simple living creative learning – Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs..

It’s been dino week around here! My little niece requested that we have a dinosaur theme, and very specifically asked for a dinosaur life cycle and craft. So, I of course obliged. I call her dino girl for a reason – at five, she already knows pretty much everything about dinosaurs. When I started to get resources together, I decided to focus on skills work with a dinosaur theme, rather than actually learning about dinosaurs themselves. I mean, we did do a little of that, but for the most part everything was more related to dinosaurs instead of about them. And it turned out to be a great week! Wyatt likes dinosaurs but he is not all in, so I did want him to know a little more about dinosaurs before we go to Jurassic Quest next month. We did lizards last week per his request, and I felt like the two, dinosaurs and lizards went hand in hand pretty nicely!

We do have quite a bit of dinosaurs and dinosaur things at our house, so it made it easy to set up an inviting area to introduce this week’s topic. I always like to set it up on Sunday night to surprise Wyatt with our weekly theme, and this was a fun one. When Billy saw it he asked “How will Wyatt survive school with all those dinosaurs?”

So – we did our regular curriculum from Blossom and Root and Math for a Living Education, then added in some fun extra stuff. A dinosaur memory game, and of course, a dinosaur life cycle. We divided dinosaurs into herbivores and carnivores, labeled a triceratops, and reviewed size sequencing. We read about different types of dinosaurs, as well as some fun little stories too. Then yesterday we went to my mom’s for craft time with my mom and Dino Girl.

We are going to keep the theme up for another week, then take a week off of school for a break. When we start back up it will be our last “official” month of school and kindergarten, so we are going out with a splash and doing a month long ocean unit. I am looking forward to it!

Resource Round Up:

Free dinosaur printables from Simple Every Day Mom

Free Dinosaur Printable Pack from Simple Living Creative Learning

This was our last week of school before our Easter break! I wanted to finish up our month with some fun themes, so I went with rainbows and sheep – because March comes in like a lion and out like a lamb. Plus, we had been talking about Ireland and St. Patrick’s Day last week and these tied in nicely. (I read that Ireland has more sheep than people! I am not sure if this statistic is correct but wow!) We always do extra themes in addition to our normal curriculum from Blossom and Root.

We didn’t have as many projects this week, it was just a rough week timewise for many reasons, but we did enjoy what we had time for. We started the week with rainbows, and followed up Tuesday with talking about colors and formation of colors and color mixing. Then we moved on to greener pastures and learned about sheep! Parts of a sheep, what a sheep eats, their life cycle, and the importance of shearing a sheep. I pulled out some of my wool roving as well, for Wyatt to handle and we discussed how it originated from a sheep! I am hoping to find somewhere to take him this weekend where we can see some sheep but so far I haven’t found anywhere to go.

Resource Round Up:

https://www.stephaniehathawaydesigns.com/freeprintables/primary-color-study

Simple Living Creative Learning – Sheep printables

Books We Read:

(This section contains Amazon Affiliate links)

The Sheepover || Brave Charlotte || Wally Does Not Want a Haircut || Farmer Brown Shears His Sheep || How the Crayons Saved the Rainbow || The Rainbow

I loved all of the books we read this week! Wyatt loved Wally Does Not Want a Haircut and Farmer Brown the best; I loved The SheepOver. However, for learning purposes The Rainbow and Farmer Brown were excellent! Farmer Brown Shears His Sheep is a fun fictional look at the process of where yarn and wool comes from, while The Rainbow breaks down the science behind rainbows in an easy to understand, entertaining way. However Farmer Brown might be hard to find in book form! All books mentioned are also available as read-alouds on YouTube.

I will leave you with Baarack the Sheep, who was covered in 80 pounds of wool!