Summer-week 1

Our first weekly theme is Gardens/Plants/Healthy Food! Our week didn't go exactly as planned due to weather and I wasn't feeling the best this week--but we still tried to do some fun stuff.

Activities we did:

-planted our garden (at least most of it--Jon needs to move branches off the back part of it)--and watered it, and the grass, and the fence, and each other, and filled the sand box with water to make a "hot tub" (that was our "water" day)

-put celery stalks in colored water for a science experiment to see how they "drink" the water and watched the leaves turn the color of the water

-my boys enjoyed a "field trip" day playing at Grandma's house

-we cut pictures of food out of magazines and then used them to play a game. One that I had read about was to cut a "happy" face mouth from a paper bag and a "sad" face bag to have them sort food according to what is healthy ("happy") and what is not healthy ("sad")--but since I like to not really focus on good/bad foods, but rather that all foods can be part of a healthy diet in moderation, we decided to do "go, slow, whoa" (check it out here) bags--that were green (go--healthy foods that you can eat almost any time), yellow (slow--sometimes foods, don't eat everyday) and red (whoa--once in a while foods).

-Ethan practiced writing words related to food and garden (carrot, apple, garden, plant, tree, etc) and then drew a picture of a robot planting a garden

-We used seeds (bigger ones like corn or pumpkin) to practice counting and simple math problems

Other things we could have done: color a picture of our garden, paint with food (instead of paintbrushes), play carrot, carrot, corn (variation of duck, duck, goose), pick out a new fruit/vegetable from the store to try, or a food collage with pictures from the magazines.

The books we read this week were (and these are a both picture/story books and non-fiction):

Lettuce Grows on the Ground- Mari Schuh

Apples Grow on a Tree- Mari Schuh

Growing a Garden- Mari Schuh

Carrots Grow Underground- Mari Schuh

Measuring in the Garden- Tracey Steffora

Carrot Soup- John Segal

This is the Sunflower- Lola Schaefer

My Garden- Kevin Henkes

Planting a Rainbow- Lois Ehlert

Growing Vegetable Soup- Lois Ehlert

One Watermelon Seed- Celia Barker Lottridge

Eating the Alphabet- Lois Ehlert