My Father's World ~ K ~ take 2!

My second son starts kindergarten this year! I can't believe how big he is! We are doing My Father's World!

• I've gone through this once with my oldest son, Chris. You can see those posts here. 

• I received and organized all his school work for the year. I'm pretty impressed with the changes they made. I linked up with A Mama's Story's MFW Blogroll. I plan on posting everything I do again with Zack this year.

• Mama Jenn has a great MFW Kindergarten resource page here. 

Lessons 21 - 26

Yep! We are done with My Father's World Kindergarten curriculum! We are glad to be done. Ready for new activities - all of us. :)

Lessons 21 & 22 ~ Butterfly & Frog:

I found this website that has neat butterfly and frog cycle worksheets. We put a good bit of reading into these two and actually followed the suggested activities in the teacher's manual! I know - I surprise myself sometimes. :p

Lessons 23 - 26 ~

I could tell my son was tired of this so we did these 4 lessons in 2 weeks. He was really happy about that.

And that concludes My Father's World K curriculum for us!

My personal opinion ~ not for children who would be considered "advanced" in kindergarten. If they can read at any level, know their colors and numbers I would not choose this for them. My son was bored with this most of the time and I spent a good bit of money trying to bring it to his level and keep him engaged. After all, one of my reasons for homeschooling is to keep the "love of learning" in my boys. Boredom and busy work will certainly kill it! I am keeping all of my stuff because it may be a great choice for any of my younger boys. As of right now if would be great for Zack my four year old. I'm still debating on if I should purchase the student materials for him for 2011 - 2012 year. As my mom always said when I was little ~ "we'll see".

Lessons 17 - 20

Since I'm so behind on posting my weekly MFW lessons I thought it would be best to bulk catch up. I didn't take many pictures in January but I'm back on track with taking pics. for February. :)

Lesson 17 ~ Kangaroo

• read about Australia in the Rookie Read About Geography book Australia
• Australia map work with a printable worksheet and the Tag world map
• found an early reader book at the library about Kangaroos
• watched National Geographic Really Wild Animals Wonders Down Under

Lesson 18 ~ Zebra

• read about Africa in the Rookie Read About Geography book Africa
• ran out of ink that week so no printable
• Tag world map work in Africa
• found an early reader book at the library on Zebras
• watched National Geographic Really Wild Animals Swinging Safari

Lesson 19 ~ Rock

• Read books about rocks
• had a rock tray
• made a volcano with Daddy

Lesson 20 ~ Jewel

• read information about jewels

During this time Chris finished his 100 chart.

That about sums up our last few weeks in MFW.

Lesson 16 ~ Penguin

I'm finally getting around to posting last week's work. :) Here's what we did:

Map Work: On Monday we locate the continent we are going to learn about on the globe. Then I print out a map and they color that continent red and label it. We pull out the Tag map for fun to hear what it says about that continent. Last we read the Rookie Read-About Geography book on that particular continent.

Videos: Tuesday is our class video day. I mainly have this day when we are learning about subjects that are out of our ability to experience in person at that time. We watched a video on Antarctica by National Geographic's Really Wild Animals called "Cold, Cold, South".

Books: On Tuesday we read any overview books I can find on animals living in the continent we are learning about. Then Wednesday is when I introduce the books on the particular animal that MFW wants you to concentrate on. The books are linked if you would like to explore them on Amazon. :)

Music: We did music activity #2 found in the MFW's deluxe kindergarten curriculum. The boys really enjoy this music time. Which we do on Wednesdays. So far we spend about 15 minutes doing them.

I think that wraps up our week involving MFW.

Lesson 15 ~ Elephant

It was great to get back to school! In MFW's plan there are four weeks of learning about wild animals. Since there is no section that teaches geography that I can see, I decided to incorporate the continents into the wild animal lessons. So while elephant this week we also learned about Asia! Here's what we did:

Map Work: First we located Asia on the map as a whole.

Then we labeled a few countries in Asia.

I asked one of his grandparents to buy him the leapfrog tag map set for Christmas and it is fabulous for map work. There are little kids located around the world and you can hear them say something in their language, tell you what they eat for a meal, and play music listened to in their country! I thought that was pretty neat.

Books: MFW recommends The Elephant Who Couldn't Forget which sounds cute but our library didn't have it. Their next recommendation is 17 Kings and 42 Elephants. Our library did have that book but I found it ... let's just say ... we didn't read it. :) I did find this Rookie Read-About Geography collection at our library which is fabulous! We checked out one for each continent we're learning about this month. Chris was able to read through them well while learning a few new words and retained what he read. They are on my wish list that is how much I and the boys enjoyed them. Two books we enjoyed were Grandma Elephant's In Charge by Martin Jenkins and Elephants Can Paint Too! by Katya Arnold.

Music: We finally did one of the music activities that came with the curriculum! The first activity is dancing to Mozart while balancing a bean bag on your head. The boys had fun with it and it was nice including music in our school day. I plan to do one once a week now. I looked them over and they don't take long and there is hardly any planning involved. For the bean bag I put beans in a sock and tied the sock in a knot. 2 minutes!

Worksheets: There are now 5 worksheets a week. One for each day. The last one is a story book they put together. If you don't know and want to know about MFW (kindergarten) - you start out with three worksheets and by Lesson 15 (17 weeks into) you are have 5 a week.

Videos: Amazon's Video On Demand has a National Geographic series called Really Wild Animals. Each episode is $1.99 and they have two for each continent (that we are learning about). I chose one for Asia and they watched it two times during the week. They are around 20 minutes long so it's not a lot of TV time but they get a glimpse of animals in that continent and what parts of it look like.

Well I think that about wraps up what we did with MFW curriculum.

Lesson 12, 13, & 14 ~ Goat, Cow, & Horse

*We kicked off our farm series by making a farm sensory box. I got this awesome idea from this awesome teacher! Because her ideas are fabulous the boys loved this! I took a wholesale pasta box, construction paper, and farm templates and let them decorate the outside. They each got 2 sides to their self. I spared you all four sides and posted one. :)

Here's the inside: The boys spent two hours straight playing with this when it was finished! Seriously!! They played with it at least 30 minutes every day! I was astonished at how much they took to this project and plan on incorporating more when I can.
* I used DTLK's Farm Crafts and Kidzone's Farm Unit. I found the Kidzone the most resourceful. From their farm unit we made mini farm books, played farm sudoku, created a collage of crop fields, and played with farm sentence sequencing cards! Spread out over the three weeks of course. :)

* I recommend these books with the farm lessons for MFW:

The Year at Maple Hill Farm by Alice and Martin Provensen

Animals That Live on the Farm Goats by JoAnn Early Macken

Animals That Live on the Farm Cows by JoAnn Early Macken

Animals That Live on the Farm Horses by JoAnn Early Macken

They offer great basic information (no overload so they'll remember what they do learn better) and great REAL pictures (excluding Maple Hill Farm - it's drawn).

* A friend of mine who also uses MFW is working on a Farm Field Trip for the kids! I'll post pics. if it works out.

Well that wraps up our extras for MFW Farm Lessons. It also wraps up MFW Lessons for the rest of 2010! We're breaking from MFW for December. It was a great stopping point so it just worked out that way. We will use December for plenty of other learning opportunities!

Lesson 10 & 11 - Water & Insects

I realized that the whole month of November almost went by without any MFW posts! I'm combining these two because they are short posts. I will also be combining lessons 12 - 14 because they are all about farm animals and posting on them the first week of December.

Lesson 10 - Water

*We just followed the lesson plan exact for water with no extras. He created a chart for liquids, solids, and gases in his observation journal. We didn't check out any extra books that week.

Lesson 11 - Insects

*We have the ant hill but I totally failed on having the ants by this time. We will probably order them in the spring because the pamphlet said its not a good idea to order in the winter.

*I found a early reader book in his stage nonfiction about ladybugs! Which I thought was great that he was able to completely read about them on his own. I wished I could find at least one book like that for all the lessons! We did check out at least one book about each of the suggests insects: ants, bees, and ladybugs. Unfortunately, I did not write them down and I can't find them on the library's site.

*Awesome enough there is a lap book for the Ants and the Grasshopper and the moral matches the Biblical Concept MFW gives for that week! Here is the front of Chris' completed lap book - He does this without any help so it takes a lot of his mental energy. He is not required to do anything else but math and play on a lap book day. The lap book covers reading, arts, crafts, moral lesson, vocabulary words, and science.

*We went into the backyard and I had him find three insects and draw them along with observations about them in his observation journal. Him & his brother had fun chasing the bugs around. :)

Lesson 9 - Octopus

We had a fun week learning about the ocean and some of the creatures living there!

Movie: I seen this movie in Redbox and checked it out to watch since one of the days suggest going to an aquarium and our closest one is 3 hours away. It was pretty good and something different since we don't watch TV or movies often. FYI: It did mention evolution quite a few times.
Books: We started out the week reading Exploring the Deep, Dark Sea by Gail Gibbons. It was a great introduction to the ocean and some of the creatures living there. The pic. is linked.
Other books we read this week were: The Amazing Octopus A Bobbie Kalman Book, Sharks by Gail Gibbons, and Whales by Gail Gibbons. They were all great books.

Map: Chris' first map. We talked about how the Earth is mainly water and the names of the main bodies of water.

Ocean Collage: Chris' first collage. He had fun with this!

In addition, we found some ocean color books and play sea creatures in the dollar section of Target.

Lesson 8 - Dinosaurs

I'm a little late on posting this lesson. There wasn't much involved with this one. The curriculum package I bought came with a book for this lesson titled "What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs?". This is a great book with basic information that we believe. It tells what the Bible says about when dinosaurs were created, when they lived, how big they were, how sin changed our relationship with all animals but especially dinosaurs, how Noah got them on the ark, and what happened to them afterwards.

I found another awesome book titled "Dinosaurs of Eden" at our Family Christian Store. I liked it so much I bought it for the dinosaur week. Coincidentally they are by the same author Ken Ham, whom happened to be a key note speaker at the homeschool convention we went to earlier this year!
This book goes into much detail about all the basics in the What Really Happened to the Dinosaurs book. It includes lots of Bible verses about dinosaurs and dragons, pictures and details on what dinosaurs lived with what groups of people, and lots more! I found it all very intriguing and so did Chris.

Ken Ham also has a Creation Museum that I would love for us all to go to. However, it's eight hours one way which once we get over 3 hours one way we have found it best to stay over night and that changes how much the trip would cost. Maybe one day. :)

BTW both of the links for the books take you to them on Amazon where you can view inside them.

Lesson 7 - Us

This week was a busy at our house. I had lots of follow up appointments this week and was just more tired as well. I was only able to teach 3 days and only took pics. one of the days. It worked out nicely because this week the science topic was the human body. The human body is something that interested Chris at the age of 3. He's read tons and tons of books about this and what he doesn't understand he asks our chiropractor or pediatrician. His interest has not died down since so for 2 1/2 years he's been studying the human body on his own. I would say he probably has a fourth or fifth grade level of understanding and has even stumped his teenage aunts & uncles a time or two. :P All that to say I'm not concerned w/the fact that we had to skimp on this week. :)

After all that here's what we did in our three days:

Calender, Number Chart, Worksheets, and Tactile Letter Activities

MFW wants the main concentration of the human body to be on the five senses. So here are some five senses games we played:

Sight Game: After he "looked" at what was there he turned around and I took one object then he had to "look"back and tell me what I took based on his memory of what he "saw".

Touch Game: Blind-folded so he could concentrate more on his "touch" he had to "feel" the objects inside the sock and guess what they were.

File Folder: The Five Senses

Books:

Sleep is for Everyone by Paul Showers ~ Chris has been complaining about having to go to sleep lately. So I thought this was the perfect opportunity to talk about our body needing sleep. This book is ok.

The Magic School Bus Explores the Senses by Joanna Cole & Bruce Degen ~ Chris enjoyed it. I honestly don't care for The Magic School Bus ( i know someone slap me right? lol) but this was the only "Senses" book our library had.

Well that's it for us this week! My mom and two baby brothers are coming to stay with us for the week tonight!! Exciting!! I hope everyone has a great weekend.

Lesson 6 - Turtle

Sorry no pics.

I had a friend come over to help with the my two youngest while I did school with Chris. It's temporary while I'm still healing. I have an awesome link that ties in with this lesson I want to share. Plus I didn't want to miss a post on a lesson. :)

We did the regular calendar, number chart, and worksheets.

Turtle Extras:

Book: Amazing Animals Turtles by Christina Wilsdon. This book has 5 chapters which worked out well. We read a chapter a day and reviewed everything we learned at the end. It's a great turtle book.

Trip to Petsmart: There was only one turtle there but we used that turtle to name and talk about all the turtle facts we read so far. The boys had fun and it was a non stressful way for me to finally get out.

Measuring: We read that sea turtles are the largest turtles growing to as long as 8 feet! I marked 8 feet on our carpet and had Chris lay at one end like a turtle looking towards the other end. This gave him a better idea on how big these amazing creatures are! I was trying to explain to him how big 8 feet is and couldn't when this idea came to mind.

Lapbook: And here is my awesome link! :) A wonderful blog I follow, Practical Pages, posted a link for Aaesop's Fables lapbooks a while back and I saved it. They had one for The Hare and the Tortoise, which is recommend in MFW for additional reading. Chris enjoyed making his first lapbook and told me that was his favorite activity of the week!

