Syncopated Mama: Latticed Learning: Week 7

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Welcome back to another installment of Latticed Learning! Today I'll be sharing the seventh week of our journey with you. You'll get a chance to see what we did, the resources we used (click here to see what we're using week after week), and hopefully come away with lots of fun ideas for things to do with your own little one!

Bible Lesson

Joseph (pages 71-91 in this Bible and 61-67 in this one)

Memory Verse

Matthew 6:9-13 - This is the seventh song on this album, which I've raved about before. I also created this card:

to post on the fridge each week (and then add to a mini photo album from the local dollar store when we take it down) and I'm amazed that Gv can say this first verse - minus the reference - by herself already!

You can download your own copy of this card for free here! Want the whole set right now? Get them here.

Saint

George (I know nothing about the lives of the saints, but when I saw these cuter-than-cute cards, I decided they gave me the perfect excuse to learn! They're honestly more for me than Gv at this point, although she can put the name to the card after having it up on the fridge and talking about it all week.)

Letter

G (Print out your free "G" phonics card here!)

Topic to Explore

Farms

Shape

Ellipse/Oval (I'm kind of going in order of vertices/sides and each one will last for several weeks.)

Number

6 (Like I said in this post about the alphabet, we'll talk about all (well, maybe not all) the numbers every week, but I'm choosing one to focus on each week and you'll see some repetition as time goes on with a few of them.)

Best Books We Read This Week

There are lots of great farm books out there and it was really difficult to choose just a few to highlight for you, but I think I managed to whittle down the list a bit.

Pop Up Farm has some different animals than the usual group you always find in the barnyard, which makes the cool pop-up pages even more fun.

My Little People Farm is one of the best books for bringing along to a dentist appointment - it will keep Gv's attention for as long as it takes the hygienist to turn my Cabernet-stained chompers back to sparkly white Chiclets again. It's already become a long-standing favorite of ours.

Barnyard Dance is not only fun to read, but was the inspiration for the game you'll read more about below. I just love Sandra Boynton's spunky illustrations!

Russell the Sheep has been one of my favorite children's books since I began teaching and I've been having so much fun sharing that love with Gv. It's another one whose illustrations make me smile.

Wolf! is one that I'd never read myself until this past week, but since it focuses on farm animals who love to read, I can't help but love it! Have you ever heard of it?

Songs We Played By

I went through all the children's songs on my iPod and created a playlist just for this week. Here are some of the best selections from our list:

Our Father in Heaven from this album helped Gv learn our memory verse

I Got Six from this

We listened to plenty of this Andrew Lloyd Webber musical album, which brought back memories of playing with the Donny & Marie dolls at my Grandma & Granddad's house.

There were lots of songs that fit our farm theme on the Sandra Boynton albums, with Barnyard Dance being an especially great choice.

Two albums from this post, Ralph's World and Birds, Beasts, Bugs & Fishes Little & Big have lots of catchy farm songs on them.

And so many more, but I'll let you search through your own music collection to see what types of songs you can add to a playlist.

Videos We Explored

This video matched right up with our Bible lesson.

We did "G" things on this site.

We watched this clip and a few of the others for the letter "G."

This video fit perfectly for the number 6.

How We Played

We did lots of things to learn about Joseph:

We made a colorful coat out of a grocery sack and strips of tissue paper:

Tip: don't cut the neck hole as big as I did, because it kept sliding off her shoulders.

I created a mini book for this story, but haven't had the chance to get it past the sketch stage yet, so I'll come back and add it when it's all finished. Gv has enjoyed reading the rough version of it, so I know she'll be happy to get the completed book soon.

I printed and cut out these cute figures, then Gv glued them onto large craft sticks and we used them as puppets each day to act out the Bible story. We also grabbed them whenever we listened to track 3 of Joseph & the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, lining them up in birth order to shout out the names of the tribes of Israel:

We created a dream catcher out of a paper plate, construction paper strips, and stickers:

This is the back. Just cut out the center of the plate, then glue colored paper strips across the opening, in a criss-cross pattern.

This is the front. We decided to decorate it with star stickers, but you could easily make it fancier with all sorts of things like paint and glitter. You could even glue some small beads to the front of the "web," but we didn't catch any dreams yet in ours.

I also created a Fat & Skinny Cows Dream activity. You can read all the details over here at this post, but here's a little preview:

We also did a bunch of things (besides reading books) to correspond to our farm topic:

I made a batch of homemade applesauce, which was insanely easy and delicious (learn how to do it here).

We visited our local zoo (for free!) and spent plenty of time petting some farm animals:

Other great field trip ideas (that just weren't in our budget this year) are to visit a farm, pumpkin patch, or corn maze.

We reminisced about making butter at the state fair this past spring:

If we'd had time, I would have gone ahead and done this again here at home. Here's a link to some directions for how to do it.

We made this simple chicken noise maker.

Notice how she's in her state fair pig racing shirt? We like to be coordinated with things around here!

We pulled out this hand-me-down toy, grabbed some small containers and popcorn and delivered "feed" to all the animals.

I just used a transparency marker to write the numbers 1-10 on cups like these, put a scoop of popcorn kernels in a bowl, and told Gv to count out the proper pieces of grain for each container. Then she loaded the containers onto the back of the truck (one at a time) and delivered them to all the different spots on the farm.

