Animals that Hibernate - Ladybugs, Turtles and Bears Oh, My!

This month we are learning about hibernation and other winter topics like the Arctic. We've been working on animals that hibernate and learned that most bears aren't true hibernators. They just go into a dormant stage and are very hard to rouse. Other animals and bugs, like the ladybug and the Peeper frog, are true hibernators who don't wake during the winter.


When searching for hibernation activities I found a ton of stuff about bears. But being the atypical family that we are, I wanted to explore a different animal. We chose to focus on the ladybug. First, I printed out a general info sheet from Enchanted Learning about animals that hibernate We talked about the different animals and discussed hibernation. Next, I looked up songs about hibernation but could only find things focused on bears or groundhogs. So, I came up with my own little song about a ladybug. Then we did a ladybug craft and acted out the song. Below is the song and some pictures. This lesson will be followed by a lesson on groundhogs, which will lead into Groundhog Day. Happy homeschooling!


The Little Ladybug Hibernation Song (we sung to an altered tune of The Farmer in the Dell - but you could use any typical rhythm that appeals to you.)

The little ladybug, the little ladybug,

It eats, eats, eats, eats, eats, up aphids before it gets all snug.

It makes a bed in leaves--- or under a rock

It won’t wake up again until it gets a little hot!

Ladybug craft:

 1 black sheet of construction paper

1 red sheet of construction paper

Googly eyes or white dots

glue

scissors

Cut a large heart out of the red paper. Cut a medium-sized heart out of the black paper. Cut four to six small hearts out of the rest of the black construction paper. Have your child glue the black piece to the red piece to form the ladybug's body. Add the heart spots on its back. Add the eyes and draw a face, if you wish.

Ladybug Action for Song:

Take a small piece of green paper and put a bunch of white little paper pieces on it to represent a leaf with aphids. Crumple up a couple pieces of gray or white papers to make a rock. Cut out a yellow sun or just a circle to represent the emerging heat of spring. Sing the song as your child takes the ladybug and eats the aphids, goes to sleep under the rock, and slowly walk toward the sun as it emerges from hibernation. We practiced the song 3-4 times and then acted it out a few times.

Eating the aphids

Hibernating under the rock

Coming out of hibernation

If You Give a Moose a Muffin Storyboard Activity Part II

Here's the update on the Teaching with Storyboards post from last week. Like I stated before, we chose If You Give a Moose a Muffin for our first ever storyboard. This blog post will cover the process, and I'll post tomorrow about the presentation of the storyboard.

Getting Started
To begin, we read the story for one week every day.  I helped her start to memorize the story so she could retell it using her storyboards. After she had the story pretty much memorized, we began working on our storyboards.

Materials
Large index cards
crayons
glue
felt
material (we used an old shirt that no longer fit---you get lots of neat prints and fabrics this way)
printed clip art that related to story (for this I printed out moose, muffins, and a blackberry bush piece)
magazine cutouts
button, thread, and needle

Process

We started by adding the title to an index card with some clipart for illustrations

These storyboards illustrate the part in the story where you go to the fridge to get some of your mother's homemade blackberry jam and the moose asks for another and another muffin.

So you have to go to the store to get some, but he wants to go with you. But since it's cold, he'll ask for a sweater. We used red felt to cut out the sweater. For the part where he notices a button is loose, I cut out another red sweater and loosely sewed a purple button onto the sweater before she glued it on the moose.

This is her illustration for the part where the button reminds him of sock puppets so he gets scissors, glue, string etc... to make some.

The next few storyboards skip ahead in the story, to the part after you help him make scenery for a puppet show and he needs to hide his ears under a sheet.

This was one of her favorite boards to make. Using the clipart of the moose, which we also used on the title page, we found a picture of a ghost in a magazine and recreated the part where he puts the sheet over his head, which reminds him that he wants to be a ghost for Halloween. Using little magazine letters, we spelled out the word Boo!...the colors everywhere illustrate the fact that he scared himself and spilled the paint everywhere.

This illustrates the part where you get a sheet from your bed for the moose. We cut up an old, patterned t-shirt that didn't fit her anymore to act as the sheet on the bed.

This is one of the last scenes in the storyboard. She drew the moose going to hang up the sheet after he used it to clean up the paints. The clipart is supposed to be the mother's blackberry bushes in the yard. The last page simply had a drawing of the moose with a clipart of the muffin with the words, "And chances are...."

