Little Hands

We went Friday for our first time to a little art group. It's called "Little Hands" and it's several homeschooling families we know around here. It's once a month, will cover some art topics, and provide some hands on fun!

Here's Mattie enjoying painting a picture of herself. She went crazy when she realized I was going to let her paint!

Each month they choose a theme of some sort to talk about. This month they were doing self-portraits. (Not a great place to start with Jacob who will know full well "That doesn't look like me!!") So I modified an idea I got from Michelle and printed a very light black and white picture of Jacob on watercolor paper so he had something to work with.

We did still have one major mouth incident involving tears (that he recovered from quickly, thankfully!), but got to learn a beauty of watercolor is that you can kind of wash it off!

So, here's mouth #2 (and the finished product). We could have put another layer of paint over this, but I didn't want to encourage the perfectionism.

So, here I present Jacob's first self-portrait! He was quite proud of it!

Jacob's compliment

I was busy working around the house the other day and Jacob comes up to me and says, "Wow, Mom! You really are a hard workin' woman!" :)

Dinosaurs

We've spent two weeks recently on dinosaurs, and here are some of the things we did!

Jacob painted a wooden dino 3D puzzle Candace found for us somewhere. Thankfully it was the T-Rex, the one he likes the best!

Here it is.

And one of the ideas in the unit we did was to bury puzzle pieces in some sand, search for them like real paleontologists do, and try to put them together without directions. This proved to be a lot of fun, but a little more work for me than I intended!

The puzzle had 48 large pieces and I buried them all! (What was I thinking??) They all started in the top two inches of sand, but apparently quickly migrated to deeper sand! After finding about 35, we pulled out the big guns and I used a grown up shovel to turn over the whole sandbox! We did find them all, thankfully, and the sandbox is nice and freshly turned over!



Some counting by 2s practice as we checked and re-checked how many pieces we'd found. (Jacob has had a hard time memorizing these and getting the pattern. After this day, he came in and they were on his Math sheet for that day. He actually got it!! The concept sunk in and has lasted!)


Jacob putting together his puzzle with no picture to look at.


And our finished product!


We made our own fossil and let it dry out.


We got a set of play dinosaurs and have had lots of scavenger hunts too. This has been good for me. Jacob has wanted to take turns hiding them, and I've struggled to find them! It's always a good thing to end up in the position of your student! (And it's been a great opportunity for the "playing" I posted about last week.)

And finally, Jacob wrote his first report! He chose the Tyrannosaurus Rex to do his report on. We had a form to complete and he found the information in his different books we had. He did really well and seemed to enjoy this! As we went through the week, he'd notice something and say, "Mom, I need to put that in my report!" We didn't get all those things added in, but still might. And I'd like for him to color it too, but who knows if that will happen either! (You can see Mattie did a small bit for him...)

Fall Leaves

We have had quite an extended fall leaves study this year. We started it in September, but it was just too hot! So we put it off for a couple of weeks until the leaves were actually changing. Here are the leaves we collected from trees between here and our neighbors' house.

Here is the display we made to learn the tree names for each separate leaf. I have tried to make not of the tree names as we see the different trees when we're out and about. It has been a challenge for me to commit the tree names to memory too! (And we are curious, did Zaccheus actually get in a Sycamore tree or is that just part of the song?? Jacob was pretty excited that we found a sycamore leaf in Tennessee! It's the huge leaf in the top right corner.)

Here is Jacob's Leaf Man he created!



And here is our page of leaf rubbings. We did these along with our study of the leaf parts and a little printable book about them. The leaf rubbing was one of the things Jacob enjoyed most, I think. Actually, he just asked to get some more leaves so he could make more!

Hamburger buns!!

I made homemade hamburger buns! Jacob has never had a bun before, hot dog or hamburger. He's never cared, actually.

But there is a teenager at church who has some food allergies, and his mother has had a hard time fitting "baking from scratch" in her schedule. And one thing she said they had no success finding was buns, so I gave them a try. I was so excited at how they turned out! Next time I will do a couple of things differently to get them to be taller, but all in all, I was pretty pleased with my success.

I kept half of the batch for Jacob to have at home, and he enjoyed his first one today with a ham and cheese sandwich. He was so excited! Later on I was taking a picture and said, "say cheese!" He said, "I love my ham and cheese sandwich on my new hamburger bun that you made for me and Aiden!" (Not the best phrase to catch a smile, but it was cute!.)