Colours, Colours ! 

Leading into spring we did an all things colourful unit. We spent a good component reading our Easter books but we also touched on spring theme and St.Patrick's Day.

A great experiment with plants and colours !  We did this activity first to give the flowers plenty of time to suck up the colour !

 Time to mix the colours! Make sure you trim the stems so they are freshly cut going into the coloured water.

Voila ! Perfect ! Took about three days

A great fine motor activity.

Cutting straws and lacing them. I have a whole collection
of these precious necklaces ! 

Using reusable dollar store ice cubes for patterning

Everything colourful for this unit -

We tied in a St.Patrick's Day activity that included a rainbow,
and my 5 year old worked on some water paintings.

This activity was lots of fun and easy to put together.

First collect some basics colour paint samples. Your child can then cut along the lines.

I made up some boxes with each colour written on. My child is working on some sight words. You could make it easy and match the marker you use to the colour written on the box, depending on where your child's level is. then I made a slit on the top.

The child then sorts out the colours and uses the slit to put each shade into the corresponding box.

Finally we had a big reveal as I opened each box to find all the same colours !

Stone Soup

Calendar

First, my apologies for my slightly inaccurate title. This unit had more to do with soup in general than the classic story of Stone Soup. Using Stone Soup as our initial launch into the unit I was able to include other fantastic stories and tie in a more rounded study for my kindergarden and grade one student.

I found a couple of versions on youtube and we after watching them we created a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast the versions of the same story. It was the first introduction to Venn Diagrams for them and as you likely know, Venn Diagrams are used across many subjects all through school years so even at an early age it's good to get the children familiar with them.

Venn Diagram

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=trbHdayluLA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhauzTi9-BU  (This was my favourite !)


The boys also worked on a paper set of ingredients that they coloured and cut out to store in their cauldron. They carefully selected their colours and I was happy to see that one child thought to make a parsnip and they each chose different colours for the peppers !

 

You can find the printables here

We also did some poetry/chanting during our calendar time - when I typically do most of the unit study work.


I made each of the boys a copy which they cut and pasted onto the background and put into their cauldron with the other ingredients.

The printable is here.

You can actually do a lot more literacy activities using a poem - like circling certain words, or finding particular letter or rhyming words. We didn't do it for this study but we have and I know we will again another time.

 

 

potato stamps

Our Second story was Boy Soup , by Loris Lesynski.  

I would recommend it ! It has all the delightful twisted plot line of a typical fairy tale with a heart warming moral tie in at the end.

I chose to do a stamping activity with paint for this day. I kept the colours to white and brown and used potatoes , because they fit into the colour scheme that I was emphasizing. 

 

 

 

 Our final Story was Delicious, by Helen Cooper.This story was all about orange so we did a bit of colour mixing and then used vegetables in the same colour family as our implements. 

vegetable painting

There are lots more expansion activities that could have been done - most obvious perhaps is that we did not actually make any real soup !  But if you are a homeschooling mom in particular, give yourself an extra dose of grace.  I myself am homeschooling five boys , kindergarden through high school this year.  It's not always possible to spend our days in endless crafts and games. I definitely make time for that, I think it's so important. But if you are doing your best and really embracing those things that you can do sometimes it's more than enough to let things go.