Garden Unit Study: Day 2

Note to self: If you want school to take less than an hour, don’t give Grace any coloring pages.

Today was much better. I strayed off the unit study path a bit, until Grace said, “Wait, aren’t we still learning about gardens?” Well ok then. At least I have someone to keep me in line!

We started off with a calendar binder I had put together. I’ll photograph that tomorrow, I completely forgot today. Then we moved on to the Math Journal. I think I am going to love the Math Journal. It’s just a composition book and I printed labels to stick prompts at the top of each page. (I added the green circle prompt last minute, so it doesn’t have a fancy label.) Her green circle looks a little more like an oval, but since the focus was the number one I didn’t have her draw another, because then there would have been two! We’ll focus on shapes another day. I also had her write the number 1 and spell out one . I wrote a 1 and one on there as a guide, but told her she was free to fill the page however she chose, as long as she was writing 1 or one.

Both girls did a do-a-dot number one next, found here at Confessions of a Homeschooler. Can you guess which belongs to the 4-year-old and which belongs to the 2-year-old?

Then Grace followed a Garden Maze (from This Reading Mama’s Garden Pack) counting from one to ten.

Then I gave Grace a black and white emergent reader to color, also from This Reading Mama’s Garden Pack. The child loves to color, and take her time. I should have known this would take a while. Joy colored one also, which lasted about one minute on the paper and five minutes coloring her body and face.

Here is Grace’s final book, including a last page that she drew more plants on. I left out the page about the watermelon, because we don’t have watermelons in our garden. We do have everything else from the book growing outside. (Including a critter that is eating some of it!)

While Grace was coloring — for probably 45 minutes, if I had to guess — Joy and I read through some of our sight word readers (scored at a yard sale for $2, the set is missing two books, but I’m ok with that) and played with a Duplo set that includes a garden and bunnies. There is also a farm set in the same container because I don’t like wasting space if they’ll fit in the same container.

Once Grace finished coloring, we read the book she had colored. Then she asked if she could go outside and take pictures of the garden to show how it’s growing. Absolutely! I haven’t loaded her pictures yet, but I can’t wait to see them! Our girls were both in preschool this year two mornings a week and Joy brought home a man with grass hair to cut. We’ve been watering him and cutting his hair, but this mama felt it was time he left our kitchen counter. We moved some things in the yard around, which created a few patches of dirt. There is grass seed there starting to grow, so we decided to plant his hair outside so it would be with us forever. My kids don’t have an easy time throwing things away. I wonder where they get that from?

 

After playing a while, we came inside and worked on Grace’s writing journal. I asked her to draw A and a, and then circle the best one. She did capital A just fine, but got lower case a reversed. She had already circled the best one, but I showed her the correct way to draw it and she gave it another try. Then she completed a maze of letters. I didn’t put the paper away fast enough, so she X’d out all the letters that weren’t A once she was done.

We finished by getting out my Bible and doing the lesson on The Patient Farmer from Kids of Integrity’s Patience lesson. 

I still feel like we did too much today. I want to keep the calendar binder, math and writing journals going. I need to reevaluate the unit studies and see what can be left out.

And now we are watching the first Tinkerbell movie. It’s about gardens, right?