Every week I’d like to write a post titled Homeschool Highlights. It will be just what the title says. A post about several highlights of our homeschool activities that week. Books we’ve read. Activities we’ve done. Concepts we’ve learned. Places we have visited. Science experiments we’ve done. I am trying to find a good balance between taking pictures of every little thing we do and getting a few good pictures every week for memory-sake. I love using this space as a scrapbook. This week’s edition probably includes more pictures than there will most likely be in subsequent weeks because I somehow managed to take a picture of almost everything we did this week. I did a lot of picture taking after we did the activity instead of during and that worked well.

And yes, I have discovered picmonkey.com and it’s like digital scrapbooking! I can’t believe I just discovered this. Picmonkey.com is a free photo editing/collage-making program that is very easy and fast to use! Each one of these images you see on this post took me less than 5 minutes to create.

And now, what we were up to last week:

{Books We’ve Read}

Our Ready-Made Preschool book this week was How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. The rest of these books are either books we already had about apples or books we checked out from the library. These were our favorite five. Another book to add to this list that my girls absolutely have loved is Apple Farmer Annie. These are all books I’d love to eventually have in our home library.

{Activities We’ve Done}

Grams made an Apple Pie with the girls! As you can see from the pictures, there was more eating of the apple slices than the making of a pie, but there was fun had by all. The girls got to enjoy a delicious apple pie slice after dinner that night! Although, I must say, Sweet Pea was way more excited about the ice cream than the pie.

The little girl in our story had to travel the world to find the ingredients to make her apple pie because the market was closed. She traveled via many different modes of transportation, including an airplane. Little Bug got to make her very own airplane. I love the hot pink color she chose to paint her airplane!

{Concepts We’ve Learned}

We learned that the alphabet has five vowels and one of the vowels is the Letter Aa. Little Bug learned the long and short Aa sound. This was the first week we made letters from the Magnet Builders and those were a huge hit with Little Bug. She also got a dry erase marker and enjoyed writing the letters on the board. I was impressed with her Aa’s! (The ones in the picture are Aa’s I drew.)

Social Studies was integrated into this week’s lessons as we learned about the globe and found the different countries the girl traveled to as she traveled the world getting the ingredients for her apple pie. Little Bug marked these places with stars on her map and then numbered the places in the order that they were traveled.

Math was also integrated in this unit as we played a simple, yet fun, Apple Math game. Little Bug rolled the die, then reached into the paper bag to pull out either a red, yellow or green apple. If she rolled a 5 and pulled out a yellow apple from the bag, she would color five apples yellow on her Apple Math page. The first to color all 20 apples on the Apple Math page wins. Little Bug won and she was thrilled about that!

{Places We’ve Visited}

We visited the Fire Station! This didn’t really have anything to do with this week’s theme, but our first week, when we read Alphabet Rescue, I wanted us to go to the Fire Station since the lowercase letters of the alphabet worked together to salvage an old fire engine so they could fight fires just like the capital letters do. It didn’t work out for us to go visit the fire station until two weeks after we did that unit.

We did go to the library to “pick” Apple books since we don’t have any apple orchards around to actually go pick apples at. Well, apparently we were late and all the apple books had already been “picked” because there was only one apple book at the library that day! We checked that one out and had the rest ordered which were available for pick up later in the week. We did happen to be at the library right at Story Time and the girls loved it!

{Science Experiments}

One of our experiments this week was a Drying Race. The girls put a paper towel in a bowl full of water and then rung it out. They hung them up to dry different ways to see which would dry fastest.

Little Bug’s work displayed at the end of the week!

- Elaine