Creative-Mommy

Well all, I am back to finally finish the bug unit I started and to post our summer fun of Oceans. As you know, Elizabeth's school has become the bane of my existence these days, and the last couple of weeks have been no exception. They have been very needy, sending home lists of things for her to bring to school. Just last week she ended up taking 4 bottled drinks, 2 packaged snacks, 1 "birthday cake", 1 pkg of paper plates, one jug of kool-aid, 1 pkg of napkins, and one bag of silverware for three days of activities. I am still not entirely sure why they even bother with school the last two weeks, as they are just play days pretty much.

Anyway, the photo above is the cake I made. I won't bore you with details, just suffice to say that it was one of those cases of everything I tried to do I didn't have the ingredients, and yet God came through for me in a big way. The crumbs on top were chocolate cookies I made, then there were two chocolate cakes and chocolate (powdered sugar-less) frosting. One of the richest cakes I have ever tried but very tasty. And even though the recipes were all ones I had never tried before the cakes turned out perfectly.

I also managed, on a very tight budget, to find plates, drinks etc very cheaply! YAY! Anyway, with the rest of our insect unit, we spent one afternoon at the park catching bugs and drawing pictures of the ones we caught.

Over the past weekend, it rained here pretty hard. The girls went into the backyard to play, on a clear part of Saturday and made an awesome discovery. There, near a fire ant mound, were tiny, fuzzy bright red bugs that looked like spiders. Well, it took a while to figure out what they were, but come to find out they were Velvet Spider Mites. Apparently they only come out here after a hard rain (which is not that common) and they eat all manner of pesky bugs. Jason tried to get pictures of them both with a cell phone and with my camera, but all the pictures were too blurry to use. However, we were very pleased to have gotten to see this rather rare occurrance. And what a fun end to our Insect Unit!

We learned about dragonflies one day over the weekend. Actually it was really cool, because Jason sat down with the girls to do this craft and mini-book (both pulled from http://www.lapbooklessons.com/FreeLapbooks.html. He took the girls online while their crafts were drying to learn important dragonfly facts like how a dragonfly's eye works, where they live, what they eat and how fast they can fly. Then, they made their books and assembled their books. He does not do school with them very often, so I try to encourage it on the weekends.

The crafts were simple, just a printed template and a popcicle stick, colored and decorated with glitter. The book was a mini-book from the lapbook on dragonflies on the site above. It was part the success of this simple little activity that made me decide to try my hand at helping the girls lapbook this summer.

The butterfly we made from tissue paper was a very simple craft to make. I just took a simple butterfly outline template from one of my fine motor skills books, and the girls put down glue with paint-brushes, then pressed pre-cut (I cut them ahead of time) squares of tissue paper over the glue. I wrote their names on the butterfly bodies, as they both love to watch you write their names. Even Julia is getting able to recognize letters in her name and she will promt you when you say them outloud as you write.

We took a paper plate and painted it red with tempera paint, then the girls took a cotton ball dipped in black paint to add spots. We accordian-style folded six legs(which imo gives it a spidery look- lol) and then added google eyes. With drying time, it took us the better part of an afternoon.

Using some coloring pages I found online, I created the girls two simple 9 piece puzzles. This is a great way to make puzzles for any theme.

I am almost done posting games. Hopefully, as of today I will be done. Its just that the girls have so much fun playing with them, either together, with me or their dad or alone. And I find them to be very effective teaching tools. Some units lend themselves better to games than others do. This insect unit has been great! The game pictured is a counting and marking game. There are two boards and each player rolls a six-sided dice. Whatever number they roll, they take the corresponding number of bees and cover the hives. Whoever covers all their hives first wins. These games also have a very practical funtion in that they give my two very different daughters something common to do together.

Yesterday we made butterfly masks. I found a pattern for a mask on the internet. (If anyone ever wants links to these sites, please let me know). I let the two little girls color their masks then we added glittery accents. Rachel had a bit of a problem with sticking the glitter container in the glue and getting it clogged, but she finally figured out how to make it work. (My floor has a lovely green glitter sheen now that will take forever to completely get rid of). Then I cut out the masks and glued them onto sheets of craft foam for sturdiness. When they were dry, we added Mardi-Gras sticks (aka popcicle sticks) to make masquerade masks. Unfortunately my destructive little daughter has since destroyed them, but luckily I got some pics of the girls wearing their masks first.

This was a game I found on the DLTK site. It is one of my favorite sites, and I can't think of one unit we have done since we started that we have not found something there to use. The concept of this game is easy and teaches what seems to me to be a tricky concept. There are two game boards (only one of which is shown). One is labeled Odd Olly and the other is Even Elly. The game pieces are 6 spots for each lady bug and three leaf pieces, to cover the leaf template. The two players take turns rolling a dice. Say the first one is playing as Odd Olly and rolls a three. They would then take three dots and put one on the left side, one on the right side, one on the left. They would be out of dots, and would be asked if the two sides of the lady bug had the same number of dots. The answer of course is no, so they would get to put a piece of leaf on their board. Pieces of leaf are only awarded for rolls that match the "odd or even" of the game board. So Odd Olly would not get a leaf for rolling a 6. If the dots on both sides of the lady bug match, the number is even.

One of the things I wanted to do again with this unit, that we have done successfully in the past, is to give Elizabeth some vocabulary words. Rachel inevitably ends up learning a few of them too, but this gives Liz a chance to have her very own game and her very own little store of knowledge on the topic we are studying. I had found a printable on the internet over the weekend on a lapbooking site, that was ladybug templates, and gave you the freedom to customize it for the child's needs. They recommended colors, numbers, ABCs or simple arithmatic problems. For us, it neatly solved the problem of the vocabulary game. I just made a basic file folder game, with the words on the folder then on the colored sides of the game pieces. When you turn the game pieces over, the definition is on the back. She was excited to give it a try, but I didn't get it finished until late last night, so I expect it will be what she wants to do when she gets home from school.

