Bird Week Has Started

 We started by Melodie doing her ABC's on cutouts of birds.  I hope we can do this every week. We love it!

 We tried playing Chicken Stacker, but it kept freezing on us. We'll try again tomorrow.
 We watched the youtube video of a chick hatching. Melodie thought the chicks were so cute.
 She spent a majority of her time painting her bird house. She has been waiting months to do this, so I let her take as long as she wanted.

 While she was in the middle of painting, a neighbor knocked on our door. She told us to come outside quickly. This is what we saw:

I have lived in this neighborhood most of my life and I've never seen ducks walking down the street. We see them a lot at Disneyland, but it was so strange to see them walking through our neighborhood.

We got a little nervous when the crossed the street. Melodie wanted to follow them for a while, so we did. Perfect sighting for bird week!
 On Tuesday we watched Chicken Little. I gave Mel the choice between Dumbo and Chicken Little and that's what she chose.
 After that we read about birds and feathers on Kidzone and read about the types of feathers and the parts of a feather on ASU School of Life Sciences. I printed the worksheets on that website and she did all the labeling.

And then we did the craft project. Mel spent hours painting with feathers.

She thought it was fun using both sides of the feather and made several pictures.
 When Rocky came home from work they hung her bird house outside. I also bought a new hummingbird feeder (We had one a while ago and it broke. Since then she would constantly ask for a new one.) so they made hummingbird food and hung that outside too.

Ocean Fairy Book

I forgot to mention this. All week we've been reading this book.

This isn't the first book in the series we've read to Melodie. I think she picked the first one because it had a shiny metallic cover (and it's about fairies). Turns out she loves the stories. When I saw this ocean one, I knew we needed it for our ocean week.

Ocean Week Days 4-7

 We spent the morning on the computer. First, Melodie played the Wild Kratts Ocean Game (this was on the schedule for yesterday). She found a few animals, then said it was boring. On her own she found another Wild Kratts game. This one was called Ride on Remora. She liked it better. However, her favorite ocean themed computer activity were the puzzles on the Pittsburgh Zoo and Aquarium site.
 Math was also a computer game. It was called Shark Numbers. She enjoyed it.
 We did the sight word memory game. I was surprised by how much fun she had (once we started playing the memory part of the game).
 Even though it wasn't our fun food day, I found these chicken nuggets at the grocery store. We had them for lunch.

This turned into our wave day, so we talked about waves and read "What is a Wave?

 We also started our jellyfish (we finished them the next day, after they had time to dry).

 Friday was fun food day. We started off with a fun breakfast. I saw a crab sandwich on a blog, but when I couldn't figure out what the eyes were made out of, I found the instructions at FumilyFun. I didn't have the ingredients for the eyes, plus I made it into a breakfast sandwich. I think it turned out so cute!

 Melodie was very anxious to finish the jellyfish, so to help her with waiting while I cleaned up breakfast and got everything ready (including me), she made some sticker scenes.

Then we finally finished and hung the jellyfish.

This was salt water day, so first we talked about salt water and fresh water, then we did this salt water egg experiment.

Stirring the salt

Will the egg act different in the salt water?

It's floating!

She loved this so much, she took the eggs out and put them back in several times.

 Next we tried a salt water picture, but we didn't really get a reaction from the salt.



I suppose it didn't really matter because she had such a good time painting.
 Lunch was fishsticks and a not quite successful jello.

Martha Stewart did a much better job. For the life of me I couldn't get the fish to swim. Every half an hour I dropped a fish in and it would sink to the bottom. The next half hour it was too firm. Mel loved it anyway.
 Dinner was suppose to be a fun food that night, but we had several plans that were up in the air and didn't do it.
 I didn't plan for any of this to be done on the weekends, but Rocky had to work, so on Saturday we did the sorting board (fish and not fish). I didn't get a picture of the board, but here's some of the pictures she cut out.

I also made the fun food that was suppose to be dinner the night before. It was so cute!

I died the noodles and made a brown butter sauce. I can't even say how much Melodie loved this (pasta is her favorite food). She asked for it the next day for lunch. I'm pretty proud of it too.
 Again, we weren't planning on this, but I moved the planning of the FHE lessons to Sunday. We are always trying to find things for Mel on Sundays and this seemed perfect.

