Archive for baloo

Missing Addends with Manipulatives

Baloo is working on missing addends right now, and using these big sheets of paper is much more motivating than a worksheet for him.

We got out all of our Toob animals for this, but he decided to just use the dogs.  I set up the math problems, and let him go at it!

Missing Addends with Manipulatives

Naturally all the dogs had to be standing at attention before he began.
Missing Addends with Manipulatives

First he set the correct amount of dogs in the cirlce.
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And then he would fill in the answer.
Missing Addends with Manipulatives

 

Baloo was much more engaged and actually did not complain at all about this math practice!

Weekly Round-Up: D week and Medieval Week

Royal is 3 years 11 months
Baloo is 6.5

We used my Medieval Pack for much of our Medieval Theme! 
Make sure to check out the pack here!

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We’ve been planning our Medieval week for awhile now, and I’m so happy that we finally got to it!  I wanted to combine D is for Dump Truck and D is for dragon, so I’ve been holding out a bit.

We started out by building a castle.  I had saved up a few boxes, TP Rolls, and Paper Towel rolls just for this purpose.  The boys and I looked through our castle books to find exactly what a castle would look l like.  The more important part for them was that it had a draw bridge.
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They decided they wanted a red castle, so we painted everything red.  Baloo painted the moat around the castle.  Then we used a glue gun to glue everything down.  The boys had a blast playing with the castle all week! 
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I was originally cutting up this box to be our castle base.  When I got to this point though, the boys decided that the front looked like a drawbridge.  It was immediately overtaken.  Now this box it an important part of our school room.  For Medieval week it was mostly a castle!
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We got the inspiration for these Tin Foil Knights here.

I cut out all the shapes because tin foil can be tricky to cut.
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The boys decided to use chopsticks for their jousting sticks, which I thought was appropriate!
Baloo’s:
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Royal’s:
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I printed off the writing cards from Cassie’s Medieval Pack.  I cut the images and writing apart and hid the images all around the room.
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Then Baloo had to find them, match the picture to the word, and trace the word.IMG_0270IMG_0272

 

Working on some sheets from my Medieval Pack.  He dotted the people pink and red/pink and purple and then added them.
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Fraction dotting
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Royal worked on some sheets from Cassie’s Medieval Pack.
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Labeling the Castle
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We tested out a few catapult designs. 
The website that we got these designs from seems to be gone now Sad smile  There are many many homemade catapult design ideas out there though!
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This one was so simple.  You just rubber band about 8 popsicle sticks together on each end.  Take 2 more popsicle sticks and rubber band them around the set of 8.  We also hot glued a lid on one stick.
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This one was a bit more complicated, but still took under 10 minutes.  We hot glued the base together, and the rest is secured with rubberbands.
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We tested…
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And tested…
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And tested!  The incredibly easier and simple one was by far the best!  It shot everything and so far!  We ended up making a 2nd one so both Royal and Baloo could go around shooting things.
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This was our ‘D’ week wall at the end!  We had a lot of D fun!
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Our book set-up, and dress up costume!
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We also squished some D is for Dump Truck activities!
This was one of the first times that Royal has traced a letter!  I’ve been presenting letter worksheets to him for well over a year now and never really pushed tracing the letters – then one day he just did it!  I was thrilled.
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Since the first time, he has been tracing all the letters he sees!!
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We counted some dump trucks and worked on number recognition.
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Royal dotted some D’s and then he wanted to glue the dump trucks to the sheet.
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Working on his 1-10 puzzle.  This was great for number recognition as well. 
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He found it to be quite challenging, but counting the numbers helped!
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Logi-Bear wanted in on the fun, and he decided to paint his dump truck.
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More dotting!  The dotting pages are some of the favorites every week!
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We had a great time with D week – themes are just so much fun!  The boys are having fun helping me plan out more themes now!

Titanic Unit Study–1st Grade

Baloo loves the Titanic.  I don’t remember what sparked his interest in the great ship, but since then he has been infatuated with it.  We read books about the Titanic all the time – he just cannot soak up enough information!

Our local museum had a Titanic exhibit come through and I thought they would be a great time to do some more intense learning about the Titanic.  We stopped at the library and picked up as many books about the Titanic as we could find:

 

I had promised Baloo that we would go to the museum exhibit after we were done with our unit study – so he was really really excited when the day finally came.  We managed to make it a mommy-son date, and it was just the 2 of us (thankfully because it was definitely not geared toward kids!).  We both loved it!  Baloo thought it would be more hands-on, but he still enjoyed the show.  I thought they did an incredible job show what life could have been like at the time – I’d just suggest adding a kitchen with foods from the Titanic Smile
If you have a chance to go to the Titanic Artifact exhibit, I highly recommend it!  Naturally, we weren’t allowed to take pictures.  They had this awesomely huge boat display outside though.  That little tiny thing up in the top left corner?  A life boat that would have help 65 people!  That’s how huge the Titanic was!

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Anyway, 95% of our unit study consisted of reading the Titanic books.  We read, and read, and read.  We really only did a few other activities.
Baloo was very curious about the iceberg and why they didn’t see it early enough.  We decided to freeze a block of ice and float it in a little tub of water to illustrate how ice floats, but sits very low in the water.
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Of course, our ice wasn’t shaped like an iceberg, but he could still see that the very top was barely out of the water!
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We also got to see how fast it melted.
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It shrunk this much after just a bit!  We talked a bit about where icebergs come from and how they’re actually melting!
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Baloo decided, on his own, to make a replica of the Titanic.  There are only 3 smokestacks, but he knows that the 4th smokestack on the Titanic was actually just a dummy anyway!  The pencils holding up the purple half egg is the crows nest.  Baloo likes to  drive his Titanic around and shout “Iceberg right ahead!”

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Those little silver things on the back are the propellers. 
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I thought we were finished with our Titanic unit study, but Baloo is still insisting on reading Titanic books every day.  Looks like I’ll be putting together a Titanic learning pack.