Our daily schedule

Now that our routine is good and settled, I thought you might like seeing what our daily schedule looks like:

Noah's Ark Art

My apologies for the delay in posting ... between Fall Break, our Circle performance today, and my own daughter's birthday yesterday, it's been a super busy few weeks!

Recently we completed a week's worth of Bible lessons about Noah's Ark. In addition to hearing various versions of the story itself, we sang songs (which hopefully you enjoyed from Circle today!) and created a gorgeous mural. After explaining to the students what a mural is, we headed outside to paint the background together. 

We wanted the background to look like the ocean, so we used different shades of blue, green, and purple to depict the water. We started in the center of the mural and worked our way outward.

We sprinkled some glitter over the wet paint and then while it dried, we colored pairs of animals. I had printed out some generic animals -- cats, dogs, bears, etc. -- but then the students started requesting some very specific creatures! Our finished product featured bearded dragons, parrots, and even a pair of iguanas. :)

Next, we practiced our cutting skills by cutting out pieces of "wood" to build the ark!

Once our wood was cut, we worked together to assemble the ark. There was a lot of trial and error to see which pieces would fit together best, but the students were able to follow a pattern (written on the board) very well! Once we laid out our boat and a ramp for the animals, we glued everything down. 

Finally it was time for the animals to board! I let the students choose the location for one animal they'd colored themselves; after that we just sort of glued at random. Because we had more animals than would fit on the boat, some ended up floating in the water, much to the chagrin of some of our students! 

Stay tuned for a finished photo of the mural ... 

Math the K-5 Way!

Early math is much more than just numbers and arithmetic ... it involves  shapes; graphing concepts; measurements; telling time; estimating; figuring greater than, less than, and equal; and other abstract thinking. As is typical at HVCS, our learning is very hands-on! Here are some recent photos:

HEre are some photos of the day we weighed each child and graphed the results in order to tell who weighed the most and the least. (We also did some predicting before we weighed!)