Poetry

I wanted to share (read: brag!) what D wrote today!  She even illustrated her poem!  Now, I might be partial but I think it turned out pretty amazing for a six year old!  Completely self-initiated and self-motivated, too.

Poetry and Christmas Tree

There are numerous blog posts all over the blog world on decorating a mini christmas tree.  It is an awesome fine motor work, appropriate for the holiday season and child approved!  We created one for our school too! I hunted and hunted for a decent mini christmas tree that wasn't expensive, but could not find it at any of our local stores.  Finally I bit the bullet and bought a live, small tree at our local Walmart for $8.  (Since it was live, I was kind of ok!)  Since our tree was really tiny and the branches were thin, I bought some mini ornaments from Michaels and luckily they were 50% off, so got a good deal on those!  After spending close to $10 total on this work, I had to get more value out of it for sure! So, I hunted for a nice poem to go along with this, got it from google and created our poetry tray. As always poetry is a big hit at our house!  So here is the tray and some action shots!

Both M and D worked on decorating this tree.

Here is the little tree after they were done with decorating.

Our Pumpkin Unit

We've been having a blast with our pumpkins that we bought for halloween.  Here is a glimpse of what we have been doing.

We got the free pumpkin lifecycle cards from here and have been working with those 3-part cards.

We also worked with this cute poem about pumpkins.  They offer a cute printable version of the poem and we just used that.

We also examined the pumpkin when we carved our jack-o-lantern.

Here are some of the crafts that we did with the pumpkin theme.  The first one is an easy one, I let D cut orange strips out of construction paper and tear it into bits.  Then she basically glued that onto a paper plate for the pumpkin body.  She drew and then cut out shapes for the facial features from black construction paper and stuck that on.  She then punched a hole and twisted a green pipe cleaner for the stem.  Easy, no mess project.

This is another one we did with a lot of help from me.  We basically stapled strips (cut by D) of orange construction paper onto a toilet paper tube to make this.  This was a cool center piece on our dining table for a week!

I did not get the parts of the pumpkin cards, since we already did something similar when we did our apple unit.  We did look and examine the insides of the pumpkin.  We also roasted the pumpkin seeds for a delicious snack!  We bought a mini pumpkin pie from our local store to enjoy for desert on one of the days!

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Coins/Currency Values Poem

D always enjoys songs and poems.  I looked online and found this song/poem to re-enforce the coins value. D has a lot of fun reciting/singing this.

Here is our poetry tray.  I need to refill my printer ink meanwhile I wrote the poem out.  The small box that holds the coins/dollar bill was sent by my mom from India.

Here is the text of the poem:

Tune: First two lines of Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

Penny, penny, easily spent
Copper brown and worth 1 cent.

Nickel, nickel, thick and fat,
You're worth 5 cents, I know that!

Dime, dime, little and thin,
I remember, you're worth 10.

Quarter, quarter, big and bold,
You're worth 25 cents I'm told.

Half-a-dollar, half-a-dollar, giant size,
50 cents to buy some fries.

Dollar, dollar, green and long,
Worth 100 cents, you can't go wrong!!!

March Poetry

With spring on the horizon this month's poetry basket is one of my all time favorites.  Wordsworth's "Daffodils".  It is slightly longer then what D is used to, but I thought I'd give it a try as she enjoys her poetry trays so much and memorizing is never an issue with her.  There aren't any props with this one as of now, I am not sure if I would have any later on.  I just googled the poem and added some google images.  I printed this out and added dots below each line, so she could point to the words as she recites the poem.

Edited to add:


I added a bunch of artificial daffodils that I found at the dollar store to this tray.  We've already recited this poem quite a few times today.  D loves it!  I was initially a little bit worried at the length, but it doesn't seem to bother her at all!

February Poetry

My printer stopped working suddenly, so I've had to hand write everything for D for this month!  So its been taking a long time to set up work.  Here is a look at this month's Poetry.  I wanted to keep this as simple as possible (less work)!



I have five small hearts cut out from foam to be used with the poem. D flips each one to show what is written based on which line we are reciting.