We just finished our first "official" unit with My Father's World. The unit was SUN. Lily had so much fun. We had to postpone it for a week. The weather was not cooperating, and a lot of our activities actually required the sun to be shining.
The first part of the lesson was learning the letter sound, and practicing writing the letter "S".
Lily already knows her letter sounds, but she needs handwriting practice. She gets frustrated when it comes times to write, so we only do a few tries, and put it away. She is only 4. She has plenty of time to practice handwriting, and I don't want her frustration to affect her love of learning.
Lily doesn't like to take time to actually COLOR. She will scribble a few lines and say she is done. I found a color by number, and this seemed to encourage her to take her time. Because she was supposed to color the numbers a specific color, she took time and did it the right way. I need to remember this and find more of these.
We made sun tea. I knew Lily would enjoy this activity. She LOVES tea! She put the water and tea bags in the jar.
We set the jar outside in the sun and left it for a few hours.
When she came out to check it, she said "It turned ORANGE!"
We went outside and observed our shadows. I traced Lily's shadow, and she traced mine. This unit really helped a lot with her fears at night. She has been afraid of shadows for a while, and after we studied shadows, she has not been afraid at night anymore. :)
We made sun catchers. We had a giant tub of craft beads, so we put them in bowls and dishes and melted them in the oven. They popped right out when they were cool, and made beautiful sun catchers. We have them on display in our flower bed.
Another fun activity was to make a sun dial. Very simple-just a pen and a glob of playdough. We set the sun dial out in the sun, and I set the alarm on my phone for every hour, on the hour.
She went to check it after one hour, and said "It totally DID move!" We kept up with it until the sun moved away from the sun dial.
We did a few artistic crafts. Painting a sun, and making a torn paper sun were fun.
The Cusinaire rods were not her favorite part of the week. Again, she gets frustrated. She just needs some work on her fine motor skills. We worked on this activity a little at a time.
We finished the unit with a lap book that highlighted some of the facts about the sun she had learned. On the back, I glued a few pictures of Lily enjoying her week. All in all. I think it was a successful week, and Lily had a lot of fun. Next week is M-Moon. We have lots of fun activities planned for that unit.
