Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel

After the last two weeks feeling not typical it was great to get back into our typical routine. This week we got to enjoy our mornings slowly that start with playing, easing into quiet time and working on Handwriting and our FIAR book. This week we worked on the letter L, reviewed all our frog jump capitals, and numbers 3-4. Our book of the week was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton. Burton is one of our favorites because we really enjoy her illustrations.

Monday, we read our story, made our story disc, and talked about personification. We drew simple machines from around our house and named them. In the afternoon, we did math, reading, and finished reading Boxcar Children! Ezra even woke up from his nap in time to hear the last chapter. 

That went faster than I anticipated! To celebrate, we made popcorn and watched the movie version on Netflix. It was very true to the book and we all enjoyed it.

Tuesday, the Nature Gang went to a nature center and park on Merrit Island. We had so much fun! In the afternoon, we made a steam shovel of our own and put in a picture of Silas, Ezra, and Ruby. Our steam shovel even had moving arms. We worked on a Halloween sight word sheet for reading and made a Birthday Card for our friend Landon.

 

On Wednesday, we looked at another story of Burton's called The Little House. We found some surprises in this story like she also personified the house like the steam shovel and hidden in the book was a steam shovel and it was red just like Mary Ann! We both knew it was Mary Ann and Mike!

We also practiced drawing trees that look like they are real and moving. In the afternoon, Ruby got to our reading cards and spilled ALL of them on the ground. Since we had to organize them again we decided to review from card 1 til where we are now. We reviewed all of our phonograph sounds that we know so far. We also continued with math.

Thursday, we were excited that we had experiments! We made a pinwheel and saw how steam could make an object move. We also looked at squares and cubes and made our own cube drawings and 3d cubes with toothpicks and marshmallows. Ezra wanted to help with this part...and the eating of the marshmallows. 

We worked on putting our projects in our special notebook for FIAR, practiced frog jump capitals, more sight words, and did math games in the afternoon.

Our day was so productive that we even began reading a new chapter book, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and to say it was a hit might just be an understatement. We read three chapters in one day because someone keeps begging...just..one..more! This was a wonderful way to end a great school week!