Mama’s ‘Last week in review’ – Letter of the week – F

I’m going to start something new on Mondays. Since I am trying to do a little more ‘formal’ learning time with Cutie Pie I thought I’d try to post about it just once a week. I mean, this blog is supposed to be about our learning through everyday life and I think posting about what we’re learning through a more formal time is everyday life, but yet it isn’t. Right? Anyway, welcome to my first post called Mama’s last week in review!

So, the week before last week was Thanksgiving, but it was also supposed to be the week for letter F. Unfortunately, my best-laid plans to do things F-related didn’t really materialize. We did use words like Family, Feast, Fun, Friends, Food, Fingers and the like a lot, but I don’t think we even looked at the letter more than once! So, I tried it again.

Monday is our most formal of the formal learning, where we talk about the Bible story for the week. The rest of the week we do more artsy stuff and I bring up the Bible story in different ways, like how a character other than the main character saw the story unfold. This Monday we also talked about Moses again, not baby Moses being found by the princess, but Moses parting the Red Sea while having the Israelites Following him and Following the pillar of cloud and fire. I tried to get creative with this one…

We talked about what it means to Follow. We also talked about what Moses and the Israelites must have felt when walking through the Red Sea! I tried hard to describe it to Cutie Pie and Sweet Pea (my now 2 year old!) Cutie Pie talked about how neat it would be to walk on the bottom of a lake and turn to see the fish saying “How are they doing that?” Then I took the kiddos into the other room, where they saw their two quilts with fish on them spread out on the floor. After talking about them being made of fabric and feeling them, I hung these quilts over the backs of some chairs and had the kiddos walk between them so they could get the idea of the ‘wall’ of fish Moses and the Israelites might have seen. We talked some more about what Moses might have felt putting all of his trust in God to simply raise his hand and have the sea part so they could walk across. Was he fearful? Flustered? Filled with awe? Did he feel favored?

(He’s fishing – the fish are the white things on the floor…)

We also got out our magnetic Fish and the kiddos stood on the chairs (yes, I know….) and Fished with their little Fishing poles. To them this was way cool because the quilts were still up, so Cutie Pie kept saying “Will this be a big one from the quilt!?” as he Fished. And we ate French Toast for lunch, along with a piece of  birthday cake with really yummy Frosting on it! We took a Fall walk and visited Friends.

Throughout the week we also fingerpainted. My kiddos use a ton of fingerpaint at one time so this also became a ‘what shape can you make?’ game. Mostly we made circles and ovals, but Sweet Pea was into trying to make squares and triangles, too. Cutie Pie (yes, the 3 yr old) was waaay into just painting over and over again with green, which was just fine with me! We talked about how the paint felt in their fingers. Cutie Pie said it felt like pumpkin goo. We also talked about the colors combining to create other colors. (using our sense of touch, sense of sight, art – colors, fine motor skills)

There was a lot of pretend play this week as the boys were firetrucks, firefighters and fish. At one point a dolly was tossed down the laundry shoot and immediately Cutie Pie became a fireman and had to rescue him! And there was also a lot of eating! We talked a little about fruits and I was tempted to make some jelly or preserves, but instead we made applesauce! Yummy! And of course, this involved a Field trip to the apple store!

I had great plans to have “Foot Fun Friday” and do fun things like fingerpaint with our feet, make footprints in the snow, trace our feet and make butterflies, but it didn’t work out. But this week we did manage to see the letter F often, we got out my rubber stamps that start with F and used them on the letter F shape. We looked for F everyplace we went, searching it out in magazines, spying it on signs, drawing it on the Fisher Price Doodle Pro…I try hard to make the learning happen in sneaky ways, but when I do things like ask Cutie Pie what letter something starts with he knows I’m seeing if he learned and he gets goofy. Eventually I know I will see that he’s learned something from all this fun!