DR Stuff

Daydreamers by Tom Feelings is wonderful for its illustrations, but the lyrical text provided Drs for us to read. Dream Hop by Julia Durango was fantastic.

Activities

Drum.



Oatmeal container. Decorated with all sorts of bling. Cut a whole in both ends and strung yarn through it so it can go around Talmage's neck. The site I found the project on recommended making drumsticks, but I thought hands worked well.

Dragon.



How cool is that dragon? I found the instructions for it here. We took a 12-egg egg carton and cut it in half. We painted one half one bright color, and after cutting two egg holders (is that what you call them?) and painted that part another bright color. Then I followed the inspiration of the activity village creator and cut out flames and and nose out of other bright colors. Tissue paper for the head and body. Talmage wanted to add ribbon for a tail and I thought that was a nice touch.

On second thought, follow the link I attached for more clear instructions.

Dragonfly.



I googled "dragonfly craft" and came up with a couple ideas and then combined them for our dragonfly. Talmage colored a large popsicle stick with markers and we affixed googly eyes on the end. I used the wings you can find here and here. (The person who made the images made them large, so for them to fit on a 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, click on print preview and reduce the image to 30%. I also switched the paper to a landscape orientation.) I printed the wings on bright paper and let Talmage decorate them. Being a dragonfly, I thought glitter would be a nice touch. Talmage did, too.

Dress-up Dolls. I found these ethnically diverse, not afraid to be man enough to put on a unitard or a one-sleeved dress, boy paper dolls here.



Creepy looking, aren't they?

I thought it would be more fun for Talmage to color them, so I opened them in Photoshop and turned them into colorable outlines. The only problem is that in the process, I lost the little tabs to fold back on the clothing so that the clothes can attach to the dolls.







Talmage took issue with me calling them dolls. Apparently dolls are for girls. Of course the first thing Talmage did with one politically correct dress up guys was attack the other politically correct dress up guy.

Treasure hunt. dragon, dragonfly, dress, dresser, drink. The treat was gumdrops.

TH Stuff

TH was a little tricky, because TH makes two sounds--the voiced TH (as in there) and the unvoiced TH (as in three). We stuck with the unvoiced TH because that's how it's found in the majority of words. However the majority of common words (like the, there, they, them) it's voiced. Ah well.

I also realized Talmage has a speech impediment this week. For Ss he makes the unvoiced TH sound and for Zs he makes the voiced TH sound. Who knew? I'm sure that'll get cleared up in elementary school. I, of course, said my Rs as Ws until I was nine.

Books that talked about the three little somethings (pigs, bears, grasshoppers) worked well. You wouldn't believe the fairytale variations we found. We only sounded out the words that made the unvoiced TH sound.

Activities

Thermometer: We found the instructions to make a homemade thermometer here. I purchased all the required ingredients--water bottle, red food coloring, rubbing alcohol, playdough, and a clear plastic straw. We couldn't get the fluid to rise up the straw. So instead I got one of our many digital thermometers and talked about what happens when you're sick.

Thank-you note: We've been a card making factory here at the Howe home. With Valentine's this last week, we made over 50 valentines. I made him stop when we couldn't think of any more people to send them to. So he was THRILLED to make thank-you notes.



Piece of paper. Folded in fourths. Decorate with crayons and hearts and glitter. Things Tal wanted to say thank you for? Thank you to Hana for letting us go to McDonald's. Thank you to Daddy for letting Tal play Labrynth 2.

Last Name, Thousand (Tyler's story of place value): One of Tyler's classic math lessons involves number houses. Due to many hours of playing on the TI-83 (yes, our family's nerdy like that), Talmage is able to read three digit numbers, but struggles beyond that. We tried out Tyler's number houses lesson, and Tal did shockingly well. By the end, he could correctly read this number: 234,000,762,027,123.

Here is the PowerPoint Ty used. I'm not going to explain it more than that, but would be happy to answer questions.

Alpine Utah

Crazy Threes: Matching games are big at our house, so I thought we'd add a new level to your traditional matching game. I made sets of three images that I cut out and faux laminated with contact paper. We mixed them up and placed them upside down on the table. Each turn a player turned over three cards, and you had to find the entire set of three to earn that set. I was prepared to turn it into a traditional matching game, but Tal loved the threes.

For fun I used images that have to do with the concept of threes.







A word of explanation on the bottom two pictures on the third page: that's a bishopric, see (with three members of it), and Star Wars is a trilogy. At least it is at our house, where Tyler elected to show him the original three and pretend the more recent three never happened.

Treasure hunt. thermometer, three, thank you note, thumb. The treat was a Heath bar.