Archiving ideas

We’ve had several co-op days where I recreated and expanded on some unit studies I did back when Lance and Ivy were little. To save the work of researching several years from now when I need to do it again, I thought I’d post what we did:

Three little pigs

This was a new unit I created which turned out to be a lot of fun!

First we read the story, then built the three types of houses. The boys did the heavy lifting on the brick house.

When houses were complete, I used the blower to test the construction. Only the brick house survived the huffing and puffing!

Next we did piggy bank math – stacking the proper amount of pennies on each numbered pig.

 

Made pig-in-a-blanket for snack – they thought this quite funny.

While we waited on the snack to bake we acted out things that pigs would do – here they are eating the toy food.

 

We also painted “mud” onto pigs. We ended with a yummy lunch of pig-in-the-blanket!

Dinosaurs!

Last week we read about dinosaurs. Most of my previous activities couldn’t be replicated for our class so I chose some new ones. The book I wanted on a dinosaur dig wasn’t at the library so I just read one of the silly ones, “How does a dinosaur say goodnight.” The kids liked it but it left my projects somewhat unsupported. Oh well.

Here we used macaroni to make a dinosaur skeleton. I had to set rules on how much pasta could be eaten.

 

We made dinosaur feet from paper bags and danced to the “fossils” song from Carnival of the Animals by Saint Saens.

 

Then we split up with half working a dinosaur puzzle…..

…and the other half digging for salt dough fossils and bones (yes, it’s more than half but this was at the trade off point).  This was very popular with everyone!

Final activity was a baking soda and vinegar volcano along with the older kids who had studied that very subject in their class. Plastic dinosaurs were properly buried in lava.

That will do for now. I’ll try and post two more classes soon.