Russell Ramblings: From the barnyard to the wilds of Africa

For the last few weeks, we've been focusing on farm animals with our My Father's World kindergarten curriculum.  We learned about goats, cows, and horses.  This week, we were off to the wilds of Africa learning about elephants; but, first, here's my wrap-up of our horse unit.

We made a shape horse complete with a fence and mane and tail.  I gave the boys the shapes and asked them to form a horse.  

We also did an exercise in classfying animals.  Using cards provided by our curriculum, we sorted wild animals from farm aniamls in a preparation to launch into our study of wild animals in the next 3 units.

This week, we began our study of elephants and the letter e.  We watched two short videos on elephants and read many, many books from the library.  As always, I enjoy learning right along with the children.  I now can tell you the difference between an African and Asian elephant, how much water an elephant drinks in a day, how long an elephant drinks milk from his mother, all about the elephant family structure, how much elephant tusks are worth, and lots more!  

One humourous story from a fact learned in this unit....

We often tell the boys they sound like an elephant on the stairs up to their room because they can make such a racket going up and down.  Well, we learned that elephants actually can walk very quietly.  According to Elephant Families by Arthur Dorros, "A family of elephants could walk right by you and you wouldn't hear them."  AJ came down for a drink in the wee hours of the morning this week.  My dear husband got up to see what he was doing and during the course of the 2am conversation, AJ enlightened my husband all about how an elephant could walk right by and you'd never know!  Now, I guess we need to teach them to walk like elephants so we can sleep through their early morning water runs.

We discussed the saying "An elephant never forgets," and related it to how we shouldn't forgot God's blessings to us.  (This fit nicely with Thanksgiving being on our minds.)  We also played a memory game where I displayed 10 objects, they closed their eyes, and I removed one.  Then they had to try to remember what was missing.

In studies other than elephants, AJ has been working on measurement and telling time - two subjects that greatly interest him.  For reading, we have taken a break from the My Father's World first grade reading that he was doing.  The phonics lessons were advancing too quickly for him.  He can now can read CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, CVCe (consoant-vowel-consonant-silent e) words, and several sight words, but he is still sounding them out.  So, we took a break from our curriculum to enjoy a Summerbook Reader - a delightful treasure I found at our local bookstore.  These books have real pictures and simple stories to read.  (I will be writing a detailed review of this wonderful resource soon, if you're interested in more information.)

CJ continues to learn to blend sounds and sound out words.  He has learned the "blend ladder" concept well.  A little too well.  (If you aren't familiar with the blend ladder, picture a ladder with the vowels on the rungs.  Take a consonant, such as "t" and put it with a on the top rung and say "ta."  Slide it down the ladder and say "te," "ti," "to," and "tu.")  Our curriculum always puts the vowels in order.  So, CJ can blend consonants with vowels beautifully as long as he goes in order, but ask him to blend "di" and he has to say "da" and "de" first to do it.  I happy he's blending sounds, and he is now able to decode some CVC words.

Thanks for stopping by my blog and reading my ramblings!  Have a super weekend!

This post is linked to the weekly wrap-up at Weird, Unsocialized Homeschoolers.