 As you can see, there isn't a lot of writing with these storyboards. My point wasn't to have her copy the story onto the cards, but use her imagination to retell the story. We focused on 2-3 cards per day, and it took us almost 2 weeks to complete the entire thing. We would read the story as we created the boards, and she would draw the storyboards in relation to how she remembered chunks of the story. So one card may represent 3 pages in the story, while another might simply be 1 page. There are no set in stone rules. The storyboards I didn't include in this blog were simply hand-drawn. I tried to lead her to more creative ways to express the story, but she is very much into drawing her own pictures right now, so that's mostly what we went with.

Since these are time-consuming projects, I only have 1 planned a month. We are thinking of doing If You Give a Cat a Cupcake this month, but she's still deciding which book she wants. Tomorrow I will post a short blog post on how we presented this story to the rest of the family and saw the whole thing come together in a cute little presentation. Happy homeschooling!

How to Create a Kindergarten Literacy Bag Part II

My first post, How to Create Kindergarten Literacy Bags, explained exactly what a literacy bag is and how to work with one. This post is an example of what we have in our literacy bag for this week. Homeschoolers could probably work through a literacy bag a week, but if you include enough activities you can plan a monthly bag.



The bag we've designated as our literacy bag



We are using the book Literacy Bags as a jumping off point for theme ideas, but most of the activities are things I've researched and found on my own. The theme for our first bag is the letter A and apples.

Inside of our bag is one activity for each day. There are two math options included along with the literacy options. The math options include a photocopy of a graph from our Literacy Bags book, along with little tiny apple templates colored red, green, and yellow. The activity is to graph the apples according to color. The other math/art activity is a photocopy of three tree stumps that I found at this stamping blog. I wrote numbers on the trunks and will instruct her to draw three apple trees and then using her fingertip, she will dab on the correct number of apples with red paint.

The literacy activities include copies of our little apple templates found in our book, which I have written beginning consonants on some and word families beginning with A on others. She will match up the beginning consonant with the ending sound to create different words. Some of the ending sounds also coincide with the sight words she's learning, such as an and am. I also printed out a story from The Virtual Vine called The Little Red House with No Doors and No Windows and a Star Inside. This is a storytelling activity that involves cutting open an apple at the end to reveal the star inside the house with no doors or windows. We talked about the story and discussed vocabulary she was unfamiliar with, such as the word orchard.

math graph

I also printed out a story from the Virtual Vine called Apples Yuck and Apples Yum! This is a sight word book of a dozen pages that uses the words I See A ------ Apple. The blanks are then filled in with color words such as blue, red, yellow etc.... followed by the word yuck or yum! She will then draw the apple according to the color mentioned and read the book. The last activity is just a brown paper lunch bag with a green pipe cleaner inside. She will paint the bag red, let it dry, stuff it with paper, and tie it with the pipe cleaner to look like an apple.

stories and craft

The above is just one small example of how you can do a literacy bag. You can include books if you want, but we just pull them off the bookshelf. As we experiment more with these bags over the year, I will post again about our more creative and fun bags. Happy homeschooling!

How to Create Kindergarten Literacy Bags

Kindergarten reading activities should be fun and interactive. I like the idea of a literacy bag, and we successfully use one in our homeschool. I found this great book   at our local book store. It has literacy bag ideas for every letter of the alphabet. I use the ideas as a jumping off point and go from there.

What Is a Literacy Bag?

A literacy bag can be an actual bag, bucket, basket, or whatever container you want to use for the activities. The bag is filled with a thematic unit, with the focus on reading and literacy. In the traditional sense, kids check out the literacy bags from their classroom and explore the activities inside. In our homeschool, I provide enough activities to do one a day.

What Goes Inside the Bag?

 You can put anything you want into the bag. Toys, games, worksheets, crafts, music, poetry, or whatever you want to explore for the week. We are just starting this week with our literacy bag, so we're on the letter A. Inside our bag I have 5-6 activities that follow an apple theme and cover reading, phonics, storytelling, art, and math.

How Do I Teach Using the Bag?

I fill the bag with the activities and have her pick one activity a day. I do not tell her what the activity actually is, as being surprised is part of the fun. For example, one of the things in our bag right now is a brown sandwich bag with a green pipe cleaner in it. It's an art project where she will stuff the bag, paint it red, and add a green stem. Today she chose a two page story out of the bag which involved using a real apple to tell the story, which in turn became our snack after the story.

Tomorrow I will post pictures of our literacy bag and show you examples of what I have in the bag for the letter A apple theme. (Literacy Bags Part II) The literacy bag idea can be tweaked for toddlers or preschoolers just by providing age-appropriate lessons. Older kids also like these bags, as more involved puzzles and games can be put inside for independent learning. Happy homeschooling!