Back to Activities

After a month or more of busy days, out-of-the-ordinary trips, a week of swimming lessons, and host of other things that kept us from our usual morning routines, we're finally back to a low-key week, staying at home nearly every day. (Perhaps that's why I've felt such chaos within and without lately . . . )

Not surprisingly, we've been focusing on Independence Day. I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but I receive regular e-mails from MoneySavingMom. On a weekly basis or so, she includes links to "educational freebies," and whenever the printable packs look worth saving, I go ahead and download them to a "homeschool" folder on my desktop. All of that to say, we've been basing our activities this week on a 4th of July printable pack from 3dinosaurs.com. The pack was supposedly based on the book America the Beautiful: Together We Stand, which I accordingly retrieved from the library. In reality, the book is just the first verse of the song, America the Beautiful, but the illustrations are nice and the boys are always excited when I can sing a story instead of reading it.

Anyway. Yesterday Owen did some pre-writing practice, tracing lines (pages 2-7 of the tot pack, though he didn't do all of them). It was the first time I've had him try to draw a specific line. Levi did a flag color-by-number (page 29 of part two of the pack).

We also attempted to do a flag popsicle stick craft, which deteriorated somewhat when I discovered that 1) I have no natural-colored popsicle sticks, and 2) my alleged stash of star stickers only actually had six white stars remaining. Oh well. It was the first time the boys have used glue from a bottle, so if our flags are a little bizarre, at least we got some good instruction on how much glue is too much. Being 100% on glue-monitoring duty, I didn't get any pictures of the action, but here's the finished product:

Surprise. The new colors of America are red, blue, and yellow.

Today, Levi did a roll-and-count activity, of a sort we've done before out of a printable pack. I print out the die template, cut it out and tape it together. He rolls the paper die repeatedly and fills in a bar graph to see which picture got rolled the most. This pack was especially cool, though, and had an extended math activity, in which he determined all sorts of inequalities based on the graph (as in, you rolled two White Houses and five Liberty Bells; two is (circle one) < = > than five?). If that makes sense (pages 30, 33-34 of part two of the pack). He loved it, of course.

Concentrating hard on staying in the lines.

While that was happening, I was quizzing Owen on his letter recognition, using the Melissa & Doug Travel Hangman board, having him flip over the appropriate letter as I called it out. I'd guess he knows about 2/3 of them by name, fewer than that by phonetic sound. Silas got his first taste -- literally, of course, in some cases -- of the pompom container. He did not manage to push any pompoms through the holes in the lid, but he was very amused by watching me do it, and did transfer a few from one bowl to another. At any rate, both younger boys were occupied for a whopping fifteen minutes at the table, which is actually quite an accomplishment!

And the fun still wasn't over! When Silas went down for his morning nap, the big boys and I used pipe cleaners twisted together to paint fireworks with red and blue paint (idea from Pinterest, but originally found here). It worked better than I expected!

The finished project. Fun, huh?

And, don't you love how none of my cabinet doors hang evenly . . . 

Thus we have filled two mornings at home. Tomorrow we'll go to story time at the library, Thursday we'll eat patriotic toast for breakfast and attend a friend's annual cookout in the evening, Friday we'll do our usual extended family breakfast at Cracker Barrel. Everything feels relatively normal and calm, and I managed to sweep the kitchen floor today. Hooray!