Sorry for all the posts; I am trying to play catch-up from being unable to post pictures. This is another printable game I found free online. It is matching a number a items with the numeral. Very easy to make, and fun to play. I find that file folders and tape and zip-loc bags make the greatest games. They are durable and easy to store. I saw online where someone was keeping a hile folder game closed with velcro so the pieces didn't fall out the sides during storage. I find it easier to stick the pieces in a zip-loc bag and staple it to the front.

Lizzie drew a picture I had to add to our bug wall. It also reminded me that I was leaving out two very important pieces of insect learning: life cycles and food chains. This will be a great introduction to our summer unit of animals. We plan to spend the summer studying animals. It will be easy to do with having a new baby in the house as the information available is overwhelming and it will be fun for the kids.

We learned that most caterpillars are not born green but rather turn that way from the chlorophyll in the plants they eat. What a great opportunity to explore color mixing. Even though the kids know what colors make other colors, there is nothing like the hands on fun of an art project and getting to see what you know in theory come to life...

The past couple of days have been busy here. We have been doing a lot of insect work, as well as keeping busy with everyday things. I have included a picture of one of the parts of an insect worksheets we did as well as the butterfly Rachel made out of hand and footprints. Elizabeth and Julia are working on theirs as well, but since it takes a good bit of drying time in between the different pieces, it is taking a while.

We have been working on mixing colors, so you will see a bit of that here, with more in subsequent posts. One of the parts of an insect sheets I got came from learningpage.com. It is not the one shown here, and features (instead of the cartoon-y bug) two very lifelike line drawings, one of a hornet and one of an ant that show the three body parts very clearly. It also shows the legs and wings only attached to the thorax, as opposed to the picture shown which is a little more vague.

The two older girls have been learning the vocabulary of the body parts: head, thorax and abdomen and sometime this weekend I hope to make Elizabeth some vobaulary matching cards. We did this activity with the unit on dinosaurs, and she learned many new words such as bipedal, carnivorous, incisor, paleontologist and prehistoric.

We will see how well it works, but we made a home for some worms. Of course, due to the place we live, worms are few and far between. How I miss the days of being able to pop into Wal-Mart for a styrofoam cup of nightcrawlers. By a happy accident, last spring we discovered that the local park is a verital heaven for earthworms. Rather than dig up my backyard, which may or may not have enough worms for our worm home, I took the girls along with a small kids shovel and a cool-whip container to the park. The place we dig for worms is technically in the sandbox, but is where the sandbox meets the dirt. In five minutes and in a hole the size of a piece of notebook paper, they found probably 45 worms.

There was an older gentleman at the park with his granddaughter and his dog. He came over and asked what we were doing. When I explained that I homeschooled and it was for a science project, he got a touch huffy. Then, when his granddaughter asked if she could have a worm, he replied that they had plenty of worms at their house and did not need to take worms from the park. I guess he didn't approve of me letting the girls take park worms. LOL. It's not like they will meet a gruesome end. I plan on letting them go in the beneficial insect garden Rachel, Julia and I planted yesterday.

Anyway, funny park guy aside, what we did is took a 2-liter soda bottle and cut the neck and lid off of it. I ran some tape around the top to keep anyone from getting cut on the sharp plastic. I then filled the container with nice, rich dirt and added the worms. They were looking a little limp from their ride from the park so I popped the whole show in the fridge. We will see. Anyway, you wrap a sheet of black construction paper around the bottle to make it dark and drop a paper bag on top like a lid. In theory, in a day or two I should be able to remove the papers and the girls can see the way worms tunnel. I will let you know how it works.

I made the cutest file folder game for the girls yesterday. Since we are studying about insects, one of the topics that comes up is of course camoflauge. In one of my other books, I have an idea for hiding octopi in different colors and textures of coral. I figured the idea could easily be adapted to insects and it was with great result. I took everyday household objects such as aluminum foil, wax paper, paper plates, felt, green tissue paper, craft foam and markers and some various printouts I found free online of insects and flowers. Then I enhanced the bugs with the different textile materials, and made plants and flowers to match. For example, I covered a beetle with aluminum foil I colored green, then made the stalks of a couple of flowers to match. An ant was covered in red felt and then a daisy made of the same material. The bugs virtually disappear from the page when they are placed on the plants that camoflauge them, just like the do in real life. I glued the flowers onto a file folder and stapled a sandwich bag on the front in which to store the bugs. It was a huge hit! Now, Rachel can explore the tactle sensation of different bugs and plants, while learning about the ways bugs use camoflauge to hide.


We also made a butterfly matching game. I found a print-out on learningpage.com of butterflies, and using the internet colored them the way they look in real life. I made two copies of the same 6 cards and after laminating (with tape of course, my fave), and cutting them out, we now have a butterfly identification matching game. Rachel is not as impressed with this game, but Elizabeth is in love. I will add pictures of it tomorrow. My phone is out for the moment, so all pictures will have to be on hold until then.

The following activities I either found online or in the case of the bug counting, in one of my many homeschooling books. The pattern was not for the activity I used it for, but oh well. It was to help fine motor skills by picking bugs out of "grass" with tongs. At this time, the bug counting is much more useful to us. The file folder game with the butterfly colors was a free online game and the bee tracing letters were also a free printable. I definately try to utiliaze free resources, although I do treat myself and the kids to new school books at tax time. I find it helps to flesh out our school experience and keep us from getting bored. Anyway, enjoy!