C is for Caterpillar (and colors and cars...)

This week we studied the letter C!  We've been trying to make body letters each week but we got a little behind.  So here is "Cc," Ss," and "Pp."  Hopefully you can figure out which is the uppercase and which is the lowercase hahaha. 


On Monday we studied Colors.
We got this great emergent reader from here and had a blast creating colorful hair for each page of the book.




For our song this week, we had to sing "C is for Cookie" and watch the Sesame Street video here. (BTW, this website, kideos.com is great for watching Youtube videos, but it screens them all for kids and you can choose if you want it to link to Youtube or not. That way your kids can surf without getting into trouble.)

Our wall words this week were "like" and "there." Since Monday was "color" day, we found this great emergent reader, "I like colors."


Other little readers we read this week using our sight words were "I like to Munch," "I Made a Face," and "I measure," all from this book.

For Family Home Evening we discussed "The Turkey with the Terrible Temper." I printed off a turkey from google images in each color and then we put different colored feathers on the brown turkey as the story progressed. The story kept the kids' attention and I think they enjoyed it.

We're still studying Moses in our Old Testament reader. Some activities we did this week relating to what we read came from here and here.

Tuesday we began our study of "The Very Hungry Caterpillar."






We learned a lot about the days of the week, sequencing, counting, science (life of a butterfly) and nutrition. There is a ton of free activites online for this book and I had a hard time narrowing down what we were going to do!!

I found quite a few different "letter C" activities devoted to caterpillars.

Here they are using little rocks to fill in the C and the caterpillar.  They loved using the rocks to create letters free form... even if it wasn't the letter C.


After using the rocks, they used jumbo push pins to punch holes making the letter "C." All 3 kids LOVED this. 

After reading the book, we made a poster of the sequence of the book. Here's the boys after they'd cut the pieces out... using WAY too much glue.


Our snacks and lunch that day were all from the book. Morning snack was all fruit, lunch was the salami, sausage, cheese, watermelon, pickle selections, and afternoon snack was just sugar. The kids had to taste everything, and there were (obviously) some things that they loved much more than others!


Other activities based around caterpillars, cars, and the letter c:

Caterpillar letter C tracing page, Youtube link to the video version of the story, word search, lacing sequence activity, cake letter C tracing page, Draw things starting with C page, What begins with "C" book, C is for Car tracing page.  I also ripped out a few pages from The Never-Bored Kid Book, Ages 4-5.  The car JJ is holding is a little wooden thing I picked up from Michaels the other day for $1.  Both boys loved coloring their cars and spent the rest of the day crashing them into each other.

Our lapbooks this week were full of activities:

They colored the Caterpillar shaped Emergent reader, glued the lift and paste activity together, stamped the number to create caterpillars, and glued together the life cycle of the butterfly (can't remember where I got this one.)  Each week they also do a "My First Letter ___ Book."  This week was no different with the letter C.

Because one child is also learning English (including the alphabet and numerals we use in our language) he's a little more behind than a child who has grown up speaking and hearing English his whole life.  I decided to enroll him in an online program to help him with phonics and language.  I chose https://www.time4learning.com/ and he's been enjoying it.  Each day he plays "games" on the computer which review more of the alphabet and sounds.  After 15 minutes of "lesson games" he gets to do 15 minutes of "real computer games" of which he always chooses www.pbskids.org.    The program also came with a curriculum for extra help at home, which I've been using.  It has extra worksheets and ideas for lessons that I can teach him.  Each day I've spent an extra hour with him working on this while the other child's responsibility is to watch VV.  It's worked out okay so far.  We've also included a TV show into our daily schedule (gasp!)  Every morning they watch "Super Why" on PBS and LOVE it.  They participate in the show so I think it's fun for them.  Each day they follow the Super Readers through an adventure and learn about letters and sounds.  Plus it gives me time to prepare a snack and fold laundry.  :)  I think homeschooling is all about tweaking and changing everything to suit the needs of the kids and that's what we're doing. 

Next week, Grandma & Bonka are coming!!  We'll try to squeeze in some study about Thanksgiving... but we're also going to be prepping for the new baby.  So after this week... we're taking a few weeks of "vacation" (hahahaha) from school as our family grows!