Confessions

Of a neglectful homeschool mom.  I admit it.  Sadly I have neglected to spend enough time sharing the classic Nursery Rhymes with my child.  This idea smacked me in the face the other evening as I discovered a book called Crafts From Your Favorite Nursery Rhymes by Kathy Ross.

This week we have embarked on rectifying this tragic injustice.  Poor Bear has but a basic knowledge of classic Nursery Rhymes. 

Tuesday we created a Old Woman in the Shoe magnet. I adapted the pattern from the book. It was fun!

There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.
She had so many children, she didn't know what to do.
She gave them some broth without any bread;
And spanked them all soundly and put them to bed.

Bear was not overly impressed.  Maybe if we had discussed this poem a year or so ago but when we got to the point that she spanked them all soundly and put them to bed she thought that was a really rotten idea. 

Materials needed:

• Light weight poster or soda pop carton cardboard (we opted for the recycled stuff!)
• Brown, yellow, or orange construction paper
• Black marker
• Scissors
• School Glue/stick glue works too
• Magnet

Directions:

• Cut out a boot from the lightweight cardboard.
• Trace that shape onto your brown construction paper.  Cut out this shape and then glue it, carefully, onto the cardboard boot.  I found it worked best to have cardboard or thick card stock to put the magnet on and stick it on the fridge. 
• So after you have glued the paper on, cut out little squares for your windows and doors.  Glue these on and then use the marker to make window frames.  Next you can use your marker to also make the eyes on the boot.  If you want to get fancy you could add string for laces, but we didn't have any string handy.    Lastly, glue on your magnet and when its dry put it somewhere to enjoy!

Next we played a geography game of sorts.   We drew a plan of the house and then drew pictures of what went in each room, kind of. She hurried, as she often does when she wants to move on to the next thing.   I tried to relate it back to the old woman with a shoe and all her children.  Some questions I asked were:  How many rooms do you think she had for all her children?  How many children do you think she could fit in a house the size of your shoe?  Daddy's shoe?  I did this to engage her in the rhyme but also to make her think about what ifs....  if x is y then what if z is done?  Does it change at all? 

Later in the week we drew a picture of the state of Washington and put a picture of a house where we live, one where her BFF lives, A space needle where Seattle is, where Longbeach is we put a beach ball, a house where her cousin Toby lives, and whale where Orcas Island is.  We discussed how we live in houses not old shoes.

This is before she had trees and oceans on it.

Another activity we did is stitching a pillow.  We decided we would begin work on making a pillow for grandma's bed and we began work on this project this week, so we picked out some fabric and cut it out.  Over the next few weeks we hope we can carefully hand stitch it and put it together for a gift for Grammie.

We practiced lessons 4-7 in one of our reading program books, reviewing 1-3 from the week before.  We talked about bubbles.  We learned how to blow bubbles with bubble gum and I think I created a monster!  WOW!     For science we talked about weather and even started work on a weather related project. A weather station.  This is a Daddy and Bear project together to daily record findings on a calendar.  So far no rain, and the temperature every morning has been 25 degrees, and 28 degrees.  We check it at the same time each day.  This will be our January and February Science.  In mid March we will begin talking about plants and bugs. 

Next week, Jack and Jill.  I wonder what fun projects we will do with that!?

Linking up today (1/24) with: