And so sadly another week comes to an end. Sharks really was everything we could have hoped for from a learning theme. We already had a ton of books about them, Youtube gave me multiple options for informational videos that made the kids giggle, and gave me time to make a coffee, brush my hair, eat a cheese string. All good things come to and end though, and I think 4 days of activities is an ideal amount. On top of all this theme stuff William still has regular online school with his class, and me and the littles have a pretty heavy block building schedule we have to keep up with.
For our Friday craft we did acrostic poems and drew a picture of a shark. I absolutely failed at the last with this final craft activity. It requires nothing more than a printer, although to be honest you could even do without that and just use. piece of paper and a pen to write out the letters “SHARK”. However, although this certainly wasn’t all bells and whistles, glitter glue and every color under the rainbow, it was a VERY entertaining activity.
I gave the boys, and John, each one of the acrostic poem templates and a pencil. Before we wrote anything down I explained briefly what an acrostic poem was, and how each line had to start with the letter it was assigned from the word shark. To stop them from rushing ahead and just writing a list of nonsensical words, I took the first letter, “S”, and a blank piece of paper, and we did a little mind map of ideas. Everyone shouted out words about sharks beginning with S and before long both the boys and John were laughing and finding it all very very silly. I modeled choosing a word for my own poem, and then we repeated the process of the mind map for the letter “H”. Once we had tons of ideas for both of the starting letters I let the boys make their own choices for their starting lines. I was willing to continue going through each letter and writing together as we went. However the kids really took to it quickly and put together the most wonderful poems all on their own.
For the craft you will need
- Printer to print the poem template
- pencil or pen
- acrostic poem template
- paper
- crayons/markers for illustrating your poem
When it came to the actual “writing’ today, William did his completely alone, and Teddy dictated to me what he wanted to write. He loved having me read him his poem again, and again, and again….. once he was done! William’s poem is below. I love it SO very much, yes it is slightly macabre, but to each their own!
Once we were done with our poems we moved onto our larger scale Friday academic activity. This week I made a printed out a shark onto gray carddstock in a large scale (300%) on my regular printer. I then arranged the pieces and taped them together to give me a big shark. Here is the link to the shark that I printed. I used my Silhouette machine to cut 100 sharks teeth shapes out of some white paper. Once the teeth were done I split them into two groups of 50. One pile for each kid. For Teddy I wanted to work some more on sight words to get him ready for Pre-K. For William we had antonyms, to follow on from our synonym work earlier in the week.
For Teddy I used our regular set of Dolch Sight Words that I printed and laminated about a year ago when I was teaching William to read. They’ve proved invaluable. I keep them all in a ziplock bag and use them constantly. I let him choose a sight word from a pile on the right of his shark, and then he matched the teeth (that I had written letters onto). He really liked the activity, I think as he gets bette at reading I’ll do the same activity, except have short words on the teeth, and encourage him to make short sentences out of them. William’s set up was pretty much exactly the same, except he had two piles of teeth. One pile was words in purple, then the second pile was in blue, with each words antonym. To be honest I should have done more words, he completed it pretty quickly, but I think he enjoyed himself. Next time I’m going to have a second activity for him to do whilst Teddy is working with the shark.
Anyhow: thanks so much for being here pals. The week is over, next week we are going to take a vacation from school work at home, to spend as much possible time with J. I’ve got tentative plans to get him to build us a new deck, we have all the stuff for it, but it may just be a little too much work to get done. I have to broach the topic with him later, wish me luck!
LINKS AND SOURCES TO RESOURCES
- Craft: Shark acrostic poem
- Read: Sharks – story jumper
- Educate: Dolch sight word printable
- Watch: Blippi visits the aquarium
Raising Truffles 