the eggs and put them in order (more or less). I played addition with Ian using the cards and he found them real fun.   *We ate Bird's Nest. Go wiki it if you don't know what it is...you might be grossed out though. BUT! It's a VERY expensive snack (a gift from my mom) and a valuable high-value tonic for the Chinese.  *We enjoyed the Mickey Mouse Sticker Book given by a friend. It's very colorful, fun and can be used for different levels too! I like the reusability of the stickers as well.  * We used the alphabets and spelt words.  *I think our favorite books were Best Nest and Baby Bird' First Nest.