Wash a chair

This was also inspired by Montessori. I asked her, "Would you like to learn how to wash a chair?" To my surprise, she responded enthusiastically. So I got a cup of water and two wash towels. We went over to one of the kitchen chairs, and I explained how to do it. I went back and forth, back and forth, really carefully, just like in the Montessori method. She watched, very focused, and then got her little towel and imitated me. The more careful I was, the more careful she was likely to be. We ended up doing all the chairs, and she did the last one herself. She was SO PROUD. "Look, Daddy! Look what I did! I washed this chair!!! It won't be dirty when you sit on it, because I washed it!"

Long Division

This activity was inspired by Montessori Math. The link is to the left of the blog. I took a bunch of her Easter Egg Hunt candy, along with 4 stuffed animal friends and 4 sheets of paper labeled 1, 10, 100, and 1000. We set up the friends in a circle and told them we were going to give them equal amounts of candy. Then I had her count out 4 candy pieces and put them on the units paper (the one labeled 1), 8 pieces on the tens paper, 4 pieces on the hundreds paper, and 8 pieces on the thousands paper. We said, "We have eight thousand four hundred and eighty-four pieces of candy to give away!" Then we "divided" the candy between the 4 friends (so, in big person terms, 8,484 divided by 4). From the thousands paper, we gave 1 candy piece to the first friend, 1 to the second, etc., until each of them had 2 pieces of candy for their "thousands place." Then we did the same with the pieces in the hundreds place, tens place, and units place. When all the candy was divided, we said, "Each friend gets two thousand one hundred and twenty-one pieces of candy." Then they gobbled it all up. She was like, "Again! Again!" It is now one of her favorite games.

Books

I was inspired by another homeschool blog to go to the library and get books. Katie LOVES it when I read to her, and we usually read once every day, but there are classics we hadn't done, yet. So this is the book list we are doing this week:
Green Eggs and Ham
The Hungry Caterpillar
Where the Wild Things Are
Some Dogs Do
Peter Rabbit
Yurtle the Turtle and other stories
Friendly Fish
Baby Einstein's My First Book of Shapes - this one is really beneath her, but what is good about it is that it engages her really well.

Easter Play

My daughter saw her Halloween angel costume yesterday, and asked if we could play angel. She wanted to act out the story of Mary being told that Jesus was going to be born. Since it is almost Easter, I asked if she wanted to learn a new angel story, and she did. And so we acted out the story of laying Jesus in the tomb, rolling the big stone in front of it, and the women going away sad to prepare spices to anoint the dead body... Then early in the morning on the first day of the week, they go to the tomb, and the body isn't there. Instead - an angel! They are terrified. And the angel says, "Don't be afraid! Jesus is alive! Go and tell the disciples and Peter to go to Galilee, and he will meet them there." But they go away and tell no one, because they are afraid. (We do it up - "Did we just see an angel? That is so strange! I've never seen an angel! What is going on? Jesus is alive? Dead people don't rise from the dead...") Then we go to the part where they tell Peter and John, and Peter and John run to the tomb, and there is no body. We take turns being either the angel in the angel costume or all the other characters.

Fairy Tale Imagination

Katie (3) is really into imagination games, and this is one we have started playing. We pick a fairy tale, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and we sort of act it out. Katie set out 3 bowls from her kitchen set, and she was Goldilocks. The first one was toooooo hot, mama bear's was toooooo cold, and baby bear's was juuuuust right. Then she does the chairs in the living room and then pretend beds on the floor of the living room. Then I (the 3 bears) come home and go to the kitchen, "Someone's been eating my bowl!" And so on. We end with a climactic encounter between me (the 3 bears) and her (Goldilocks), and she dashes away, never to return to the bear's house... until 10 seconds later when she declares "Again! Again!"

Subtracting Daffodils

To work on subtraction, I printed out 6 little pictures of daffodils. Then I made up a little rhyme, and my daughter loves it -

Six little daffodils up on a hill
Along came Jack and along came Jill
They took [insert number] daffodil(s) off that hill,
But don't worry! There are [insert number] more still.

Counting Syllables

Today we played the syllable game. She or I would pick a word, and then we would clap as we said each "syllable" (new word for her). How many times did we clap? we would ask, and she or I would answer. It was a great game, because it was a lot of fun to her, it reinforced counting skills AND memory skills - she had to remember the sound of the clapping to know how many syllables were in the word. And she learned what a syllable is.

The Why Game

So Katie is 3, and everything is why, why, why. So the other night we turned the game around. My husband and I came up with questions to ask her - "Why do roller skates have wheels?" and such. It was interesting to hear her answers, and it showed us the kinds of answers she is looking for.... It got her thinking, and she loved playing the game this way!

Plant Reading

I printed off 4 sheets of paper to make a little book:
1. A game page. I made a list of 4 words and cut the words out for her: plant, flower, tree, grass. I had her sound out each word, and then glue them next to a picture of each. ("plants" went at the top as the page label).
2. A picture of a tree, and the sentence to read: The tree is big.
3. Flower picture: The flower is red.
4. Grass picture: The grass is green.

I want her mainly to grasp "the" and "is" as sight words, in addition to continued practice sounding things out.

I'm making similar sheets for flowering plants (tulip, rose, daffodil), gymnosperms (pine, cone, needle), and one with moss and fern. Again, the main goal is to practice sounding out words she doesn't know and to reinforce basic words as sight words.

What is a plant?

For the record, my daughter is 3.

I made up a song with 2 parts. The first part teaches what makes a plant a plant, and the second teaches the 4 basic kinds of plants:

Plants have something green and they need the sun!
Something green and they need the sun!
Something green and they need the sun!
Plants are fun for everyone!

Plants have something green and they need the sun!
Something green and they need the sun!
Something green and they need the sun!
To do photosynthesis for everyone!

Moss, ferns,
Gymnosperms,
Flowering plants.
Moss, ferns,
Gymnosperms,
Flowering plants.

I found a couple pictures of different types of moss, etc., and I showed them to her as we sang the song. She loved it, and she picked it up really quickly.

Then we went on a plant hunt. We found lots of green things - grass, a leaf on the ground, a green puzzle piece - and we put them in a dark closet. We'll see what needed the sun, in addition to being green... She can't wait. She asks about it all the time, but we are waiting until the end of the week...

I intended for that to be it, but she wanted more. So...

We got a shovel and went outside. We dug underneath a wild flower and saw the root. I told her that the roots suck up the water and food from the soil. She thought that was really neat. We went and bought a flower at the local garden center. We watered it and put it by the window, because it needs the sun. Then, because she wanted to keep showing love to the flower, I told her it likes it when she talks to it. I told her about photosynthesis - how we give it Co2 and it uses that to turn the sunlight into sugar it needs and oxygen we can breath. She got it. People seriously underestimate the curiosity of a three year old.