Weekly Wrap-Up: Z is for Zoo

This week we jumped right back in to our homeschool schedule.  When coming up with our plan for the year, I decided to teach 2 themed weeks the first 2 weeks of December and then teach the last 2 weeks about Christmas.  I am noticing that many homeschoolers do month long Christmas units.  I really like this idea and I'm thinking we might do that next year.  This week our theme was Zoo's. We worked on the letter Z, the number 9, and the color black.  Our memory verse is: "The Heavens declare the glory of God." Psalm 19:1.

Some of the books we read this week include:

"Goodnight Gorilla"  By:Peggy Rathman

"Curious George Feeds the Animals"  By: Margret & HA Rey

"Jungle Animals" By:Cathy Jones

"If I Ran the Zoo." By: Dr. Seuss

Little People "Lets Go to the Zoo."

"Heaven is Having You." By: Giles Andreae

"God Gave Us Heaven." By:Lisa Tawn Bergren

We did a cute tangram activity I found in a book called, "Super-Easy Shape Art." By Jacquelyn Johnson Howes.  The kids did a great job matching the shapes up and they were excited to make the bear.

This Wednesday, we did our homeschool work with Princess.  They all did a great job working together at the table.  After they were done their work we shifted gears to something a little more fun and made necklaces with gimp and small beads.  This is a great fine motor activity that takes coordination and helps with developing the correct grasp to hold a pencil.  Sassy gave up pretty early.  Princess and Peanut both made necklaces and wore them for the rest of the day.

Peanuts Occupational Therapist has asked we continue to do activities in an upright position.  One of the problems Peanut is having when holding a pencil is he extends his fingers instead of flexing them.  By doing activities upright it helps to encourage flexion of the fingers when writing.  We are working on this with a variety of mediums and thicknesses of items to hold.  We have used sidewalk chalk, paint, Dry erase crayons (by the way, my new favorite item!), and stamps.  We also use a touchscreen computer to do our computer work (which includes trace work).  The 2 programs we use are Starfall.com and ABC Mouse.com.

Sassy loves the dry erase crayons.

Peanut using the chalk on the other side of the easel.

We also cut out our memory verse and colored our number of the week (the number 9)with black marker (the color of the week).

The kids love to display their work at their work table

Another little project we did was making our own zoos.  I gave each child a blue and a yellow piece of construction paper.  They each got stickers of zoo animals and sea creatures.  They put the sea creatures in their "tank" (the blue paper) and the zoo animals in their "cage" (the yellow paper).  I had them glue each colored paper on to a white piece of construction paper.  I then gave them strips of black paper to glue on to complete their "cage".  Peanut was doing this while talking in a growling voice saying, "We don't want to let the animals out!"  After they were done this I encouraged them to color their zoo.  Sassy colored a little and then decided she was done.  Peanut and I decided after a little bargaining, that he should at least draw a tree.  He insisted he couldn't do it and so I helped him out with a little hand over hand assistance.

Peanut's Zoo.

On Thursday I went online before I started dinner and found a cute project on Our Little Monkeys called a  Christmas Countdown Chain.  I was so excited when I saw this and I scrambled to put it together for the kids.  I wanted them to be able to pull off their first link that night and I was able to put it all together before  bedtime.  I think next year when they are older I'll do this again but next time I'll add a scripture on each link and turn this into a month long night time Christmas devotional.

Here is Peanuts Christmas Countdown chain.

We had a great and encouraging week.  The time to Christmas is going to begin to fly and I'm honestly looking forward to it.
Coming up next week:  More operation organization, the conclusion to our journey in Therapeutic Listening, fun Christmas crafts, and a recipe for homemade chicken broth.

God Bless!
Mommy Provost
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