God's Eyes, 3 Letter Words, and Too Much Sugar!

Every year, my kids get a TON of candy. When I say a ton, that is no exaggeration.  Each of their buckets was completely overflowing with chocolate, gum, Skittles, M & M's and just about every other type of candy you could imagine. So, always looking for a teaching opportunity, I decided to have my children do some math and science activities with their load, secretly praying it would all somehow disappear before they ate too much. First, I had them sort all the candy by brand. Then, they sorted the candy by type- chocolate, chewy, gum, hard candy, etc... The fun part came next. We did lots of experiments using various candies-melting time, water/oil experiments, etc...   They really enjoyed this activity and little by little, the giant sugar mountain started to disappear.  I don't even think they really cared about eating the candy as much as they were curious to see how long it would take a chocolate bar to explode in the microwave. Fun times...

We've been learning about Mexico as part of our Galloping the Globe studies and the kids had fun making Ojos de Dios (God's Eyes) this week. Much more about Mexico will be seen here, as we chose Mexico as our Christmas Around The World country.

I know I've mentioned this before, but I will say it again- I just LOVE Starfall Kindergarten. It is so thorough and full of all sorts of colorful, high quality manipulatives and products. My little guy has been working hard at sounding out words and so I decided to make 3 different colored circles and laminated them. Then, I wrote the words "beginning" "middle" and "ending" and placed one above each circle. I say a word out loud and give him a handful of magnetic letters. His job is to break up the word into separate sounds and then find the correct letters and place them in the appropriate spot. For example, I say the word "bed" and he repeats it and then says what each letter sounds like b-e-d. Then, he finds the letters in his pile and sets them in the correct order.  He really enjoys this activity and I am amazed at how well he is learning to distinguish beginning/ending sounds as well as vowels.