L- Lentil FIAR

We had a ton of fun with our letter L week! We LOVED rowing the book “Lentil” by Robert McCloskey! We experienced with several new things, the best of which was playing a harmonica!

We did several activities to get the girls familiar with the letter L. This was all pretty much review for both of them but it was a chance for RJ to really actually start practicing writing a letter. We used the letter puzzle from COHS with our magnetic blocks.

We practiced making letter “L”s with our magnastix.

And we practiced making letter l’s with the notebook from our magnastix set.

RJ traced L’s.

And she traced and colored the letter L sheet from her tot school notebook.

We did a scavenger hunt to work on the letter L sound and found things from around the house that started with the letter L and lined them all up with our alphabet soup words.

We continued with our Raising Rock Stars Preschool and Kindergarten curriculum with our letter L verse: Matthew 5:16- “Let your light shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven.” Last year MK just learned “Let your light shine.” But both girls were able to memorize the entire verse this time around. I’ve been amazed at their memorization skills and big help has been setting the longer verses to musical tunes.

MK gluing the words in order for her verse.

RJ being camera shy measuring her verse with her length.

Practicing our verse one morning, we busted out our Melissa and Doug birthday candles and also sang “This little light of mine.”

RJ gluing her verse craft for RRSP.

For All About Reading this week, the girls had a ton of fun painting their Llama and then gluing yarn all over him for hair!

MK enjoyed some hands on work with syllables with this AAR lesson. She had to jump for each syllable of the word. She already really grasps syllables so we played this one with RJ just for fun.

RJ again used her gems this week to count syllables of the words from her RRSP cards. This exercise has been the best at helping her grasp the concept of syllables.

We made lizards out of our lowercase letter l sheet from COHS.

We used another lapbook/ unit study from Homeschool Share this week. We didn’t really “lapbook” it this time because I got lazy but we still enjoyed doing a lot of different activities.

MK practiced handwriting by tracing this sentence from Lentil.

We made American Flags on paper. The book Lentil focuses a lot on Patriotism in the small town of Alto, Ohio. We noticed that there were a lot of American Flags in the middle of town in a couple of their pictures. The girls love pointing out American Flags when we are out driving around town so it was easy to relate back to that throughout the week.

The highlight of the week for me was the harmonica. I just HAD to have one before ROWing this book. I picked one up a couple of weeks ago at a local music shop and had been stowing it away in anticipation. RJ LOVED it. She carried it around everywhere she went trying to become an “expert” like Lentil. She even carried it in the car with her. (Why did I let that happen?!)

The girls pretended to whittle like Old Sneep using bars of soap. (I’m pretty sure he was their favorite character in the book….go figure….the grumpy antagonist in the story.)

RJ was trying her best to look grumpy while she did it….but was just having too much fun to act that part!

It then occurred to me that the girls have never really used a bar of soap. I know…absurd…but I’ve always just bought pump soap. So I filled 2 buckets with water and put all the shavings and the bars of soap in the water along with some dishes and toys to “wash” and they had a great time! (And got super clean in the process.) Also as an interesting sensory experiment side note…..I left these buckets sitting out all afternoon. When I went to clean them up in the evening, all the soap had congealed and made this very slippery goo out of the water. I begged the girls to play in it but they were a little freaked out by it. I bet some kids would love that though!

The girls colored little maps of Ohio from the lapbook and also counted how many states away we are from Ohio.

RJ colored some little maps of Ohio as I got too lazy to use that particular sheet for it’s intended use.

We did our states and capitals puzzle just mostly focusing on matching the pieces to the shapes they fit in and then we pointed out Missouri, and Ohio and “traveled” there. Then we spent some time talking about and pointing out the other states we’ve been to.

We used The Usborne Flip-Flap Body Book this week for a lesson on taste buds. Because Old Sneep sucks on a lemon in Lentil, we expanded on sour and the rest of the taste buds through a little experiment.

We talked about the different taste buds, how we experience taste, send signals to the brain, etc. The girls did not really grasp it all, but were still very interested.

I set out a plate using coffee to represent bitter (it was REAL strong!), pretzel for salty, lemon for sour and sugar cookies to finish off with for sweet. The girls kept reviewing what the 4 tastebuds were before we dug in to guess which one each food represented.

Here is salty pretzel.

MK with bitter coffee. “Bitter mom, that’s bitter.” Perfect response!

Sour lemon. I was laughing so hard at their faces RJ asked to go look at herself in the mirror while she tried to pucker.

And the sweet reward of a cookie.

We talked just a little bit about fractions. I’d intended to do this with lemons and then make lemonade…but by the end of the week I was falling off the wagon hardcore. So I pulled out our Guidecraft fraction action puzzle and talked with the girls about whole, half and thirds. They both really caught on to the concept of halves so that’s a start!

We reviewed several vocabulary from the book. The words we focused on were, citizen, expert, alley and grumble. Below the girls were making a city (which later somehow turned into a Chik Fil A) I put some houses out beside it and made a little alley to reinforce that word for them.

I made lemon scented play doh and the girls enjoyed playing with that several times this week. Below RJ was practicing the spelling of her name by cutting the letters out with cookie cutters.