Bee Fingerplay

I've done this fingerplay with my kiddos since Noah was itty bitty. It's always a hit.

Here is the bee hive.  (show fist)
But where are the bees?
Hidden away where nobody sees. (hide fist under other hand)
Watch them closely-come out of the hive.
One, two, three, four, five! (one finger comes out of hiding at a time)
Bzzzzz!!! (tickle child now!!)

This is Noah doing it with each of his siblings.

So precious.

Fall Leaves Activity

I was reading Confessions of a Homeschooler, one of my favorites, this week and thought this "leaf animal" activity was cute. So I decided to do it when our friends came for a visit.

We found lots of cool stuff!

"Dash" made a T-Rex.

"Sissy" and I made a giraffe. (Like it, Mimi?)

Noah made two dinosaurs.

I helped Saylor with her cat (which could arguably be a wolf or a fox...but don't mention that to her).

And Gabriel and I attempted an octopus.

It was a little messy, but not hard to clean up.

Tip: Leaves are easier to glue if they're soft and not yet "crispy."

A Cowboy Tale

The Deciphered Version:

Once there was a cowboy named Herby. He liked to round up cows. One day he was eating lunch when suddenly a wolf named Sneaky got into the cow pen. Luckily, Herby had a gun. Herby saw him, aimed, and "Booooom!" Herby saved the cows.

Written by Noah, age "almost 7"

Graphing Backyard Birds

We have a lot of birds. Many different kinds. It's one of the things we love about where we live. In the spring of 2009, we decided to make a chart with some of the species we see on a regular basis and then tally how many times we spotted them. Noah got so excited about this project! He immediately ran off to find our bird identification book and got busy drawing each bird by looking at the picture. (No tracing, I swear!) We then hung our chart by the back window so we could mark our findings. It made for exciting meal times!!

Hummingbirds won by a landslide, but MY favorite--the bluebird--came in second!

We used the information obtained from our chart to create a bar graph as well.

Continents

After learning about the seven continents, Noah made a clay representation of them on a piece of cardboard. Although not to scale (that would have been hard for ME!), I thought he did a great job of shaping each continent and then making flags to mark each one.

Bird Stamp

One of my favorite creations by Noah (over a year ago) is this picture made with a bird stamp he got from the treasure box at the library. He simply stamped birds all over a piece of white paper and THEN decided to put the birds in a tree. I thought it was fabulously done!!!

An Explanation

Okay. I've had this blog set up for a while now, but I've not yet gotten around to doing anything with it. I guess I wasn't entirely sure WHAT I wanted to do with it, but now I know! I need a place to "save" all my kids' work, creations, and assignments. (This way I can put them in the trash after a sufficient amount of time hanging on our "accomplishments" wall...and not feel any guilt.) So. This will pretty much interest about three people in the world.

I'll probably post a million things at first. Because I've been saving pictures for so very long. But once I get caught up, it should just be little bitty "snippets" here and there to let you know what we've been up to here at Davidson Homeschool Academy.