SK or SC Stuff

The Scaredy Squirrel books by Melanie Watt are great SC books!

Activities

Scales

When I do this with Asher, I plan to coordinate my books a little better with the activity for the day, finding a book that has the same topic as the project. Look for that circa 2012. When I finally get around to that, I'm definitely going to read The Rainbow Fish by Marcus Pfister with this project.



The book is about a fish with beautiful scales, many of them shiny, who learns that the most beautiful thing is sharing with others and ends up giving his beautiful scales away. Good message and plenty of SCs to sound out.

We made this scaly fish.



It was pretty simple. I improvised a white fish and glued him on a blue piece of paper. Then I cut out several different colors of scales from tissue paper and included a couple from foil. Tal got to glue the scales on.

Scarecrow

The Wizard of Oz series is pretty big at our house these days; Grandpa is reading the books nightly to Talmage. They are currently reading Ozma of Oz. So when I suggested we make a scarecrow, Tal was certainly excited.



I improvised a shirt, pants, head, and a hat. Tal glued the pieces on a black piece of paper and added the details. We then took some dead grass from my most recent weeding excursion and glued it on.

Sky

This was a fun idea that ended up looking totally different than what I anticipated. I put some blue water color paint in an empty spray bottle. I have some nice paints in tubes, so I just squeezed out a bit into the bottle, but I bet if you could break a chunk off a Crayola set it would work just fine. I then added a cup or so of water and shook it until it mixed together. Talmage and I painted horizons along the bottom of our papers (I did use watercolor paper for this one so it would absorb the paint well). We then took our pictures outside and sprayed on a blue sky. I sprayed minimally and got a rainy sky.



Tal didn't want a rainy sky, so he sprayed a lot.



I have to admit; Tal's picture turned out awesome.

Treasure hunt. scale, scarfs, skirt, skin. The treasure was Skittles.

PR Stuff

The Prince Won't Go To Bed by Dayle Ann Dodds was probably our favorite book of the week.

Activities

Frog Prince



I found the idea for this little guy here. I printed off this sheet on both green and yellow cardstock. The site recommended craft foam, which I'm sure would have been cuter, but I didn't have any and cardstock worked well. Tal and I went rock hunting, and after we found an appropriately sized rock, I painted it green and glued on googly eyes. We glued the rock onto his legs and added the yellow crown. Tal felt he needed nostrils and a smile.

Handprint Butterfly

Print seemed a good PR word and we did a really fun activity with handprints during H week but I didn't want to repeat it. So we came up with a handprint butterfly.



I let Tal pick three colors and we brushed the tempera paint on his hands. We positioned the prints facing outward. After it dried (again, with the help of a blowdryer) I drew a butterfly body with a black Sharpie. Talmage added the butterfly smile.

Praying Mantis

Tal loves origami, and I'm always trying to think of ways to insert more math into this project, so I got ambitious and thought we'd make this folded praying mantis. I got through 5 of 100 steps. Once it started talking about waterbomb bases I got lost.

So instead we started to make this guy.



Now I admit that at this point we had already spent a good half-hour on the other praying mantis, so I didn't finish putting him together. So follow the instructions listed here. (You'll have to scroll down a bit.)

Treasure hunt: prince, princess, present, praying mantis. The treasure was chocolate covered pretzels.

PL Stuff

Plantpet by Elise Primavera was kind of a weird book, but it was great when we made plantpets.

Activities

Planets



We took a piece of black paper and made stars with a toothbrush and watered down white tempera paint. Then I took this idea from Ehow: Use the pinky to create a red dot for Mercury, the ring finger with yellow for Venus, the ring finger with blue for the Earth, the pinky with red for Mars, the thumb with orange for Jupiter, the thumb with yellow for Saturn, the middle finger with green for Uranus, and the pointer finger with blue for Neptune.

I thought it turned out pretty cute.

Planetarium

We went to the Clark Planetarium.

Plantpets



I wanted to do these during GR week as grassheads, but I never made it to the store to buy grass seed. This week, however, we read a book named Plantpet, so the projects worked well as a PL activity.

