As you may recall from my post on Friday or this one about parenting during the pandemic, I’ve been on the struggle bus. Everything is so overwhelming, so I took the weekend to reset. It was great. The girls and I baked some blueberry muffins and we did some major weeding as a family. Then on Sunday on of Matt’s coworkers came with is family. We swam, ate, drank, and had a great time. I didn’t have my phone on me much, so I have no pictures.
I have also started making some progress in coming up with a homeschool unit for the start of the year. While I am still planning on trying remote learning through the district, I need to have something in place in case it’s not working out, so I started creating this Apple Unit for Homeschool. (link will take you to the full unit)
I plan on doing a much more detailed post, but figured I would share what I have done so far. For the first unit of the year we will be studying apples. I have been coming up with ideas based on the Common Core Standards for math and language arts, as well as the Michigan benchmarks for science and social studies. My goal is to do as few “worksheets” as possible, and focus more on centers (I loved centers when I was a teacher). I ordered a mini laminator so I can use the pieces of the centers in different ways.
So here is what I have so far:
Apple tree and apples
Get your tree PDF here
Get the apple PDF here
So, I actually created the apples in my Silhouette Studio, which is why they are a little bit blurry looking, but hopefully you can still use them.
Plans for apple tree and apples
- write numbers on apples and sort odd and even
- write addition facts on the tree, and on the apples, and match ones that have the same sum (i.e. 7+1 on the tree and 4+4 on apple)
- Long vowel team sort
- Draw simple coins on apples, match with the correct change on the tree
- Ideas for younger children include: upper case/lower case matching, writing a number on the tree, and dots on the apples, sight word matching
Measure the distance the bee traveled to “pollinate” the flower
Get the PDF with all of the distances here.
One of the standards in science is to talk about the roll of pollination for plants. After talking about it, and doing a few other activities, I will have Annabelle work on measurement. We will use a variety of tools such as ruler, paperclips, and cheerios.
Basket of apples
Get your PDF here
Ideas with the baskets of apples
- write an amount of money on the basket, then write the coins on the apples, and match the correct one (i.e. $0.45 on basket, then a apple with four dimes and a nickle, and another one with a quarter, a dime, and a nickel).
- Write a number (in the 100s) on the basket, have Annabelle build it using base-10 blocks.
- Sorting vowel teams
- Sorting prefixes or suffixes
- Ideas for younger kids: sorting numbers, simple base-10, sort word families, upper case/lower case sort
Like I said, this is just what I have so far, but my ultimate goal is to make this into a nice big apple unit for homeschool package. With lesson plans that detail what to do, materials needed, along with the benchmarks that go along with it. I may even include ways to make the centers more challenging or less, depending on the grade level of the child. I just hope that this will help any family struggling with what to do with their kids at home. I want to show them that learning doesn’t have to be all worksheets, and that hands on learning can be fun, and help them retain information.
And this post got way longer, and more detailed than I thought it would, so if you made it this far, thanks for sticking with it! 😉
Once again, here is the link to the full unit!