Ocean Unit- Day One

To start off the ocean unit, we began as we always begin school. First, we ring the school bell (a tip from Amita's Montessori school that I adopted). Next, we read four books. I pick two (pertaining to the subject), and the girls each get to pick one that makes them happy. At this age, I consider a large part of their learning to be learning how to learn, as well as learning to love reading. I picked up the folder I had prepared for the day with all our activities.

Note: Amita is expected to sit, listen, and interact with me (and she does so willingly, it is her favorite time of the day). Ashima is expected to sit quietly and answer questions when she is listening. Around the time of the second book, she begins to get fidgety. I allow her to quietly play with toys while Amita and I finish reading. Sometimes she comes back while other times she listens and interacts while playing with something else. She is still young and is not expected to sit for a long time. 

Next is our calendar time. The kids bring chairs over and stand on them to they are eye level with the calendar. We read the month and day as well as review the days of the week. Amita does some reading ("today is Wednesday, Wednesday starts with a "wa" sound. What letter makes a "wa" sound? Etc.) and Ashima does the colors on the card and preliminary letter identification. They both discuss the weather and usually fight over who gets to move the arrows, and then we are finished with calendar and take a little break to get all of the wiggles out.

Next, I started Amita on some prewriting worksheets. She gets stickers for each line she traces mostly on the line and this is a huge motivator. She also really likes tracing and coloring.

Ashima started working on a puzzle.

Next, Ashima started a project where she counted some ocean animals and then put letter manipulatives over the existing letters on the page to spell the number. I liked this activity a lot because it worked on both math and spelling. The girls liked it because they got to play with blocks and letters.

While Ashima was doing that project, Amita worked on math with her counting bears. We just started addition a couple of weeks ago.

Here she is using the counting bears.

Next, daddy woke up after a stressful week at work and we had a tickle break while daddy loved up on the the girls. 

Then, Ashima made castles with daddy for a while.

While Ashima did that, Amita read a sight word book. 

Her sight words included "ride" and "on" so when she was finished daddy thought it would be funny for the girls to "ride on" Alli. Indeed, it was pretty funny.

We put Amita's new sight words I her word wall and praised her reading skills like crazy. We are very proud of her!

Then, after we regrouped from all the giggles and silliness, we talked about the jellyfish book we read and then made our own jellyfish from paper plates, crepe paper, curling ribbon, and Mardi Gras beads.

Here are the completed jellyfish.

After that was over, we still had some time until nap time but my lessons were over. Amita received a wooden box to paint for her birthday and she decided that she wanted to paint and decorate it. 

And while Amita painted, Ashima asked to do a color sorting activity with little poms. This is one of her favorite activities and she asks to do it a lot.

When they were finished, it was nap time! It was a busy but very productive and silly morning. The girls loved having time with Ridhwi and all of the giggle breaks. One of my favorite aspects of homeschooling is that they are allowed to get up as much as they need and have multiple chances to get up and move.