Ocean Week: Pre-K 5/K

Click here for the downloadable ocean unit  
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Ana's Week

I thoroughly enjoyed ocean week this week and I really think that my excitement about the week helped me to really teach Aria the week well, which meant that she really got a lot out of the week and thrived. Not only did she seem to learn a lot about the ocean and have fun, but she also worked really hard on her literacy and math.

We incorporated a lot of hands on activities this week, from making waves and ocean layers in a bottle to playing with ocean animals in water beads (huge hit for little sister) and putting on puppy shows. We spent time playing with kinetic sand, in our pool, and in the sand box. We also took trips to Petsmart to see the fish after a doctor appointment and went to Callaway Gardens to play in the lake and on their beach. Obviously, it isn’t an official beach, but we enjoyed pretending and getting a chance to practice our swimming!

I also incorporated learning the ocean names into our lessons this year. Aria doesn’t quite have all of the names memorized after this week, but she can point out each ocean on a map. It was also a great way to practice recognizing the names of the continents.

We enjoyed doing smaller things like playing ocean board games and putting together ocean puzzles or using the Water Wow! ocean pads for a little bit of entertainment while I needed to get things done. Aria’s favorite thing to do this week was painting a shark’s jaw and making shark’s teeth out of molds from a kit. We found a shark kit at Michael’s on major clearance last year and Aria has been dying to pull it out. It came with an awesome informational poster that gave us some great insight into sharks and allowed us to have long talks about sharks, their teeth, and their place in the ocean chain.

On a final note, this week finally got our Math U See book, and Aria loves it so much. Aria already can count to 100 and write her numbers up to 100.  Therefore, we have started with the Alpha rather than Primer level (aka, the second level of Math U See). This means, we are working on addition and subtraction, which I think the blocks really help her to enjoy. We haven’t received our Sing, Spell, Read and Write curriculum yet, but Aria practiced writing over 30 sight words and using them in sentences this week, finishing her Kindergarten prep workbook in its entirety. Our big win of the week was completing this workbook because I told Aria that once she did, she could be considered an “official kindergartener.” She loves that. One of the great benefits to homeschooling is that while according to state law, Aria can’t start kindergarten in a full blown classroom for another year, in our home, she can achieve whatever she wants to as long as she works hard. She worked hard to be a kindergartener, so I’m happy to be able to call her one!

I love that Aria seems to think that our thematic activities are a “break” from our focused math, literacy, geography, Bible, and foreign language of our mornings. She really loves the ocean, so it was a great second unit of the year to really pump her up for what is to come. Plus, we were able to mix fun stuff that Skylar enjoyed and learned from with more difficult concepts and longer, more educational literature that is more suited to a 5 year old. Ocean week is always a win, and I can’t wait to revisit some of the information when discussing Australia and the barrier reef at the end of the year!

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Jessica's Week:

I don’t know about you but getting back into the swing of things with that first week of school can be rough. We had an amazing summer filled with lots of vacations, fun, outdoor play and rarely spent more than a half hour at a time on any “school” related activities. So Taegan was not at all ready to settle down and focus on learning this week. Since this is our third year going through most of these themes I tried to focus a little less on the fun stuff and concentrate a little more on theme related reading skills, math etc. It suffices to stay my 4.5yr old did not agree with my approach. She wants to read, she’s probably capable of learning how at this point, but she DOES NOT want to put in any of the time necessary to really learn the skills. I can’t tell you how many times I heard “this is boring” throughout the week. 
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I often have to remind myself that every child is different and needs to learn at their own pace. With the time and effort I put into preparing play based lessons I want my daughter to be the smartest, most advanced, kiddo in her age bracket on the block. She is inventive and a strong-willed social butterfly, but academia (at least so far) has not been her greatest strength. In my heart I know that’s ok, she’ll learn when she is ready, and honestly, she’s still probably much more advanced than many kids her age but I struggle with my frustrations where this is concerned never-the-less. Several times this week I had to “take a break” and let her play while I tried to keep myself from screaming into a pillow. I wanted to yell, “Why aren’t you paying attention? Your never going to learn this if you don’t focus! How many times have we gone over and over this?” Sigh. None of that would have been productive. So instead I prayed, had a little extra chocolate and wine, and tried to breathe deep. Ocean week was not our favorite but it had its positive moments and that’s what I’m trying to focus on enjoying.

We spent our last week of summer at the beach in Michigan and I took some time to discuss tides, marine plants/animals, etc introducing our theme. My hope was that when we got home she’d be all revved up to learn more about the ocean. No luck there, she was more wore out with it than excited but there’s no changing the theme that late in the game so we pressed on. I tried out a new experiment showing water densities which was a hit, and she loved tossing around the beachball covered in sight words. My other big win was a watercolor painting of the ocean layers and including gluing in the animals who live at each depth. 
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Ocean bingo was a good review of naming a wide variety of sea creatures (I am amazed she remembers the names of things I forget like sea anemone, squid and urchin) and T matched up all the oceans with their locations on a map easily, hooray! Our in depth focus this year was a high point of the week. Since Taegan spent hours on the beach hunting for shells over the summer I decided see what all we could learn about them. We compared and contrasted the different types she has in her collection and read a simple book titled, “Oceans Alive, Sea Shells” by Shari Skeie. It tells what shells are made of, the different shell names and which animals call them home. Sooo interesting. It was also fun to just spend some time playing with our shells. We pretended the toob animals used them for a home, built sculptures from them, traced shells to color in, and hid them like lost treasure in kinetic sand. The play and sensory stuff was great but most of our other activities created more frustration than fun. I'll spare you the gory details of describing them all lol. 

For those of you who breezed back into school and have children eager to complete a workbook, rejoice in your blessings. For those who may be struggling to teach the basics and make school fun, you are not alone. I realize compared to Ana, I might come off as a hippie unschooler. My daughter is no where near as advanced as Aria but I hope this post encourages those of you like me… who’s children are perhaps not yet ready for the rigorous academic studies of modern education… you can move at your own pace, or in an untraditional format and still be a good teacher to your children. It’s a concept I am still learning to accept 😊 but I think its an important one.