F is for Frogs

We were running out of steam a bit with our curriculum for the year, to be honest.  Thankfully, the boys were both pretty interested in frogs, but we were definitely doing less specific to our kindergarten curriculum but trying to press through and finish up the core things and have a sense of completion of all the units.

I found a great Frog Unit online, and we used a few random pieces of her notebooking pages, and it also had a great list of resources such as videos or links for information.

  

Isaiah was particularly proud of his Frog Life Cycle paper and even wanted to make a video to show and tell about it.  Check him out in Part 1 and Part 2. :)

Isaiah actually came into the room when I was looking at my Pinterest board for frogs and some windows I had open from it.  He saw this idea and really wanted to make it.  He absolutely loved the finished product, and it is a fairly simple thing to make, but it definitely wasn't a project that we could do as much, so it felt a bit more difficult than it actually was.  He did enjoy putting on the spots and eyes himself and then played with it quite a bit.

I don't usually post much that I haven't taken pictures of, but since the boys were REALLY enjoying the Frog and Toad stories, I printed one of the FREE printable board games from First Grade A La Carte, and we had fun playing it.  She has them for multiple stories.  What a fun free resource!

B is for Butterfly

I saw instructions for making your own butterfly feeder, and the boys were super excited about the idea and really got into making it and trying to place it in the perfect spot.  Sadly, in spite of our enthusiasm, it didn't really seem to work for us.  We did manage to attract a lot of bugs but no butterflies. :(  Maybe someone else will have better luck with such a project.  I'm still glad we did it because especially my older one has a really hard time when something doesn't work out according to plan and his perfect ideals (um, no idea where he gets that from, sigh).  So, it was good for both of us to try something and still value the process and exploration, even when the results weren't what we wanted them to be.

We were working on symmetry this week, and as with most math things, it seemed to come pretty easily for Isaiah.  We did a couple of activities with a friend, and for this one, I just cut a body out of construction paper for each, a few different shapes as wing options, and some various shapes and sizes of sparkly craft foam (which was, by the way, a super exciting find in a shop here!).  Isaiah was actually really upset because, somehow, we ended up not having a mirror image of the blue triangle to complete his symmetry.  He was quite unsettled about it.

The same day with friends we made some simple butterfly masks using the templates from Deceptively Educational.

Isaiah really enjoyed making the butterfly life cycle out of pasta and a few other things.  I got the idea from this post.  Our pasta, leaf, and bean options look just a bit different, but they worked well.  One significant change that I made is that the original picture in the post I saw had the bottom two pictures reversed, which works for the left-to-right reading paradigm, but it loses the cyclical visual.  So, I changed the placement of ours and added arrows around the edge of the plate to show the cycle.