Huh? What? I can’t understand you!

The tower you see here in this picture represents the Tower of Babel that JayBird made from blocks and using a simple color pattern. The little wooden guys? Yep, they are the prideful men that tried to build such a great tall tower to show how great they are. But as JayBird will share with you, as he did with many members of our extended family, God is the greatest of all and He showed this to the men by “making them talk funny.” (BTW, thanks to our family members for dialoging with JayBird as he continues to share what he learns. It is a perfect way to help retain and understand what he is learning!)

Building the tower with blocks did not catch JayBird’s attention much at all…until I suggested bringing out the wooden people and using them to act out the story. He was all about doing that! Just another example of how he loves to be more hands on…and he also loves to act! (Hoping to start some preschool drama classes soon…we’ll see!)

We then babbled to each other in our own made up languages to show that we could not help each other much if we couldn’t communicate and understand each other. This brought lots of laughter!

Art, Science, and Lessons for the Heart through Noah

Interestingly, before even beginning learning activities revolving around Noah’s Ark, JayBird wanted to make an ark craft. Originally he wanted to make it out of popsicle sticks, but it worked out better to cut strips of paper. This also gave him practice cutting on straight lines.
 
We then talked about a variety of things that God wants him to be obedient in. As you can see, it is written on the ark, each in a different color of the rainbow. This was such a fun spur of the moment activity!

And then, onto some drawing to fulfill his passion for art! This is a giraffe for the ark.

In learning that Noah was obedient and had to follow careful instructions to build the ark, we practiced our listening and problem solving skills with a scavenger hunt. Special little treasures were hidden around our backyard. JayBird (and JellyBean) were given simple clues to find these treasures.

Clues eventually led to the best treasure of all…

 JESUS!!

We used our children’s Bible to count by 2’s by counting the animals entering the ark, but JayBird being the active boy and kinesthetic learner that he is jumped up, grabbed some counting bears, and made his own game of counting by two’s. He put the red and yellow bears in pairs of two. The blue bears are laying their side was to represent a dash in between each pair. For him, this made sense and helped distinguish each pair. He then practiced counting by 2’s up to 12…and almost 14 but not quite. He problem solved and did the math on his own to go from ten to twelve and when he figured it out, we hugged and were so giddy together that he figured it out on his own! He didn’t want any help at all or even for me to look while he was figuring out what came after ten while counting by two’s.  :-)

(Oh, and those black crescent shaped moons on his shirt…well he was pretending to be a cow with moon shaped spots earlier in the day. LOL)

Here JellyBean works on a brand new Noah’s Ark puzzle. I think her favorite part was making the birds fly in the air. :-)

When learning about the flood, our science experiment was seeing if items would sink or float. JayBird would make a hypothesis for each item and then place the items on a chart.
 

And of course we had to see if Noah’s Ark would float…

We also acted out the scene of Noah and his family coming off the ark and praising God for keeping them safe. Then we made banana rainbows! JayBird sliced up bananas that we arranged into the shape of a rainbow.

Both JayBird and JellyBean then sprinkled colored/flavored gelatin onto the banana slices to resemble a rainbow. I realized later that this probably could also have been done with kool-aid powder, and at a fraction of the cost!
 

They thoroughly enjoyed their creations! Mmmm! Such a good way to have fun with healthy food! My kiddos go through phases of loving bananas and not wanting them so much. So this is a wonderful activity to encourage them to eat bananas when they are in their no banana stage! We’ve already done it a second time!

A beautiful rainbow represents God’s promise to never again flood the earth.

Adam & Eve…and the serpent

JayBird spent a nice amount of time making this scene of Adam & Eve, the Tree of Knowledge, and the serpent. In fact, he used every single color of playdough that we had and pretty much used up every amount of it! (I have since bought some more to increase our stash!) This was completely his idea to make and he seemed to really enjoy doing it. It was very time intensive for him but he continued through to completion!



Here the kids brought in different kinds of play food to represent the fruit in the Garden of Eden. Their task in these pictures were to jump over the serpent (a puppet snake) without touching it. This was good jumping practice for JellyBean…not sure that she actually jumped though. Almost looks like it in the picture though! JayBird practiced jumping over the “serpent” forwards and backwards. Then we just had fun with the puppet as we teased each other with it and tried to run away, staying far away from it as possible, just like we want to stay far away from temptation and sin.

Thank you God for making me!

We have almost completed our first full week of Heart of Dakota’s little Hands to Heaven. But for us, an HOD week will really be a week and half or so in most cases since we are going at half speed and adding in other activities. This week we sprinkled in some 4th of July activities.

We have been learning about God’s creation this week…how God created everything from nothing. And that He made you and me! Other activities included:

Learning to count by two’s (up to 10)

Learning about patterns…stripes, polka dots, plaid, checkers, floral…

He learned these patterns through Mom and Dad’s clothes then went into his own closet to find similar patterns. Here he is below being goofy as always!


Drawing his own patterns
 

We did some activities and songs with the letter ‘A’, which was largely taped to our floor. For JayBird, these are just fun activities as he knows all his letters and letter sounds. We have yet to see if these might be a benefit to JellyBean at her young age (not quite 2 years old yet). Certainly it at least exposes her to a world of letters. She played with JayBird making stuffed animals dance on the letter ‘A’, tracing the letter ‘A’, and having races on the letter ‘A’. Through all this, she has become quite good at saying the ‘A’ sound (“ah”). We’ll see if she catches on to ‘B’ and its sound later…or if she just thinks that all letters taped onto our floor sound like the letter ‘A’. lol
 

We acted out the creation of Adam and Eve. JayBird decided that he would play the part of God (hmm…), I would be Adam, and JellyBean would be Eve. JayBird, as God, pretended to pick up dust from the earth and blow it into the air forming Adam(me). He then pretended to take a rib from Adam (me) to form Eve (JellyBean). Even JellyBean enjoyed acting with us…but then she thought she needed a rib taken out of her too. LOL

Here is JayBird shouting “Thank you God for making me!”

First day of Little Hands to Heaven Preschool!

JayBird, with JellyBean alongside, enjoyed his first day of our preschool curriculum today. Yes…today…on a Friday. We decided to start our non-traditional schooling on a non-traditional day. We have that flexibility with homeschooling. Besides, it’s summertime. And it’s preschool. So we’re relaxed.


We are going through Heart of Dakota’s Little Hands to Heaven this year for preschool. You can read more about this on Our Curriculum page. I’m very excited about all that JayBird will learn this year in all subjects through the use of Bible stories and activities. We are starting now, mid summer, because it is HOT! So we need some fun things to do indoors. And since JayBird is ready and eager to learn, and I too am ready to start Little Hands to Heaven with him, we are ready to start!


Little Hands to Heaven will teach us math, science, literature, art, and music as it takes us chronologically through the Bible. So of course on day 1, we learned about Creation and how God created everything. The kids enjoyed the finger play song focusing on the letter ‘A’ and roaming the room as different types of animals. I’ll have to take a video of that later! In learning about how God made everything from nothing, we turned off the lights and closed our eyes to exemplify nothing and then opened them again.Then, for the art project…painting! JayBird saw that this was coming from looking at the painting icon in our guide book. He loves to do art.

We drew with white crayon on white paper and used black paint to show that God made everything out of nothing! JayBird didn’t understand what we were doing at first, but as the first picture shows, he was excited when he realized he could see his tree, flower, sun, and grass through the dark paint. JellyBean, well she was much less impressed, but she enjoys doing everything that Big Brother does so she was sure to be right there with us.