Butterflys, Biography, B Box and other B's

Today we moved into B with full gusto. We had a wonderful butterfly themed day. We spent over an hour classifying different butterflies we had. I spread out all our butterflies on the floor in our office and the pulled up different images and descriptions of butterflies and the kids had to find the matches. They enjoyed this activity for quite awhile and I believe learned quite a bit. We talked about the lifecycle of the butterfly - though both are ery familiar with it and it was mostly review. Then we acted it out (my favorite part) they started curled up like eggs on the floor and then broke out of their eggs and crawled around like caterpillars eating everything they could. Then I helped them cocoon themselves by wrapping them in toilet paper with their arms at their sides. Then I took turns holding each one upside down as a crysallis and they used their arms to break out and become a butterfly. Then we flew around the house as beautiful butterflies and pretended to pollinate and just fly. It was so much fun and is still one of my favorite activities to do - the kids too - this is the third year we have done it and the first year that Ciaran really understood what we were doing and had so much fun. We rounded out the butterfly lesson reading a book on butterflies and having the kids work together on a life cycle butterfly puzzle we have - where they put each stage together in an individual puzzle. Finally they each made a butterfly craft where I traced their hands spread out like butterfly wings - the outline of each hand is one wing. I drew a body and they drew the antennas, eyes and colored them in. We even made one for Sirah. Great fun!

We also read a wide variety of books including biographies of Bach, Boticelli and Daniel Boone. Boticelli was by far their favorite of these books and both really enjoyed "Birth of Venus". We listened to the music of Bach during the course of our work. They watched a video of Backstage at the Ballet - which included quite a bit of the performance of the Nutcracker. We read Angelina (as she is a ballerina) and several other fiction stories including one of my favorites "The Bee Tree".

Ciaran and I worked on our B box, some items in there: banana, book, boy, bus, boat, bunny, boar, bear (panda and brown and several stuffed), bread, ball, brown, blue, block, bead, beetle, bee, and bugs. He also colored a picture of a bullfrog.

Rhiannon worked on several dot to dots for math work today including beluga whales, beach, and a birthday cake. She also did some worksheets from Miquon and focused on how different number combinations can equal the same total. She worked on the letter B for handwriting and drew a picture of birds in her nature notebook. She read from her phonics bible and drew pictures and words on the chalkboard that started with B.

It was a VERY busy day - but we got so much accomplished and we had a good day. The kids played outside in the afternoon and I got much of the house cleaned. Serona and I even had a date tonight. We went and saw "Sky Captain of Tommorrow".

Tommorrow will be even busier as we have our country coop in the morning. I am co-leading this session and just finished all my prep work! We are leading a class on animals and the government of the US. We have fun things planned - check in tommorrow evening for a recap.

Peace,
Tenn