Ocean Week Days 2 & 3

 We started Tuesday by watching Finding Nemo. This was a nice change of pace for me. Lately, the only two movies Melodie has wanted to watch are Barbie Mermaidia and The Incredibles. After the movie, Melodie worked on the worksheet I made tracing the animal types of the Nemo characters.

While she was doing that, we looked up and read about the animals in these two books:

 

After swimming lessons we made sea turtles from a kit I bought at JoAnn's. (Purchased for a lot less than what it is online. It was on clearance at the store.)

I'm not sure what marshmallow clay is, but it was easy to use and the embellishments stuck right on.

 

Melodie insisted on taking a picture of me with the turtle I made. Here's the cute turtles:

 After our craft we worked on math playing this number sort math game that I redid to fit a Nemo theme (from Herding Kats in Kindergarten).

 

Can you tell she won? She enjoyed this game, so we'll be playing it more often. I might revamp it for other themes and put in subraction problems.

 The only thing on our schedule we didn't do was the sorting board, but that's because she asked to do more worksheets (I had some Nemo ones).

Wednesday

 Melodie started hip hop today, plus she went to the park, so we didn't get to everything on our schedule today. Here's what we did do.

 It was music day, so we listened to Finding Nemo: Ocean Favorites while she did her dolphin sand craft.

Ignore the wild hair. And my friends wonder why I style her hair every day. LOL We listened to whale songs on the computer and then learned I'm a Sea Star from the Monterey Bay Aquarium website. It's a repeat song (someone sings a line, then you sing the same line), so it was easy to learn. She loved it. We sang it several times.  

 She asked if I had anymore Nemo worksheets, but I didn't. I had something better. She worked on Little Mermaid worksheets while I took a shower.

 After swimming lessons she drew a few animals using this book:

She did a pretty good job. I'm not much of an artist, so I'm not a whole lot of help. We used a dry erase board just because she thinks that is fun.

We also read and Mel practiced some letters, so I guess the only thing we really missed were the jellyfish crafts. I didn't realize I had scheduled four art things for one day. A bit much, so I am putting off the two jellyfish ones (plus I forgot to buy paper bowls). Oh yeah, we didn't play the computer game either. Next time!

Birds Week

Just a preview of next week (the last week in June).

A possible field trip would be to the Magnolia Bird Farm. Has anyone been there?

I'm not sold on Dumbo as my movie...but it has a magic feather. My other option was Chicken Little (which Mel loves). I guess we'll see how I feel on Wednesday.

Monday
(eggs)

(gospel lesson)
prepare Elijah fed  by the Ravens FHE together
Reading and Computer: Chicken Stacker at Between the Lions
Writing: ABCs on birds
Math: worksheets from Dollar Tree workbooks
Craft: paint bird house (this is a bird house she made at Home Depot a while ago)
Science: watch video of chick hatching

Tuesday
(feathers)

(movie) Dumbo
Reading: What makes birds different from other animals? from Kidzone
Writing: Label types of feathers and parts of a feather (worksheets from ASU Life Sciences)
Math & Computer: 2D and 3D Shapes from Starfall (not bird themed)
Craft: feather painting (instead of using a paintbrush, use a feather)

Wednesday

(Flightless Birds)

(music)
Listen to these songs on youtube: Feed the Birds, Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah, Carnival of the Animals (Finale) Fantasia 2000, and Tiki Room

Reading: "Why Do Birds Sing?" from the library
Writing: Upper case and lower case matching from abcya.com (not bird themed)
Math: worksheets
Craft: bottlecap birdies (Meet the Dubiens)
Science & computer: Listen to different bird songs online (Canadian Museum of Nature)

Thursday

(Birds that Fly)

Reading & Writing: Write a bird word (for example: fly) then look for it when reading a book. Different word for each book.

Math: worksheets
Craft: Make bird feeders Here's a few ideas: The Crafty Classroom, No Time for Flashcards, Under the Table and Dreaming, Working Mother in Zion, The Moffat Girls

Science & Computer: How do birds fly (Canadian Museum of Nature) and Airborne Experiment on Wonderville
Sorting Board: Birds that Fly/Flightless

Friday

(Fun Foods)

Breakfast: scrambled eggs and peacock fruit (Canadian Family)

Lunch: Bird's Nest Egg Salad (Taste of Home) and grape bird's nests (The Adventures of Bear)

Dinner: Chicken (ha, ha!) and Chocolate Bird's Nests for dessert (Mama Jenn)

Reading: library books

Writing: worksheets from All Kids Network - Missing vowels and Word Scramble
Math & Computer: Weight at PBS Kids

Some fun extras if we have time:
Create a bird computer game
Sesame Street Pigeon Trouble computer game
For older kids I like this website (KidWings). I thought it might be too old for Mel.
Some of the worksheets from All Kids Network are for younger kids.
This Count the Chicken game is good for younger kids.

