{Activities We Did}

Our Ready-Made Preschool book was Chicka Chicka 123! We love this book! This is one we already had and have read many times already. This week we really used the book to learn numbers. This is probably the cutest book out there that teaches numbers!

Little Bug got to make the apple tree from the book. She laid her hand and arm down on the paper and I traced it. Then she colored her arm brown to be the tree trunk and painted her hand and fingers green to be the leaves on the tree. She crumpled little squares of tissue paper to make the apples and then glued them to her tree. And then, using number stickers, Little Bug put several numbers falling from her apple tree.

{Concepts We Learned}

The academic focus this week was numbers! And especially numbers 11-20. Little Bug has been able to identify numbers 1-10 for a long time now, but this week we nailed down the rest of the numbers up to 20. She can count to 100 with a little help at the tens. We had a lot of fun ways to practice and learn our numbers!

One way was a Noodle Game. Little Bug had cut-outs of the digits 0-9 and she made numbers (from 11-20) and then counted out the noodles to match her number. In the picture below, she was working on number 12. We played Numbers Bingo which is an excellent way to learn numbers by playing a game. Another day we got just the cut-outs out and made various numbers all the way to 100. We watched The Big Number Song on YouTube just about every day.

{Letter of the Week}

Our Letter of the Week was Letter Nn! Little Bug was suppose to cut stripes of newspaper to glue on her letter n, but she had alternative plans of her own for her letter n. She did her Do-A-Dot Letter N, made the letter N with play-doh and wrote the letter N in shaving cream.

{Mudpies to Magnets}

I took these pictures with my phone which is why they aren’t very clear. Grams had a Paper Chromatography experiment for the girls. They put strips of a coffee filter that had dye on it in medicine containers with water. The water made the colors crawl up the coffee filter!

{Fall Craft}

The girls made Pinecone Turkeys! I had been looking forward to this craft because I remember making one of these as a child along with my brother and my mom used our Pinecone Turkeys as Thanksgiving décor for many, many years! I wanted some Pinecone Turkeys to decorate our house! Well, turns out Grams and Mommy had to help a lot with these turkeys. I like to do crafts that the child can do all on their own or mostly on their own. The girls each made their turkey’s face but when it came time to glue the feathers on, Elmer’s glue just wasn’t going to cut it and we had to pull out the glue gun which obviously the girls could not use. Sweet Pea was especially into putting the Elmer’s glue on her feathers so we let her and then we’d put hot glue on and stick it to her pinecone. I am so happy to have these and will keep them for many years to come!

{Hands-On Thinking Skills & Bible}

We are still working on Dividing Shapes into Equal Pieces in Hands-On Thinking Skills. I think another week and we will be moving on to the next concept.

I am absolutely loving our Bible time every morning. This week we finished our study of the story of Joseph. I just love Joseph’s story. It is probably one of my favorites in the Bible. Joseph was mistreated and wronged by his own brothers and his father who loved him dearly was lead to believe he had been killed by a wild animal. Joseph wasn’t killed; he was sold as a slave and spent time in prison! But God had a plan for Joseph that was just amazing!

God allowed Joseph to be able to interpret dreams and he was able to interpret a dream Pharaoh had! This lead to Joseph’s freedom from slavery and landed him as a ruler in Egypt. Pharaoh had dreamed there were seven lean cows that ate up the seven fat cows – meaning a famine was coming to the land! Because Joseph was able to interpret this dream, Pharaoh made him a ruler in Egypt and his job was to build enough supply of food for Egypt when the famine came.

Joseph built enough supply for not only Egypt but surrounding areas too! Joseph’s father sent his sons to Egypt for food which lead to the family’s eventual reunion and Joseph extending love and forgiveness to the brothers who had wronged him so many years ago.

I used this story to teach my girls a Truth about God: Bad things may happen, but God always, always has a plan to make good come from that bad because God is good. I told them that something bad had happened to Mommy. I couldn’t have a baby in my belly and I was very sad about this. But God took that bad thing and made GOOD come from it! He gave me Little Bug and Sweet Pea. They loved hearing me talk about this.  At the end of our study of Joseph’s story, the seed of that truth was planted in especially Little Bug’s heart. I LOVE that. Next up we will be studying Moses and we will unpack the Truths of God found in his story.

Our work at the end of the week:

- Elaine