Learning Fun!
Unit 1:
This is ME!
Before a child can begin to understand the world around him, he has to understand himself. Personal orientation in space and time grounds a child’s identity and creates value in oneself. Creating a connection to true identity and place silences doubt and gives confidence to explore beyond the current edges. This confidence is freedom!
Topics:
Hello! My name is…
The most important letter in the alphabet for me is…
Here is how my body moves and ways I am practicing to move.
Expression through movement and music interpretation- Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
Suggested Books:
At Home Activities:
The first letter a child should learn is the first letter of her name. It gives letters and sound meaning and purpose! Hang your child’s letter in a prominent place and remind her daily that it is her letter. Consider throwing on hats and grabbing binoculars or a magnifying glass to go on a Letter Safari in your home and yard. Find items that start with the same sound (don’t be concerned if they start with a different letter for now, just the sound) and create a little showcase on a shelf or windowsill.
Differentiating letter sounds requires deep listening. At Deep Roots Nature School, we call this “Deer Ears.” Go outside with your child this week. Have them sit comfortably or lay on a blanket. Close your eyes and listen for 20 seconds. What sounds did you hear? Where were they coming from? Did you hear different bird sounds or multiples of the same sounds? Slowly extend the amount of time for quiet listening.
Movement is magical for children. We listened to Vivaldi’s Four Seasons at our Nature Experience. Pull the piece up on your phone and select a section ( it’s LONG) to play. Encourage your child to move like the music. Ask big questions like “What is happening in the song?” “Which of the Four Seasons do you think this music is expressing?”
Unit 2:
This is MY WORLD!
The concept of The Earth is very obscure for little minds. Think about it…. something so big that you can’t see it, a sky that has no seeming end, land that continues beyond what you can see. It really is a difficult concept. Before this just becomes accepted knowledge, we can create an overwhelming amazement of all the components of our planet.
Topics:
I live on the Planet Earth (globes, maps).
The Earth has the Land, the Water, and the Sky.
I have to keep my body healthy and WE have to keep the Earth healthy.
The Sun provides Energy for all living things.
Expression through movement and music interpretation- Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
Suggested Books
At Home Activities:
The plants on the Earth each serve a special purpose, just like the people on Earth. Every single plant is different and every single person is different. These differences create a magical world. Take a hike, a walk around the neighborhood or even just in your own yard. Collect as many different leaves as you can find. Next, sort the leaves. Let your child lead the way on this. You could sort by size or shape, or you could sort by color. Your child may find even another way to classify! If interest is still high, grab a magnifying glass ( I like these) and look at the veins, textures, and ridges of the leaves. At Nature School, we use the term “Owl Eyes” when we are really trying to SEE the world. Reinforce this phrase and encourage your child to use their Owl Eyes to find cool things!
Consider making an Ocean Play station in a Rubbermaid container. The one we will use at class this week is great because you can get a whole kit. It uses waterbeads, which my kids LOVE, but do this outside because they WILL get messy and start throwing them! You could recreate an ocean with blue food coloring in water or blue jello and add some fun fish and boats or shells and sand. Let your child explore this station without boundaries!
Take a blanket outside and gaze at the clouds with your child. Point out a cloud and declare that it looks just like something (a dinosaur or elephant or rocket ship). Make up a short story about who is in the rocket ship or where the dinosaur is heading. Can your child find any shapes in the clouds?
Unit 3
Inch by Inch, I am Growing Taller!
Unit 4
Sometimes, Nature seems scary…
Unit 5
The Wonders of Water
Unit 6
Rainbow Power
Young children are excited by their changing bodies and growing capabilities. While they are very aware of their own personal growth, they are still ego-centric in their view of the world. Children can begin to relate to ALL living creatures as they gain awareness that everything starts small, just like them!
Topics:
Living things change as they grow.
Seeds become plants and trees. Babies become adults.
A Life Cycle shows the stages of life for different living things.
Baby creatures often look different than mature ones and have different names.
Expression through movement and music interpretation- Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons
Suggested Books:
At Home Activities:
The Growing Up Wild curriculum is a wonderful FREE curriculum offered by the FWC (with attendance to a one day training). This is available nationally, though not necessarily for free. Print the resource page Grow as We Go and cut out the cards. Place the cards face up spread out in an open area, except the card depicting the mature animal. Place these face down in a row. Ask your child to flip over one card and race around finding all the stages of life that the mature animal had to grow through to become an adult.
After reading Inch by Inch, cut out your own inch worm and use the record sheet to make length predictions. Use your inchworm to test your prediction. Try drawing a chalk outline of your child and let him inch the inchworm along his body to see how big he is! Download the Inchworm and Prediction sheet HERE.
These Mommy and Baby Turtles have provided hours of fun at our home. We play “Night, Night Turtle” before bed. Hold up a mommy turtle and ask your child to find it’s baby. “Can you help me find the Purple Baby?” The shells of the mommy come off and the child can position the baby inside. Placing the shell back on the mommy like a puzzle. Be sure to kiss the baby goodnight and reinforce that animal mommies protect their babies just like you protect your baby!
Put on some great classical music and act through the stages of development of different animals with your child. You go first and act out being an egg, then a loud cheeping baby bird, then trying to fly and then soaring around the room. Let your child pick the next animal. You might try: caterpillars, cocoon, butterfly or egg, tadpole, frog as suggestions!
Our children pick up on our insecurities about the natural world. Often times, when we are scared of something, if we take the time to learn more about it, we can take the fear and turn it into a healthy respect. It’s normal to be a bit afraid of snakes, spiders, bees, worms and other things! While we want our kids to respect these creatures, they should also understand that they each have a special role in our world and we need them to do their jobs!!
Topics:
How I feel about animals, insects, and other living things.
