Word of Wisdom/Nutrition/Food

This past week we discussed the Word of Wisdom/Nutrition/Food. Our Family Home Evening lesson was based off the Scriptures4Kids/Sugardoodle FHE outline for August, found here.  One of the kids liked doing the coloring activity. 

After the lesson I introduced a simple little system to help them choose healthy snacks.  I found the idea here:

Source: polishthestars.com via Nancy on Pinterest

I used the printable provided on her website and also made a few more magnets for other snacks that we like at our house.  Now when the kids are hungry, they can choose a snack off the magnet board and SHOW me what they want.  This has been extremely helpful with a child who doesn't speak yet, and another child that has only spoken English for a few months.

I am able to change the snack options depending on what we've got in the house.   (Pictured to the left is VV showing me that she wants raisins.)

I also found some nutritional online games that my 4 year old enjoyed playing. The ones we played dealt with sorting foods into their food groups. The games were a little too advanced for him, but we played them together and he really enjoyed it. 

I found another website that had some wonderful printables about the food pyramid and nutrition.  I printed off a few of those and used them as I explained our new "system."


During the week we also finally put batteries in our grocery check-out toy.  The kids had a blast purchasing food from each other.




We also went to a children's museum where they had a pretend store.  The kids enjoyed putting food in their carts and pretending to shop.


They also picked "apples" from the apple tree.



They really loved this because we'd been reading this book which talks all about the apple harvest.

My kids really enjoy file folder games. I found this one that started a dialogue about food coming from the ground.

All 3 kids loved playing with it.


Books we read this week:
Floating Bananas
Green Eggs and Ham
The Little Red Hen
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
Big Bird's Day at the Farm
The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Fishers of Men

We began our week with a Family Home Evening lesson about being missionaries. We read from Matthew 4:19, "And Jesus saith unto them, follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." We talked about how to be a good example and tell others about Jesus. We used this monthly primary theme as our discussion guide.

We also talked about how some the disciples were fishermen. That was about the extent of the attention span of the kids that night, so we moved on to an activity.

I had some foam fish that I'd bought from Oriental Trading Company a few years ago. We cut out some shapes and glued some "scales" on the fish. We then put the fish up on display. This was the begining of our "home aquarium."


The kids were excited about fish because we'd gone to a nature center a few days before.





They loved looking at the fish in the aquarium.


They also loved looking at the turtles outside in the lake.

During the week we (of course!) watched Finding Nemo.














I also made 2 new file folder games that focused on shadow matching. 

and

(Click on the pictures to download them.  They're free!)  My kids love these file folder games and I think they do some great teaching.

I found these great fish clings for $1.00 each at Target so one day we used them to enhance our "home aquarium."






They were something like this:














The kids loved sticking, and re-sticking them to the windows.

We also ate fish for dinner one night and the kids loved that too!!

We couldn't go without reading books about fish. Here's what we had in our bookshelf:
















(which has a story from The Little Mermaid, "There's No Friend Like a Fish."

















In all, we had a great week learning about fish!

Back to School Week

We began our week with "back to school" pancakes.

The idea came from here.

This was the boys' last week of summer so I thought it would be good to prepare them a little for school this week. Our Family Home Evening lesson was great. I got the lesson idea from here:


I also found some great printables from here that we used in our lesson as well... like this:

Our snack was super yummy!



One day I read them The Story of Johnny Appleseed found here:
http://www.applejuice.org/johnnyappleseed.html

Afterwards, we drew pictures of Johnny Appleseed.  The boys really enjoyed it.

(This was actually the first time I've seen JJ draw a stick person.  I was impressed.)



Throughout the week, the boys enjoyed new file folder games.

Found here.


And a few sorting/sizing games.

found here.

And here.

And even a matching game found here.

We attended JJ's preschool orientation and tour one day. A few days later we attended Kindergarden orientation for SS. That night we made jigglers, cut out the letters of their names with cookie cutters, and enjoyed eating them.

On Friday we drove SS's bus route while singing, "The Wheels on the Bus."

They are excited to begin school tomorrow!!

We also did some simple coloring pages found at http://www.abcteach.com.


We also read these books: