F Week Report

Verse of the Week: Fear Not, for I am with you. Isiah 41:10

Saint of the Week: St. Francis Xavier and St. Francis of Assisi (I'm aware that Will sees no distinction between them at this point and I'm ok with that for now.)

Food: Fish, goldfish

touch and Feel

For each unit we've been making a big letter on cardstock. I don't know why I haven't been taking their pictures, but they're all textural, so far anyway. This one is felt which feels fuzzy. We also pulled out all of his touch and feel infant books and identified things that felt fuzzy or furry. 

 Feelings
I'll want to spend a lot more time on this when he's a little older, but we talked about feelings a little bit and practiced making sad, mad, happy, surprised and funny faces. I pointed out pictures in magazines of feelings too.

Art - Fingerpaint! 
I followed this recipe from Pinterest to make some baby safe finger paints. The one on the left is my attempt at the color fuchsia.

 I wish I had taken a picture of his masterpiece! It hung on the wall for a few days then came down. While he was working on it, I fingerpainted a fishbowl you can see in the video below. I'm very proud of my work :)

Pipe Cleaner Fishing
We made a busy bag game to work on fine motor skills, coordination, and color recognition. He actually had a lot of fun with it and we played throughout the week even though in the video he's just kind of messing around. You get the picture. It's a magnet tied on the end of the string as the hook.

One Fish Two Fish and poem
We read lots of fish books as I bet you could guess. One Fish Two Fish was among them. I wanted to be sure to read it, because I had come across this spin off poem that I wanted to play with during snack time. That book is complete crap. Apparently I had never read it, my parents aren't huge Dr. Seuss fans either. About 12 pages is tolerable because it's still about fish, but then it just keeps going on and on getting more and more ridiculous and lame at the same time. Sorry any of you Seuss fans. I guess now I know where my parents were coming from. Green Eggs and Ham is an exception.

We only played with Goldfish once, otherwise I would have ended up eating the while box. After that we repurposed the pipe cleaner fish and lined them up on  there.
We also looked at the fish in the fountain at church, the aquarium at the library, and in the river by our house. We learned and practiced the ASL sign for fish which is useful because Will pronounces fish SHHH.

Faith
We read stories about St. Francis Xavier and also St. Francis of Assisi. There are a lot more children's books about Assisi as you might imagine and I'm glad to talk about him because he happens to be my confirmation patron. While we fed the birds and the dogs we talked about how much he loves animals and by being gentle with them we could honor God. St. Francis Xavier's feast day fell during our study and we celebrated with a traditional Xaver Suppe  so the two Francises are probably one in the same in Will's mind. We'll sort that out later.

Farms we had big plans to go to the farm when we bought our 1/4 beef, but logistics worked out better to just pick it up at the farmer's market. So that trip and reading many related farm books is pretty much all we did with that. Speaking of which, does anyone have recommendations for farm books where the animals don't all eat corn?

Fire Safety Again, we half-butted this one to the extent that I dressed Will in his Old Navy fireman shirt 3 or 4 times over the two weeks and we went to play on the fire truck playground at Landa Park.

Farming and Firemen were two themes I wanted to jump into, but just missed out on some of the enthusiasm this time around. There's a wealth of options there for later years. Frogs, flowers and flags (get in some geography) would also be fun and interesting units later on.

Favorite Books
Swimmy  by Leo Leonni
The Song of Francis Tomie DePaola
St. Francis and the Christmas Donkey Tomie DePaola (bridged the F unit and advent season well)
The Story of Ferdinand  Munro Leaf