Tuesday, June 30, 2015

My Father's World - A is for Apple

If I stay in Jesus, I will have much fruit!  These were our words to remember for this unit and they were very timely, for all of us.  With all of the upheaval in our lives at the moment we have been missing quite a bit of "fruit"!  We spent lots of time talking about the fruit of the spirit and how we can show different fruit in different circumstances.  There wasn't a great amount of paperwork to show for this unit but we did lots of talking and learning.






We practiced being patient, kind and having self-control by working and playing together to build a new fort.



We practiced kindness by giving little brother a ride in the wagon.



We saw love when big brother let us cuddle up to him in his bed during the storm.








We did a little bit of paper work.



We had fun learning our colours and numbers.





Our book of the week was 10 Apples Up On Top, so we tried to see how many apples we could balance on our heads.  We didn't get much further than 1!!



We made a graph of different coloured apples.




Played with our apple playdough,



And did some apple prints.










Sunday, June 28, 2015

Bible Road Trip

We have come across an awesome Bible curriculum thanks to my friend Sandra. Bible Road Trip leads your family on a three year survey of the Bible, cover to cover.  It is aimed for pre-k to year 12 with teachers notes and notebooking pages etc for each different level.  We have been using it for 3 weeks so far and are loving it!!  The kids ask for Bible time every morning now and are really getting into it.  The best thing, is that we can all do it together.

Here is a look at what we have done over the last couple of weeks.




We started off with a quick overview of the Bible, what it is, where it came from etc and looked at some parables. I love starting the day with us all together reading and talking and working on the same thing!





We read and talked about the parable of the sower.



We acted out the parable of the wise and foolish builders....again and again and again!




Then while the big kids were busy with their notebooking pages, the little ones built some houses.  My favourite is the one built on the sand.  It just makes me smile.  :)



We watched episode one of What's In the Bible.  This series ties in really well and we already own it - bonus!!!




We also read about the armour of God and made our own sword of the spirit.



Which, of course, were used for sparring practice as soon as they were dry!!

From what I have seen so far I would thoroughly recommend this curriculum to anyone.  Oh, and even better it is completely free.











Sunday, June 21, 2015

My Father's World - L is for Leaf

I wanted to blog Samuel's pre-primary year so I would have a record to look back on, but so far I haven't been very consistent!!  Anyway, I have a few catch-up posts to do.  I can't find any of our moon week photos so that will come later.  For now we will catch up on L is for Leaf!!



We started our week, as usual with a lesson about our words to remember.  For this unit our words were, I can live and grow in Jesus.  We picked a branch off of our tree and put it in some water, then we removed one leaf that decided it wanted to do things its own way and not be part of the branch. We discussed what we thought would happen and then watch it over the week as it dried up and died.  We compared this to our lives with and without Jesus.







Samuel completed his reading, writing and maths pages for the unit.  





Nathanael, as usual, joined in with his own activities.  Give this boy a crayon or paint and he will be happy for hours.  So different to his big brother!




We made play dough using herbs from our garden to scent it and then collected leaves and twigs from outside to help decorate our own gardens.






We made leaf prints in a variety of ways.  we painted the leaves and used them to print on the paper.  we also put different leaves directly on the paper, covered them with kitchen towel and then gently banged them with the hammer hammered the life out of them and produced some pretty cool prints.  Finally, we did the good old leaves under the paper and colour over with crayon trick!




We also did a bit of name practice this week.  I have been a bit slack with teaching the boys their names this time around.  Samuel pretty much knows his name but Nathanael doesn't have a clue.  Poor child, who gives their baby a 9 letter name to try and learn to spell!!












To finish of our L is for leaf week we went to Fred Jacoby up in Mundaring to enjoy what was left of the Autumn leaves.  There was lots of running and jumping and throwing and slipping down muddy hills!