Week(s) 10: Joshua Leads Israel

So luckily, this was a letter review week for letters E-H.  She really doesn't need a ton of letter review.  She knows her letters, sounds. Whole bit.  She could probably use more writing practice but I've decided that at 3, I'm not going to push it.  We'll do our weekly letter writing and let her think it's a game and call it a day.  She likes all the letter activities and all but every 5 or so weeks, things get easier on the homeschool front.  I don't do too much review of the letters and we just get to do Bible stories and activities for the week. This page here is a Hide and Seek Review page and she was able to match up the capital and lowercase letters pretty easily.  At first, I thought the repetition in this program was going to make me a little crazy but it's really fun watching her work and see her know what to do without me having to explain much.  She's getting good at this!  

Thankful Tree
These last couple of weeks we've begun prepping for Thanksgiving.  In Claire's bedroom, Christian painted a big tree to go with her room theme of bird and the wall words that have the hymn, "His Eye is on the Sparrow and I know He watches me."  A sweet friend, Jaimie came over and painted little birds in the tree later. We love it.  She loves it.  So this year I decided to use the tree for Thanksgiving.  I took construction paper in fall leaf colors, red, brown, orange and yellow and traced leaves from a cookie cutter I had in the kitchen and then cut them out: one for each day in November.  I taped them to the wall and each day we talk about things we are thankful for.  I think, after Thanksgiving, I'll write a post where I'll talk about what she was thankful for this year!  Some of the items are pretty cute!  But I will save it for later. "I'm thankful for God" was her first, though.  Warmed mama's heart!

Joshua Leads Israel 

First order of business was to talk about the spies and Rahab (her occupation was left out of this particular lesson and will be discussed at a later date, I'm sure) and how she helped the Israelite spies escape.  So for this story we had some fun with peanut butter, crackers, and Twizzlers.  I had, originally, bought these fruit ropes at Target thinking they came apart but, alas, they did not.  So, luckily, Claire had some Twizzers ropes in her leftover Halloween candy.  

So we made the tower out of crackers and held the crackers together with the peanut butter and then used the Twizzlers as the rope that Rahab used to let the spies out of the tower without being caught.  She learned a couple things: the Bible story and how to spread peanut butter on a cracker. Win, win.

 Another activity we did involved the Arc of the Covenant.  We talked about how God set out special rules for how the Arc should be taken care of.  We practiced walking across a line of painters tape on the ground holding a pillow (Hello Kitty of course!).  She had to follow the line and hold the pillow.  Was good for coordination and learning about how important and holy God is and how important His commands are and how amazing His grace is in light of His holiness.

 One of our favorite activities for the week had to do with Joshua and the Battle of Jericho.  We sang through "Joshua fit the battle of Jericho. . ." several times while learning about this.  She'd heard the piece before because my kids at work learned it for their Spring Concert last year. But now she knows it and knows what it is about. 
We made a little trumpet out of construction paper. . .

 And built the walls of Jericho in the living room. . .

 And then marched around the walls with the trumpet (in pajamas, of course!)

 And after 7 times around the walls (math, you see?!) we were able to knock down the walls! 

On the Judges for next week and then on to Thanksgiving week!  Planning a fun unit on Thanksgiving and being thankful for that week.  A little different but will work in nicely with her "Thankful Tree" 
Happy Saturday all!