Cut off the end of a nylon stocking, leaving about four inches. Spoon about 1 Tbs of grass seed into the bottom of the stocking. I added roughly 1/2 cup of dirt from my backyard at that point, but various websites recommended sawdust. After tying off the bottom of the dirt, we added a rubber-banded nose. Other images on the internet had rubber-banded ears, too. Googly eyes helped complete the effect. "Dress" a Yoplait yogurt cup with paper, buttons, anything you want. Fill the cup at least half-way with water, and place the head on top of the cup, letting the nylon dangle in the water. The nylon will serve as a wick. The grass will begin to grow in about a week, provided you keep the water level above half-way.

Treasure hunt. plane, planets, plates, pluto. The treasure was Good and Plenty. I was certain he wouldn't like it. I was wrong.

GR Stuff

Activities

Green Painting



I mixed three colors of green. We painted with them.

Grandparent's Cards



I've mentioned before Tal's love of card-making. This time we made cards for his grandparents. The most adorable part was the things Tal thought of to say thank you for. Here is my favorite.



Treasure hunt. green beans, grapes, grass, grater, groundhog. The treasure was 100 Grand.

GL Stuff

Activities

In general I try not to spend too much money on these projects and instead opt for stuff that's generally already in my craft supply, but there were just so many fun GL things at the craft store, that I bought everything.

Glitter Glue



These were a big hit. What's more fun than shiny adhesive?

Stained Glass



This craft involved putting different colors of plastic beads into the frame and then melting them in the oven. Not actual stained glass, but I counted it.

Glow-in-the-Dark Paint

This stuff was AWESOME. I picked up a pillowcase from the DI this week and let Tal decorate in with this fancy glowing paint. Here's the end result.

Treasure hunt: glue, glasses, glove, glow-in-the-dark pillow. The treasure was Black Forest Gummy Glo Worms.

FR Stuff

Most of the books we used had "friend" in the title.

Activities

Frame

This is also a repeat from F week. Tal was a little more rushed with this years frame. But he was excited about what happens when red and green mix.



I thought the frame set off Tyler's mountain picture nicely.

Fractal

This is a Sierpinski Triangle.



It is a fractal, which means it is "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole." I didn't teach Tal that, but we did make a Sierpinski Triangle.



We actually made one on each side of the paper, and Tal then wanted to cut it out. Hence the incompleteness of the fractal. Don't tell Mrs. Keir. I'm not sure Tal understood any of this, but he got good practice drawing triangles. I didn't realize until we did this that he didn't really know how, so I made three dots and he connected them.

Frog I ran out of time this week, but the frog we did during F week would have fit nicely here.

Treasure hunt: fractal, frame, freezer, fruit, frog. The treasure was fruit snacks.

FL Stuff

There weren't any books that really stuck out for me, but I did discover that books with "flower" in the title are pretty girly.

Activities

Egg Carton Flowers



I cut apart a cardboard (Cardboard? Non-styrofoam, at least) egg carton into it's individual egg cells. Tal then painted each of the cut apart carton pieces in bright colors. We then cut about 2" squares from various pieces of tissue paper. After the cartons were dry (with the help of a blow-dryer) we pushed the tissue into the carton cavity and held the whole thing in place using a pipe cleaner through the center. I bunched up the pipe cleaner at the top so it didn't slide through the flower.

Plastic Stain Flowers

We made suncatchers (imitation stained glass with plastic frames and glass stain). Here is a website that sells something like what we did.



Flag

Like I've mentioned before, I didn't plan on continuing this project once I finished the alphabet, so there are many projects that I did back in F week, for example, that really should have been FL projects. I'll fix this all in two years when I do it with Asher, but in the meantime I'm just going to repeat some things. It was fun to see Tal's progress, however.

Here is Project Flag 2009:



Note the random number of stripes and haphazard arrangement of stars.

Here is Project Flag 2010:



This time we looked at pictures of flags online and Tal was very specific that we needed 13 stripes and 50 stars arranged geometrically. This led us into a discussion of what the stars and stripes mean, which led us into a discussion of what states are, so I printed of this map and we found all the states where his cousins live.

Treasure hunt: flower, flour, flag. The treasure was Flipz (yogurt covered pretzels).