Little Hands Toward Heaven - Unit 5

Samuel seemed to really like this unit. There were alot of hands-on things that he enjoyed doing. Unit 5 was about Young Joseph. It was a review week for our letters and we reviewed all the ones we've worked on so far, A-D. Our rhyme was also sort of a reveiw of the last few weeks called "What Do You Know?". The first verse reviewed the letter sounds and stories we've done so far and then the last 2 verses were about Joseph. Samuel really liked doing it. And, I thought that he didn't like some of the other rhymes because I could never get him to say them with me, but throughout this week, he would be playing and I would hear him saying the different rhymes so he definitely learned them.

Our first story was about Joseph getting the coat of many colors from his father. For some reason, Samuel keeps calling it his "cope" and always places extra emphasis on the p. He has no problem saying t sounds any other time so I think he's just being silly. For our art project, we painted Joseph's coat of many colors. We were supposed to use coffee filters or paper towels with watered down paint so the colors would run together. I couldn't get our paint to thin out for some reason so it didn't turn out exactly how I had planned, but Samuel still had fun doing it.

Our next story was about Joseph going to find his brothers and we talked about how they were jealous of him because he had a special coat. We also started Hooked on Phonics. Samuel loves going through the flash cards with the CD and saying the letter names and sounds. He is doing great! He has a few more lessons to do before he should be able to read the first booklet. I say "should" because he has to be in the right mood to actually work on it.

Just showing me a pretty smile!

We were supposed to choose one of the letters we'd already done to make out of masking tape and practice the sound. We chose D because we didn't get to do it during the D week. Samuel was all excited at first about finding things to line up on the D, but then decided he wasn't interested. He did put his monkey on there though.

And, since I took a picture of Monkey, he wanted Froggy's picture too.

The next story we did was about Joseph's brothers selling him as a slave. Samuel said, "That's not nice, we don't buy people only toys." I thought that was pretty good that he figured that out on his own. We worked on his Number Five page for his counting book. I printed some pictures of money bags off the computer and he colored them, cut them out, and glued them on the page. The money bags remind us that Joseph was sold as a slave.

He also did a worksheet where he had to pick out the letters A-D and then also had to match the upper and lower case letters to each other. He did it all by himself and did a great job!

Our math activity for the day involved sorting money. I got a handful of coins out of his piggy bank and we worked on recognizing the different ones. Then, he sorted the pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters into different cups in my muffin pan. He loves playing with money so he had lots of fun with that one!

The next story we read was about how God was with Joseph in Egypt and he was put in charge of telling others what to do. We practiced following directions. First I told Samuel some different things to do like put your hands above your head, run in a circle, jump up and down, etc and then he told me things to do. He really liked that because he loves to be in charge! For our letter activity, we were supposed to choose one letter to review, draw it on paper, paint it with glue, and then sprinkle it with glitter or spices. Samuel wanted to do all 4 letters so since it didn't take very long we did them all. I wrote the letter on the paper and then he did the glue and sprinkling. He actually did a really good job staying on the lines and making the letter properly. We didn't have any glitter, so we used a variety of spices.

The last story we read was about Joseph going to prison even though he didn't do anything wrong. We talked about the difference between lies and telling the truth. That was really timely because Samuel has a big problem with making things up to get out of trouble. Hopefully the lesson will stick.