Our June Units, and Fish Out of Water in Review

Good Morning! I LOVE Fridays, don't you? :-)

So I have told you our plans for all of next year, and our book list for the rest of this year. As I mentioned before, our plan is to take our book list for this year and pick 4 or 5 books and/or units for the month ahead. I am not really assigning them to a particular week in the month, unless there is a holiday that warrants it. I am going to gather all of my resources the month before and then let the girls pick each week what unit they want to cover next!

For June, we are going to have fun learning about:

• Fish out of Water
• Berries/Jam (Jamberry, Giant Jam Sandwich and Blueberries for Sal and MANY others)
• Caterpillars and Butterflies (many different resources)
• Monkeys with Caps for Sale and Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb
• Bees (lots of resources here, too).

I will do a Week in Review for each unit, letting you know the books we read and the activities we did. This week we "Rowed" Fish Out of Water! This book is SO Cute! I was a little worried when I first picked it up from the library, as it has 63 pages. The book has big pictures on each page with the type, though, so the story looks a lot longer than it really is. And I was happily surprised to see that both of my girls (2 and 3) sat completely still throughout the reading, and subsequent readings since they ALWAYS ask me to "read it again!"

For those of you who don't know, this was written by Helen Palmer and illustrated by P.D. Eastman in 1961. It is a story about a boy who gets a new fish that he names Otto, and what happens when he doesn't listen to the pet store owner and ends up feeding the fish "Too Much!" The girls love this story and Jordan has been telling animated narrations all week, sometimes adding her own twists and explanations for the happenings in the story. In the beginning of the week, she told us stories about her own fish (this would be a pretend fish as we do not have one yet) and how she took care of it. Now she has added a name, Buster (yeah, Buster the fish!) and has given me and Daddy our own fish as well!

For our lessons, we have used Homeschool Share's Unit and I also combined that with Christian Preschool Printable's unit on Fishers of Men. Monday was a busy day and we weren't able to actually pick up the book until mid-day from the library, so basically we just read the story a few times. That night for bedtime, we read One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish. On Tuesday we snuggled on the sofa and watched Chicken Little. I was hoping they would pick a movie with fish in it, but imagine my surprise when I saw one of the characters -- Fish out of Water!!! I had totally forgot about him! I didn't push that really, but mentioned it and that was enough for me :-) We also read the story several times. We talked about why you shouldn't feed a fish too much, and what parts of the story were real and which parts were pretend. We went in the pool and pretended to swim like fish. We also read the story about Jesus calling his disciples to be Fishers of Men, colored pages illustrating this story, and discussed it a bit.

On Wednesday, we read a few more supplemental books that we have: Ocean Wonders (a tab book), Little Mermaid and Officer Buckle and Gloria (a story about a police officer and his dog partner. In Fish out of Water, a policeman comes to help the little boy). We snuggled on the sofa and watched Little Mermaid. We then got out the fish diagram and labeled the gills, fins, scales, eye and mouth. We talked about how a fish is different than a human (breathing through their gills instead of lungs). Then we had a fun math lesson with Goldfish crackers! In the beginning of the story are 12 fish. . . so we talked about what a dozen means, and then we counted out twelve fish for each girl. We called it a dozen. Then we had fun with subtraction, finding out how many were left after they ate one. They thought this was a lot of fun! That night, I gave them each a dozen kisses (thanks Jocelyn!)

Thursday was a busy day -- we went to the Used Book Sale at our local conference downtown. On the way, we watched Little Nemo in the car! When we got back home, we had a lot of fun reading tons of books, both ones I purchased and new ones we had picked up from the library on the drive home (I love that drive thru window at the library!). We then read Fish Out of Water again and talked about Rhyme. We used the HSS lapbook component for rhyming "Fish" and I came up with "Dish" and Jordan came up with "Wish." That was all we could think of, so then we had fun rhyming the word "Bat." Jordan came up with "That," "Cat," "Mat," and "Sat," and Mommy added "Fat," "Hat," and "Rat." We also read Swimmy from the 20th Century Children's Treasury. (Fun note about that book -- they have Chica Chica Boom Boom in there! We haven't read that book since last October, but BOTH girls remembered it! They LOVE this story!!)

Today we will talk a bit more about Community Helpers (a fireman and a police officer are in the story) The girls both know their full names, address and phone number, which I had put to song before, but we will fill that in the HSS lapbook component as well. We will talk about 911 and when to call, and maybe post information near the phone in case the girls HAVE to call one day. Tonight we are planning on trying out the new Whole Wheat pizza at Papa John's and checking out Veggie Tale's Jonah!

This weekend I hope to maybe come up with a fire escape plan and practice it, but if we don't, we will revisit this topic in the coming months with Chair for My Mother. Another topic to be discussed was the food groups, and how much is "too much" for us. I left this out because this will fit in nicely with our Food unit on Berries and Jam we are going to do next week (I gave the girls the choice yesterday and that is what they decided!)

This weekend will be a busy one, so I might not post again until Monday. . . Have a WONDERFUL weekend!!!