Cars Land Preview

 I can't believe I forgot to blog about this. If I had done it earlier it would have been more exciting. Now Cars Land has officially opened, but on the 11th, I was able to go to the annual passholder preview. It was great to see the new land at DCA before the opening, especially because I probably won't be back to see it until after summer.
 We had from 6pm to 11pm to spend in Buena Vista Street (the new entrance area) and Cars Land. It was plenty of time.
 The Buena Vista Street theme is beautiful.

Even though we took pictures on the trolley, we didn't get to see Mickey and the news boys. Bummer! I'm a fan of Newsies from back in the day, so I look forward to seeing this. There was plenty of other atmosphere talent and characters though. Here's the ones we saw in the few minutes we were there:

We stopped for a quick look at Ghiradelli and then entered Cars Land.

Unfortunately, Radiator Springs Racers, the first attraction we came to (and the attraction we were most excited about) was down. Luigi's Flying Tires was an incredibly long wait, so we looked around a bit before going on Mater's Junkyard Jamboree. While I wouldn't wait that long for it again, it was at least under an hour. Plus the queue had cute signs from all the Mater shorts. Cindy and I couldn't resist a picture with these:

It was a fun ride. After that we spent time looking around at the area. The theming was incredible. So much detail. One of my favorite things was this:

See Buzz? This was in the lobby of the Cozy Cone Motel.
After looking around a bit, we grabbed food (in my case just a milkshake) at Flo's Cafe.

By the way, the neon at night was perfect. The place glowed with neon signs. I loved it! While we were eating we saw Radiator Springs Racers opened. We went over after we were done and opted for the single rider line. 20 min. vs. 95 min. is a no brainer for us. It was a great ride. It reminded me a little of Test Track at Epcot.

 Luigi's Flying Tires was finally a shorter wait. It was my least favorite of the three. You lean to make the tire move and throw giant beach balls. The problem is there's really no where to go (think of really big bumper cars) and once you throw a beach ball it's difficult to get another one. Hopefully you got one in the beginning (there's not enough for everyone).

 We rode Radiator Springs Racers once more (yay single rider!) before calling it a night.

 Overall, Cars Land is a lot of fun. My only problem with it is that two of the height requirements are 32" and the Racers are 40". For a land themed after such a popular kids movie, I'm surprised their wasn't at least one attraction for a family to ride together.
 I can't wait to take Melodie. She'll love the attractions.

Oceans Day 1

 Our first day of summer homeschool! I set up the night before.

Melodie woke me up this morning. She was VERY excited. After breakfast, we got started right away. She didn't even want to wait to brush her hair. She did, however, get dressed. I had to keep from laughing at the orange shirt with pink, green and white plaid shorts.
 We started with our introduction to the theme of the week: oceans. We talked about how their were four and went over the names using the National Geographic Our World book and our beach ball globe.

Then she put up window clings. First, the money and clocks ones that will stay up for the summer. Then the ocean animal clings.

She did one of her math worksheets while I took a shower.

After my shower and her first math worksheet (see original Oceans Week post for details on worksheets). We read The Underwater Alphabet Book and then she wrote one upper case and lower case letter on a dolphin. We put these on the wall.

In the afternoon she went to her first day of swimming lessons, we had lunch and then went on a field trip to the beach.

After the beach (and a shower) she wanted to do more summer homeschool. She did two more math worksheets. Then we drew our globe.

We didn't do a great job, but we still had fun. Then she reviewed the ocean names on the Sheppard Software Website. This is when the names really stuck in her memory. After she memorized the names and locations, we labeled our globe. It was a little confusing because some of our continents weren't in the correct place, but we managed.

She wanted to do even more things, but since we went to the beach (unplanned) I decided to move Jonah and the Whale to another day (we don't have FHE on Mondays anyway).
 Besides swimming, we did plenty of non-homeschool things. But it was cute how she always wanted to do more. I hope it lasts!