That's it. It felt nice to start school back up. I'm so grateful for wonderful friends willing to help me.

For The Children's Sake

This book came with My Father's World Kindergarten Deluxe Package. I originally did not plan on reading it. I had many other books to read that I bought at the convention that I preferred. While I was flipping through this book and so many paragraphs caught my attention that I decided to read it. WoW! It was good! I started this book at the beginning of July and just finished it last week. It is only 158 pages but sometimes one page was so full that I wanted to stop, pray, and take it in. I have 31 pages of notes in my notebook! As hard as it is I'm picking out two points that stuck out the most to me from each chapter.

Chapter 1: was an introduction mainly. So I'm applying my points for that one to another chapter. :)

Chapter 2:

• Respect children. Don't see them as something o prune, form, or mold. They are individuals who think, act, and feel. They are separate human beings whose strength lie in who they are, not who they will become.
• Our generation is prone to watching a brief program or reading a few paragraphs on a subject and then thinking we "know" about that subject. All we are doing is amusing our interest. This is not education.

Chapter 3:

• Do not smash your children. Lead them. Just as a Shepard leads his sheep. The pasture itself has boundaries but there is freedom within the pasture.
• Children will treat others as they should when they are used to consideration, time, and care themselves.

Chapter 4:

• A child flourishes in an atmosphere where they are liked as a person. Their ideas and choices count.
• Education is an atmosphere, a discipline, a life.

Chapter 5: the most filled chapter

• No division between secular and christian. The whole of reality is God's reality.
• Let the child, God, and His Word work out their own relationship together.
• Time must be unhurried and TV free to encourage the gentle art of learning.
• A part of life is learning how to regulate one's time, responsibilities, and one's limits.

Chapter 6:

• We hinder the child's worth ("just as I am") when we set up artificial development schedules which they must learn grade by grade. We push the "slow", bore the "quick", and ignore the living mind.
• Don't feel guilty about enjoying the whole of life. God created this world and all that's in it for us. Learn to balance each area of your life and enjoy each part of it whole. Whether it's work, sex, eating, reading, watching the sunset, playing a game, etc. It's yours.

There is so much and I've already started applying some things and planning on how to apply others! I strongly recommend this book to all teachers. It's not just for homeschool teachers. Most of the book she referring to how a specific school was ran. You can view inside this book on Amazon here.

MFW Break

School is started here this week and we are officially breaking from My Father's World for 3 weeks! In case you don't know - I'm 39 weeks today! This break was planned for two, I'm just adding on a week. The boys will be doing trays, handicrafts, arts, and read a louds. I personally will be concentrating on keeping house tasks caught up, my own arts, crafts, projects, and reading. I also will be posting things I've been wanting to post on but haven't had the time.

During last week I've found some great deals on some handicrafts & arts! These are some of the activities we'll be doing and I just can't wait:

Michael's: Has had great clearances lately! 2(6pc) Plaster kits, 1 box (makes 10) foam boys, workbook (Chris will ♥), water color pastel crayons, 2 acrylic paint bottles, and a box of colored macaroni $12

Border's: Awesome Handicraft books ~ $10

AC Moore: 2 sketch books (one for me & one for Chris), a little sketch pad (Zack),
pencil set $15I would normally only do one of these trips a week. (scoping clearances for future homeschooling projects) but since we're taking off for 3 weeks and this is what we will be doing. I figure it evens out. I most likely will not be doing any scoping after the baby comes. I plan on digging into all our projects that have been building up!

I'm a little nervous about labor & delivery but excited for what all this break will bring!

Lesson 5 - Nest

Lesson 5 was OK. Honestly Chris is starting to get bored with the curriculum. It's pretty repetitive. You do the exact same thing just with a different letter each week. He's actually complaining about having to do the worksheets and he's always been a workbook fanatic (doing them since 2 & only because he loves them!) The parts he's liked the most are the parts I'm adding in. So some debate is going on in my head. We'll see how the break does and I'm doing some research to see if the first grade one is the same. Anyway - here's some activities we did this week:

Number Chart: A better picture of what we've been doing for the "count to 100". He really likes learning to count by 5s. And on his own time has been studying addition and multiplication.

Paint a bird nest:


Animal Homes Lap Book: He really enjoyed this. I found this cute animal home lap book at DLTK right here. I'm pretty sure this was his favorite activity of the week.

