Bedtime For Frances Day 1, 2, and 3

We started a new unit, the book it's based off of is called Bedtime For Frances by Russell Hoban. The book is about a little badger named Frances who can't fall asleep. 

Day 1 was Tuesday, so we were a little bit pressed for time because we had Letter Day in the morning. After lunch and getting Ivan and Adelia down for naps, Lincoln and I did our first reading of the story. Lincoln was really into it, I think because it was right at his level. He's just started to say he's afraid of things in his room at night, and he's already a pro at stalling, and dragging bedtime out as long as possible. :) So I think he really identified with Frances. He asked a lot of questions. We talked a little bit about what badgers are, about how monsters and giants aren't real, and about how the wind moves things.

After that we build Frances's bedroom scene on the side of the fridge, using simple shapes. As we put the scene together, we talked about the different shapes we were using. These are the patterns I made for Frances's bedroom. If I were to do this again, I wouldn't trace the mattress onto white construction paper, I'd do it a color. Since our fridge is white, it's hard to see the white mattress against it.

And last, we read our poem for this unit, Wind on the Hill by A.A. Milne. I made this poster of our poem to put up on our preschool board.

Day 2 we got a little more done, and I was happy. After rereading the story we talked about the things Frances did before she went to bed and compared them to Lincoln's bedtime routine. We also talked about the song Frances sings to try and help herself go to sleep. We made a list of things we could give Frances that might help her sleep. Lincoln came up with a telescope, a baby, a teddy bear, shoes, a tree, and a cactus. He helped me write a letter to Frances explaining what we were giving her. Then he drew a picture of each thing labeled it, and he cut it out and put it on Frances's bed. (Lincoln also wanted to make a blanket for her, and to put the moth on the outside of her window.)

After that, we talked some more about the wind. In our read aloud time we've read a few books about the wind, so we brought those into our discussion. Then we made a wind vane. I found the basic pattern for that on pbs.org, but then I improvised a little based on things I had around here.

I made this pattern for the compass and the pointer. Then Lincoln cut out and glued the compass to a paper plate. Then we poked a hole in the bottom of a plastic cup, and stuck a pencil through. To hold the pencil in place we had a big round ball of play-doh inside the paper cup that we stuck the pencil in. Then we glued down the edges of the paper cup onto the plate. We cut slits in both ends of a drinking straw and inserted the pointer arrows, and then taped them down. Then we stuck a pin through the center of the straw into the eraser of the pencil. Ta-da! Wind vane. Then we took it outside to test it out. We talked about the points on the compass, and which way was north/south/east/west. We ended up drawing a little key on the driveway with sidewalk chalk. We drew a little house with an N under it for north, mountains with an E, a road with an S, and a tree with a W (because if you're sitting on our driveway, the house it to the north, the mountains east, the street to the south, and the tree in our yard to the west.) Then Lincoln could line up the letters on his compass with the letters in the key, and he would be able to tell me which direction the wind was blowing.

On Day 3 we started a lot of projects we didn't have time to finish. But that's ok, because they can go in Lincoln's projects folder, and he can pull them out to work on when he's bored, or when I need a minute to prep something. After reading the story, we talked about jobs (in the story Frances's dad tells Frances the wind's job is to blow the curtains), the wind's job, the job Frances gives to her teddy bear, what Lincoln's dad does for a job, etc. Then we got started with out activities for the day. We started making an alphabet book similar to the song Frances sings to put herself to sleep. We folded 7 sheets of paper in half and stapled the middle together to make a book with 28 pages. Then on each page, in the top left corner, Lincoln wrote a capital and lower case letter, until he'd done the whole alphabet. We will go back and make a simple sentence for each one (A is for apple, B is for bear, etc.) and draw pictures, or cut pictures out of magazines for each one. We will probably work on this project here and there, and it will take longer to finish than we will be spending on this particular unit, but that's ok. Next we talked more about badgers, and how they are omnivores, and that omnivores eat meat and plants. I found this activity online at homeschoolshare.com for free and printed it out. All we had time to do today was cut out the picture and glue them to the right words (and I made Lincoln figure the words out all by himself by going off of the starting letter, he did great!). After they dry we'll staple them together to make another book.

*Something weird is going on with the color/underlining of my links, sorry the look so dumb! I can't figure it out at the moment.