I came up with this cool paper plate chicken:

First, fold a paper plate in half. Then cut out a small triangle beak from yellow construction paper and trace and cut out your child's hand, using red paper. Fold the thumb down to make the wattle and the fingers make the comb. Glue the paper to the plate:

This is the back

Then, turn the plate around and add a big googly eye. The weight of the eye will pull the chicken down so it looks like it's pecking for food!

Pull your chicken noise maker back out to add the sound effects to this little friend while you play!

I made Gv a batch of dirt dough and let her plant some pony bead "seeds" in it. I would have totally just taken her out into the yard to dig around in the real dirt, but our lawnmower broke and I was afraid I'd lose her in the thigh-high grass!

This dough was so easy to make. Just take a scoop of baking soda (How much dirt dough do you want? Use that much.) and add a few drops of different food colors (I used blue, green, yellow and red). Add small bits of water (only like a teaspoon at a time) and mix it up with your hands. Keep adding water and food color drops (I added more red to get this shade) until it achieves the consistency and color that you want.

Put your dirt in a container within a container to eliminate mess. Better yet, throw down your handy shower curtain liner first, or do this activity (with beads that can't fit down the drain) in the bathtub. Your hands will be stained after mixing and playing with this dough, but it all washes off with just soap and water.

I printed out these funny little characters, lopped off their heads, and then Gv glued them to paper bags to make farm animal puppets. I also cut the ends of the bags down so they would better fit her small arms.

"Cluck! Cluck! Cluck!"

We played several rounds of the Barnyard Dance Animal Action Dice Game that I created. Look for the details and your free printable in this post, but here's a little sample:

"Bow to the Cow"

I pulled out this ancient farm puzzle for Gv to play with:

How ancient is this? It was mine when I was little! It was also the first puzzle Gv could do. She still enjoys it, even though it's too easy for her now, because she'll use the pieces for dramatic play.

Even though Gv wasn't in a coloring mood, I printed out pages 2 & 3 of this cute pack because I knew she'd be all over the gluing aspect. I didn't know if she'd be able to match the numbers and glue everything down on all her own, but she surprised me.

I did the coloring and cutting, but Gv did the rest! She loved peeking in the barn doors to find the cow.

Then I printed out pages 4 & 5 of that same pack, because Gv went wild with the scissors and paper scraps we'd used already. She's been fascinated with cutting for a few weeks now, but I'd just shown her how to make a snip with the scissors and how to hold the paper so she wouldn't cut her hand. Then I just let her do whatever she wanted, which was to just snip off little bits of paper at a time. However, I realized that she was enjoying all that scissor fun so much, maybe she was ready to continue cutting along a line with the scissors:

...and voilà! Now she can cut! I just had her do her typical snip, then I held her hand and said "push" to move the scissors along to the next spot. We did that first line together, then she did the rest on her own. By the time she'd finished these two sheets, she could cut the lines cleanly!

After being so surprised by her cutting skills, I printed out pages 2 & 3 of this other cute pack and showed her how to trace the dots on these pre-writing pages:

Notice the snip on the right side of the page? Well, I should have put the scissors up before I handed her this paper, because she was all still in cutting mode and started in immediately on this sheet.

I slid the sheets into cheap page protectors and gave her both thin transparency markers and thick dry erase markers to use. Both come off easily, and she enjoyed the different effect each one had on the page.

We made a paper bag scarecrow out of some of Gv's clothes. The bonus with this activity is that we now have a cute fall decoration to display in our entry!

I filled a pumpkin cookie jar with black beans. If I remember to do it, I might change it out for lentils, popcorn and white beans to make it look like candy corn.

After all that pre-writing practice, I decided to have Gv draw the face on by herself. She surprised me again!

Lesson learned today: never underestimate what your child can do, if you give them the chance!

We stuffed the head with plastic grocery sacks and used rags to stuff the scarecrow's body. Yellow tissue paper became the hair, because I was too lazy to pull down the box of yarn from the closet shelf. I actually think I liked how it looked better than I would have liked the yarn.

I remembered that I had these foam pig shapes from an addition and subtraction card set I'd had in my classroom, so I pulled them out, added number labels to a large egg carton, and let Gv fill in the "graph."

You could also do this more simply by drawing a grid on paper, then having your child fill in the number spots with stickers!

And, of course, we spent plenty of time playing with this beloved toy:

Why are the critters all covered with band-aids? Why, I'll tell you!

Toddler time-occupier tip: I needed to pay the bills, which meant that I needed to give Gv something really exciting and new to do to take up all that time, and it had to be something she could do completely on her own. So, I grabbed a handful of cheap dollar-store band-aids and let her fix them all up.

To be honest, this was actually totally Gv's own idea. She was playing with the barn and told me the sheep got hurt and needed a band-aid. She asked me for one and I figured, why not, but then when she was done bandaging up that woolly patient, she declared that the goat also needed a band-aid. Hmmm, I thought, I see where this is going, and brought her a big handful. It kept her occupied for the entire time I was doing the bills!

Looking for all the great posts associated with this concept in one place? Check out my Latticed Learning page here!

What's your favorite thing that we did this week? I'd love to hear! Either leave a comment below or email me at lisahealy (at) outlook (dot) com.

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Latticed Learning: Week 7