Books:

• Animals at Home by David Lock (Reading Level 1)
• What's Inside? Animal Homes
• Animal Homes by Angela Wilkes
• Animal Homes by Barbara Taylor

We usually read all of one or two and then go over the rest. Unless he asks to read all of every book.

That's about all the "extra" we did for animal homes.

Lesson 4 - Apple

I may have taken less pictures this week than last! As it gets closer to time for the baby to come I'm just happy school is going well! Here's some of what we did:

Number Chart: I can't remember what blog I seen this idea on but we started it this week now that he is on number 25. I'll have a better picture next time to see. It's cool though because he is learning how to count by 5s this way.

Books:

More Books: That made me wish we had much more than these past two weeks to go over leaves and trees and such.

• Seeds! Seeds! Seeds! by Nancy Elizabeth Wallace
• The Brook Book exploring the smallest streams by Jim Arnosky
• Tell Me, Tree by Gail Gibbons
• Be a Friend to Trees by Patricia Lauber
  

Rain Walk: I grew up "rain walking" and I had many friends who loved to be at my house when it rained because my mom would let us go out in the rain. I'm so glad to do this with my boys and together as a family, we LOVE it!! There is nothing like it!

Paint an Apple:

Bowling with Daddy: Chris actually got a free bowling pass from our library by completing 4 newspaper activities featured in the Sunday paper. So "the guys" went while I had an OB appointment.

Well that's all I got! Like I said I wish we could dig in more but the kindergarten curriculum is a basic overview. All in time. :)

Lesson 3 - Leaf

I didn't take as much pictures for this week as I have the previous weeks. Here are some of the highlights:

Books: We read these books and used them for identifying leaves. They were all very good.


Observation Journal:

• Backyard Leaves - We got a leaf from each tree and traced and colored it. Then identified it and read about that tree it grew on.
• Science Experiment - How does a leaf drink water? - see pics. below
• Nature Walk - pictures and leaf rubbings from nature walk w/daddy
  

Science Experiment: How does a leaf drink water?

Day 1

Day 6

Nature Walk: Daddy took them on a nature walk while I had a few OB appointments to attend. They each had a backpack w/snacks, journal, markers, and crayons. So Cute!!
Well that's all the fun stuff I can think of that we did w/last week's leaf lesson.

Lesson 2 - Moon

Lesson 2 went great and pretty smooth. I'll just get into some of what we did:

Weather Observation: We cut out a four day forecast from our Sunday paper and then recorded on each day two times what he observed. He wrote the days and times and I wrote the descriptions that he gave me.
Moon Observation: We also put a moon observation page in his Observation Journal to record one moon cycle (which does take about a month).

Calendar: He completed his July calendar.
Moon Art: Monday he colored a moon. Wednesday he made a moon mosaic. Thursday he painted a moon.

Badges: There are some different ideas on what to do with the weekly "badges" in the teacher's manual. However, I liked this idea better than finding a place to put up a poster or make a necklace that will get tossed. I took a piece of card stock and he's gluing the "badges" on in order and keeping them in his school notebook. It works great. Tactile Letters: He does this on Mondays and Thursdays using the Cuisenaire Rods. Worksheets: Still one worksheet a day which is perfect for kindergarten, I think. Books: I forgot to include this last week. I didn't check out any of the recommended books for him because if you follow pretty much any Mason Reading List (which we have) then your child read these anywhere between ages 2 - 4! So I've only been checking out informational books, which he loves so it works, other children may need a break in between. I've checked out 3 for each subject so far. The hard part is most info. books on the sun or moon involve things like the big bang theory, evolution, or billions of years ago... Not our thing nor what we want our children to be taught. So make sure you read ahead to know what to skip. In addition, I explained to him that other people don't believe what we believe (because he can read and knows when I skip) but based on these verses (and read them to him) this is why we believe this. The two he liked best were The Sun Our Nearest Star by Franklyn Branley and Usborne Beginners Sun, Moon, and Stars. The Franklyn Branley book says a few times "billions of years" but other than that it's great. The Usborne Beginners book does teach that the sun was formed by thick clouds of dust and gas other than that it's great, especially in comparison to the details in some of the scholastic books in great length on the big bang theory.

Chris seemed to really enjoy the sun and moon lessons so I know he's going to have a blast next week. I have lots of neat things planned for his "leaf" lesson. Also, the activity the MFW teacher's manual has you do on the first day for the moon is awesome. This seemed to really help him grasp the moon reflecting the sun. Which is you go in a bathroom and turn the lights off. Shine a flashlight on the mirror and position it to shine on their face. The flashlight is the sun, mirror the moon, and their face the earth. Well, I think that's it. :)