School Lately

 Well, it's November. How did that happen? Last year, in November we made a paper turkey and wrote down things that we were thankful for on his feathers. This year the Grateful Gobbler returns. Our turkey this year is much improved from last year's model, and it's hanging on our toy room door, where we see it all the time. It's been really fun (and sometimes funny) to hear the things the kids come up with to be Thankful for.

On top of the Grateful Gobbler this year we're also doing an awesome Thanksgiving countdown that I found on Sugar Doodle. "Valerie writes, 'Here is a fun THANKSGIVING THANKFUL COUNTDOWN.  This is a fun activity to do with your family.  Each day you draw a scroll of paper from a jar which gives you a thankful activity to do.'" Just to give you an idea of what the scrolls say, so far the thankful activities we've drawn have been, "I am thankful for my eyes. Watch a special movie together as a family." We watched Happy Thanksgiving Charlie Brown. "I am thankful for modern prophets. Read a talk from President Monson together as a family." We actually watched his opening address from conference where he announced the new Provo Temple. "I am thankful for books. Go to the library and check out books about Thanksgiving." We're going to do that one tomorrow, since Thursday is our normal library day.

We've been reading The Story of Thanksgiving by Nancy J. Skarmeas at least once every day. It's a nice, simple, explanation of the reasons we celebrate Thanksgiving. I like that it specifically focuses on giving thanks to God for all that we have. There are a whole bunch of books similar to this one that explain different holidays, events in history, and famous people from history. We've checked out The Story of the Statue of Liberty from the library before, and it's equally good. I think we might have to start collecting these.

Today we made hand print Mayflowers. I thought they turned out so cute. I got the idea (along with lots of other great ideas) from one of my favorite websites homeschoolcreations.blogspot.com she has a new Thanksgiving Preschool pack up, that I might have to go take a look at and see if we want to add it into the plan for this month.

I embellished her idea a little, and instead of cutting the clouds out of paper and gluing them on, we dipped cotton balls into grey paint and made the clouds that way.  I thought these turned out so cute, I'm probably going to do them again next week when I host Little Boys Club.

And we've still been doing our reading and writing and math stuff. It should occur to me more often, when I have an idea, that someone else has most likely already had that idea, made it better than I could ever hope to, and shared it on the internet. :) I've been spending a lot of time recently trying to make little activities to help Lincoln with his budding reading skills, and low and behold I do an internet search and find that someone has already done it for me! I found this awesome series called Explode the Code, and the first book is right at Lincoln's level. When I saw it, I remembered Aaron's sister telling me about it a year or so ago, but since we were far off from being able to use it, I'd tucked it away in my mind for later. Well now it's later. Here are some samples of the pages with the activities it has.

So far we love this book. It works on Lincoln's reading, as well as writing, comprehension, and spelling all at the same time. Lincoln does about two pages a day out of it, and that seems to be about right for him.

And occasionally, Lincoln comes up with a project of his own that he wants to do, and of course, I encourage that as much as possible. Today he wanted to make a card for our little neighbor girl who is his friend, to tell her he was thankful that they were friends. :) A little while ago he wanted to build a road for his cars, but first he had to draw up the plans and all the directions for how to make the road. (Bring the dirt, smash it down, paint the lines, etc.) He worked on it for a long time, and it looked great when he was finished.

And that's how school has been going for us lately. What cool crafts/activities are you doing for Thanksgiving?