Dear Sis,
Our Daily Reading
Today’s non-fiction selection was Boat Book by Gail Gibbons. It talks about all the different kinds of boats, broken into categories by how they are powered and what jobs they perform. A great toddler book… that is simply factual, without being condescending.
Today’s fiction selection is the Golden Book Classic, Scruffy the Tugboat by Gertrude Crampton. If you don’t remember from when you were a kid, Scruffy is a toy boat that longs for adventure in the great big world. Once he has his adventure, he realizes that he is better off in his small section of the world, with the man in the polka-dot tie and his son.
“b” is for Boat Letter Craft
Parent Preparation
- Print b is for Boat Letter Craft by Tag Sis, You’re It, on white card stock.
- Provide paints, brushes, painting smock, scissors, blue sheet of craft paper, and a glue stick.
Student Assembly
- Choosing different colors for each part, paint the trapezoid boat, triangle sail, and “b” mast. Set it aside to dry.
- Once your painting is dry, ask your grown up to help you cut out your boat parts.
- Paste the boat parts to blue craft paper.
- Write or ask your grown up to title, name, and date your work, for your homeschool portfolio.
Colored Sail Apple Boat Float
Activity Materials
- 10 different colored sheet of craft foam, cut into squares. We used red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, white, black, gray, and brown.
- 10 lollipop sticks, trimmed skewers, or similar narrow craft stick, to thread sails onto.
- 5 apples, sliced in half.
- A dish bin, half filled with water.
Our Process
- As your student hands you sails to poke into apples, ask them what color it is, reminding them if they forgot, and having them say the color name back to you.
- Have them review color names again as you place the boats into the water. Only 7 of our 10 boats were sea worthy, but that’s okay. It presented the opportunity for more practice.
- First, we counted all the sea faring boats. Then, we counted the boats that sank and had to be docked.
- Finally, we named the colors of the sea faring boats. Then, we named the colors of the boats that sank.
Three of our boats were not sea worthy. The first one, I accidentally pieced through the skin on the bottom of the apple. It floated for a while, until too much water got into it. The other two weren’t symmetrical enough, and tipped themselves with their own weight. William decided we should just eat the boats that didn’t work:)
Song of the Day
We printed this lyric sheet by downloading the PDF from Children Love to Sing. We sang to our sailing apple boats before cleaning up.
Transportation Counting Puzzles
Activity Materials
Our Process
- Lay out all the number cards at random. Counting between each addition, match the wooden puzzle numeral to the corresponding card number.
- Using the puzzle as a reference, and counting between each addition, line up the number cards in sequence.
- Working with shuffled transportation counting cards, ask student to count the number of vehicles on each card.
- Then, count down the number row, and place the vehicle card in the correct location.
- Finally, we discussed that number ten was made with two numerals… the one and zero.
We even finished our lesson early enough to go to library story time!
Love,
b
