Monday, September 23, 2013

 Storm in the Night | FIAR

Bug started her first week of first grade with Mary Stolz's Storm in the Night - a story about a storm, fear, and overcoming it.  We were both very excited about the fun week ahead and with much anticipation began our first year of FIAR.

{Monday}
 
We started off our day reading Storm in the Night for the first time.  Bug seemed to enjoy it (despite my having to remind her several times to pay attention - you'll learn quickly that that is par for the course around here). 

We began our discussion by talking about fears.  Thomas says that he is not afraid of storms, but Bug and I agreed that we thought he really was.  We sat down with this fear worksheet and talked about the different fears Bug has.  Like Thomas and Grandfather (when he was a boy), she too is afraid of storms.  She recorded them on the sheet.




This made a great transition to our bible verse for the week.......




Isaiah 41:10a "So do not fear, for I am with you...." - We talked about how we don't need to be afraid, because God is always with us. 

After all this talk about fear, we moved on to something a bit more fun and talked about onomatopoeia.  This was not a new concept for Bug as we had talked about it on several earlier occasions, but we had fun going back through the book and finding the different instances of onomatopoeia.  To reinforce the idea, we filled raindrops with different rain sound words and glued them under our paper umbrella.  Bug is still struggling a bit with reading and writing, so I went ahead and wrote the words for her, but you could certainly have the child do it.



The next part of our day was Bug's favorite!  It was a beautiful day out, so we went out to make a rainbow with the hose.  We put the sun to our back and sprayed the water until we could see the rainbow in the spray.  Bug was really fascinated by that.  We spent a little bit of time discussing how the rainbow was formed before we went back inside.......and the added bonus?  The garden got a good watering!

Once back inside we did a review of the colors in the rainbow and Bug learned that there is actually a color called "indigo" in between blue and violet.  We happened to notice that the skirt she was wearing was actually in indigo color, so that worked out pretty well.

To help her remember the colors and the order they go in, we created our friend Roy G. Biv.  I cut out his head and she drew on his face.  She then used the strips of construction paper that I had pre-cut to creat his hair in rainbow order.  Unfortunately, I didn't have any indigo construction paper, so we had to skip it.

To wrap up our time with rainbows (and a get a little handwriting in), we did this little worksheet I created (yep - I'm well aware that my indigo is not indigo).



We finished up our first day of the 2013-2014 school year by recording the weather on our weather chart (we did this every day for the whole week).


Overall, Bug and I were both very happy with our first day!


{Tuesday}

We started off day two with another reading of Storm in the Night and a review of our bible verse.

Today's language arts focus was on quotation marks.  We talked about what quotation marks are used for and found where they were used in the book.  We then, did a made-by-me worksheet.  I read each sentence to Bug, and then asked her WHAT the person said.  When she answered appropriately, I underlined it.  I, then, had her add the quotation marks in the proper places.




We will revisit quotation marks again tomorrow.

Today's science topic was clouds.  We started with learning about how to identify the different types of clouds.


With our new found knowledge, we created our own little lift the flap cloud craft.  I prepared the construction paper ahead of time, but had Bug add the cotton balls in the appropriate shape and fill in the facts inside.



Next, we read Little Cloud by Eric Carle, which was a cute little book and served as our segue into today's art project - a cute little poem about the shapes clouds can take.  I had Bug paint with white paint all over a piece of blue construction paper.  She then told me what she wanted her cloud to be (a dog bone) and I helped her cut it to shape.  She filled in the words "dog bone" and we put it all together on a sheet of blue construction paper.


We wrapped up the day by recording the weather on our weather chart.

{Wednesday}

Today, we read Storm in the Night for the third time.  This time, we took a few extra minutes to stop and talk about any words Bug wasn't familiar with.

Then, we spent some time looking at the pictures - especially on the page with the quilt.  I pulled out our pattern blocks and had her make quilt squares with them.  She spent a good deal of time doing that and found the challenge of creating a perfect square fun.

In order to transition into our science topic for the day (thunderstorms), I had Bug watch Bill Nye the Science Guy's video "Storms".  She really enjoyed it and picked up on a lot more of the concepts than I had anticipated.  We followed it up with an experiment - making a thunderstorm in a jar!

I filled a jar with about 3/4 water and topped it off with some of Mr. Incredible's shaving cream.  


We spent a few minutes going over how & why clouds rain (again) before beginning the experiment.  I gave Bug a bottle of blue food coloring.  She dropped it into the "cloud" (the shaving cream) little by little.........


........until it began to "rain"!


She had quite a bit of fun swirling the jar around and as the shaving cream began to mix into the water, it really did begin to look like a storm in the jar.


Our craft for the day involved making glue "rain".  We cut out an umbrella and glued it onto another piece of construction paper.  Then, I had Bug put dots of glue wherever she pleased.  Once she was satisfied with her dots, we hung it on the refrigerator and allowed the wet glue to run.  When it was dry, the glue drips looked like rain!


{Thursday}

Our reading of Storm in the Night today included taking some time out to find the similes.  After we completed our reading, we talked about what a simile is and then made some of our own.


This is a prime example of the limits of Bug's patience when it comes to writing and focusing.  I would have liked to see her complete a few more, but just getting these six out of her was like pulling teeth, so we called it good.

I had wanted to do an experiment having to do with wind today, but found that I actually didn't have everything I needed, so we skipped it and went straight for our craft.

I had Bug paint some tin cans that I had removed the labels from.  We set them outside to dry while we worked on her math.  By the time we were done, they were dry and we punched holes in the tops with nails.  We then strung them up to be our homemade wind "chime".

Again, we finished up with our weather chart.

{Friday}

We read Storm in the Night one final time before we went back and found where Stolz used personification.  I introduced the word to her and we talked about what it meant to "personify" something. 

Bug then got the opportunity to pretend she was an object and personify herself.  She had to imagine what kinds of things her object would say and do if it could.  This is what she came up with:


We, then, used her idea for our craft.  She made a sentence about the flower and then illustrated it.


After that, we moved on to science.  I had Bug watch The Magic School Bus episode about the water cycle.  She loved it!  I, then, had her color in a water cycle worksheet while she verbally explained to me what she had learned about the water cycle from the video.


We took a look at the cover of the book and spent some time talking about how Grandfather and Thomas's faces were shown in profile.  We, then, created our own profile art of Bug's face.  I had bug sit on the floor and we taped a piece of white paper to the wall.  I put a lamp very near to her - we had to enlist Drama's help for this - and I used her shadow to trace a profile.  I, then, cut it out and traced it onto a sheet of black construction paper, which I cut out and glued onto the lighter paper.


To wrap up the week, we did a story map of Storm in the Night.  Again, because Bug doesn't have the patience for a lot of writing, I did that part, but if you have a strong writer, you certainly could have them do it.  I hope to progress to a point where she can by the end of the year.



Of course, we also recorded our final day on our weather chart before calling an end to our week with Storm in the Night.

We had a wonderful time with our first week of FIAR and are really looking forward to everything there is to come!  Thanks for joining us on our journey.