Flashing Back: A Lesson on Weather

This week our church is doing Vacation Bible School "VBS". Therefore, we will be "flashing back" to some recent days in May of this year (2013), that I was unable to post about but that are totally post worthy -because our family will be taking full advantage of VBS!

Today we had a weather themed day. It has been raining for a few days in a row and I thought that this would be quite appropriate!

We started out by using plastic tweezers to pick up colored pom pom's and then transfer them into the yellow bowl. I called the pom poms "our clouds" for today's activity (we pretended).

This is a great fine motor skill building activity.

Next I got out our copy of "Colorful Umbrella's", a color identification book that I downloaded from This Reading Mama. 

I also got out the blank copies of this book so that we could color each page and make a book specifically for Vada's collection.

After we spent a good deal of time coloring (Vada will stay focused coloring if I or someone else is coloring with her.) I brought out the Jesus Storybook Bible and read a version of one of my favorite biblical stories, Noah's Ark and how God promised to never flood the earth again. Every time I see a rainbow, I think of this promise and it brings me peace and it reminds me that there will always be a calm after a storm.

(On a side note, when I was driving to the hospital to identify my mother after her accident I was so nervous! About a twenty minutes from the hospital where she was being held I noticed that a small rainbow was in the sky. It remained there until I got to the hospital. While I was driving I thanked God out loud for that small gift. Later, after going through my mom's house and belongings and finding out that she found God, I felt even more comforted by that rainbow because I felt that maybe it was a gift not only from God but maybe from my mother as well. You never know.)

After reading about God's promise we did some counting practice and color recognition with this rainbow that I also downloaded from This Reading Mama. (I colored it myself before laminating it, I couldn't have a plain rainbow.)

I wanted to make something clear. I show a lot of things that look pretty neatly done, like above. However, Vada is still being told step by step how to do this. She is getting much better at color recognition but has a ways to go and I don't want anyone to look at my posts and begin to think that that she is doing this so perfect, when she is not. The reason I feel it necessary to make this a point is that I do a ton of research and while I don't find myself in the habit of comparing Vada's abilities to other children her age (with and without Down syndrome) I do feel like it is something that I may do on occasions, even if I don't intend to do so. Therefore, I am assuming that others may do so as well and I don't want to mislead anyone with what I am sharing. I want to share my ideas and help educate so that you feel more confident in educating your children. So, the below picture shows how I tell Vada what I would like her to do with the pom pom. Eventually, she will be able to listen to the directions when they are given to her and do this on her own and then even further down the road, she will just know what to do when this activity is given to her. 

After our rainbow activity we read Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. 

Finally, we did a really fun craft of making a storm painting.

Vada used rain stamps as well as clouds, lighting, and even the sun.

Somehow she got a huge glob of blue in her hair and I have no idea how it happened but oh well.

This was her finished work. I think it belongs in a gallery but then I am biased.

Day Three of Letter 'C'

Yesterday was beautiful outside! Finally it is warming up and seemingly staying that way! It wont be too much longer before I am complaining about it being too hot! For now, I am trying to take advantage of the nice weather and do what I can for school stuff outside. Technically, I could do it all if I wanted to but I do like the flow of the way certain things are going so I do pick and choose!

For yesterday's beginning lessons I decided to start outside. We did some sun art on solar energy paper. The age suggestion is six and above I would assume for the understanding and comprehension of the actual process of whats taking place but I thought since we had the paper and it was so sunny out, why not. 

I gave Vada the simple task of placing the plastic butterflies onto the paper while I counted how many she chose. If your interested in how her picture turned out stay tuned for this weeks post of "I Did That", where I post all of her crafts of the week at one time.

Next, we got into her new Fun Sand sensory bin. Well, we kind of got into it. She wasn't overly excited about the sand and kept saying "yuck". 

She was alright if she was sitting on my lap and if I was picking up the alpha cookies but she just wasn't comfortable fully immersing her hands into the sand.

After about five minutes of her sitting in my lap and watching uncomfortably as I brought the alpha shaped cookies closer to her I decided to have her do the same activity that I had originally planned only using a bin of water. 

Every so often there would be some left over gob of sand on a letter that would throw her off a bit but in general she was quite content "diving" for letters in the water.

I had her grab for a letter and then show it to me. Once she showed it to me, I would tell her what the letter was and then I would sing the Leap Frog Alphabet Letter song for each letter. "The 'a' says "ahh". The 'a'a says "ahhh". Every letter makes a sounds..." and so on. She really enjoys Leap Frog videos and frankly next to Signing Time and Sesame Street, it's about the only thing that we let her watch on tv.

After playing in the water I did try to reintroduce the sand to Vada but she just wasn't ready.

Then we went for a walk around our neighborhood. 

And of course we had to stop to smell all of the beautiful flowers.

After our walk we came back inside to do our lessons for the day. 

We read the Caterpillar book as usual and Vada made sure to feed her hungry caterpillar.

We started with math. Counting and numbers. 

This printable activity came from our Letter of the Week curriculum from Confessions of a Homeschooler.

I had theses Measuring Worms that I thought we could pretend were caterpillars and use them as our counters instead of the printable paper caterpillars that came with the curriculum. Just to change things up a bit.

The only problem was that I am pretty for sure that Vada thought that these were crayons.

I thought maybe it was because I gave her the longer worms so I gave her the shortest worms instead. Same thing, she tried to color with them.

I tried to reason with her. No, these are our caterpillars. Well, not for real but for pretend. Were pretending that they are caterpillars and were going to count them. Okay? 

For some reason I really wanted my "caterpillars" to work, so I tried to give her the numeral card first then one caterpillar to count and place onto the leaf at a time.

I guess you could say that sometimes mother doesn't always know whats best. We ended up going back to the printable caterpillars for our counting activity and Vada did great! She knew what was expected. The caterpillar cards were not confusing and she didn't try to color with them.

I wonder what she would do with cut up pipe cleaners...?

Together we worked on tracing and then Vada got her time to practice writing on her own.

We also did some cutting together and this time she was much more cooperative, which was pleasant! 

Then, I gave her a chance to hold the loop scissors and paper on her own. She has a great deal of practice left before she is able to cut things on her own but at least we are working on it!

I tried to work on Large, Medium and Small sorting with Vada but she saw the caterpillars and instantly was done! I think after our counting, she had had enough for one day!

We ended our day with learning colors and some pre reading color cards that I printed for free from This Reading Mama.

I did a couple of things with these cards. I introduced them and then put them into the slots. Then I introduced a handful of items of the same color.

I always gave Vada a couple of minutes to check out the items that I placed onto the table and made sure to keep reinforcing what color they were and that they matched the colors in the slot or on the cards.

I always put a crayon of the corresponding color onto the table and also let her try it out.

For literacy purposes I made sure to highlight that both of the written words said the same thing. I would say "This one says blue and this one says blue." Then I would hand her one card and ask her to put the blue on the blue. I would ask her to do this twice. the first time using the black card and the second time using the colored card.