Misunderstood animals
Spiders
Spider Web Wonders
Expression Through Music- Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons- Winter
Suggested Books:
Spiders by Gail Gibbons
There Was an Old Lady That Swallowed a Fly
At Home Activities
Find pictures of animals your child likes and dislikes. You can print them on the computer or cut them out of old magazines or books. Use these pictures to do a family graph of likes and dislikes. Hang 4-6 pictures up. Give each member of the family a chance to put a smiley face or frowny face (draw on post it note, use emoji stickers, or do this on a chalk board) below each picture. Count how many happy faces and frowny faces for each picture. Have guests that come to your house add their frowns and smiles for a week. What is the most liked animal and the most disliked? Now, find books about the poor disliked animal and marvel over it!
Buy some cheap yarn and let your Little Spider make a giant web outside or inside. Help them practice tying knots. Have fun pretending to be the spider (you have to keep a hand on the web at all times!) and see if you can catch them as they run through. Tickle them to death when you do, of course!
Make a Misunderstood Creatures Museum. Use play-doh to create snakes, spiders and other misunderstood creatures. Alternatively, cut out pictures of these animals. Make a welcome sign and display your creatures.
Turn on Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons- Winter (great at bedtime) and ask them what story the music is telling. This one makes for a great predator/prey type story. Will the predator get dinner or will the prey get away?!?!?
Water is EVERYWHERE! It’s easy for us to take for granted that we will turn on the faucet and out comes the magical clear liquid that quenches our thirst and keeps our plants alive. You can foster a big appreciation for this wonderful resource at a young age by introducing the water cycle and taking time to notice all the ways that it sustains life on our planet.
Topics:
The Water Cycle
Sink or Float- Making Predictions
Pouring, scooping, dropping, and filling- Estimations and Motor Skills
Rain, snow, clouds rivers, oceans, streams, lakes- Water is everywhere
Types of Clouds
Suggested Books:
Water by Frank Asch
Water: Up, Down, and All Around by Natalie Rosinsky
Little Cloud by Eric Carle
At Home Activities:
We get lots of afternoon rain storms here in Florida! Go for a Nature Walk right after an afternoon storm and take notice of what your senses find. I like THIS Observation Sheet. Encourage your child to close his eyes and use his Deer Ears to listen deeply. Record what he hears. What about his Dog Nose? Look all around with your Owl Eyes and encourage your child to use Raccoon Touch to feel whatever draws their attention. Repeat this activity on a day when the storm clouds are building (but stay close to home!) and compare the differences.
Kids have an amazing capacity for vocabulary, even at a young age. Don’t shy away from big words like Evaporation, Condensation, Precipitation, and Accumulation. Make felt shapes of a sun, cloud, lake, and rain. Help your child arrange them into a Water Cycle. Write out the vocabulary on slips of paper and place them appropriately on the Felt Water Cycle.
Purchase some blue silky fabric or a spool of blue ribbon. Cut it into strips. Turn on Beethoven’s 5th Symphony and encourage your child to use the ribbon or fabric to move like water. Be sure to move with them and ask them to describe what they are doing!
Make a musical Thunderstorm. Find buckets, stainless steel bowls, cups, paper towel tubes, mailing tubes and anything else that might make a fun sound. Experiment with soft and loud sounds and fast and slow sounds. Create an afternoon thunderstorm building up the noise and speed.
There is nothing quite as magical and mystical as a rainbow after the rain. A unit on Rainbows is a wonderful opportunity to mesh what we know through science with the innate childish love for the magic of the world!
Topics:
Colors and Color Mixing
Storytelling
5 a Day Fruits and Veggies
Scientific Method- predictions and outcomes
Suggested Books:
What Makes a Rainbow?- A Magic Ribbon Book
How the Crayons Saved the Rainbow by Monica Sweeney
At Home Activities:
Color mixing is simply amazing to young children. How can you start with Red and Yellow just to end up with orange?!?!? It’s amazing and it’s extra fun if you can do it with shaving cream! Squirt a ton of shaving cream into a large bin with sides that are 4-6 in high. On one side, squeeze in one color of paint and on the other side, another color. You can have your child choose the colors or you can just present them with the colors you want them to use. Provide large, inexpensive paint brushes (like for painting a wall) and a large washable surface like an acrylic easel or a table or a giant sheet of aluminum foil. Let the fun begin!
A rainbow provides all sorts of opportunities for storytelling and creativity. May is typically rainy here in Florida which provides a prompt for such a story session often. At our house, we like to tell stories as we listen to classical music. Prompt you r child that you are going to create a story about a mean storm cloud and a rainbow that saves the day or about a little boy who climbed a rainbow or some other creative prompt. Select a classical song like the Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture or Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Start the story and ask your child to contribute as the music changes.
The Earth provides Rainbow Colors for us! The rainbow is a symbol of beauty and strength and the rainbow power is what finally pushes even the strongest of storms away. We can harness this same power for our bodies by eating the rainbow of fruits and vegetables. Print out THIS sheet and cut out the cards. Talk about fruits and vegetables of different colors and go on a shopping trip to find some from every color family. Each day, help your child select foods from different color families and mark off the color on their card when they taste the food. Try for 5 different colors a day!
Baking soda and vinegar are cheap supplies to create awesome science fun! Let your child scoop some baking soda onto a plate and spread it out evenly. Drip different colors of food coloring into a design in the baking soda. Encourage them to try to get single drops and to spread them across the plate. Put some vinegar into a small container and let them practice using a pipette to suck some out and squeeze it back in. (This is great Fine Motor practice and we use pipettes all the time for all kinds of play.) Suck up some vinegar and dribble it across the plate. Enjoy the fun fizzing reaction and watch the colors combine!