Who isn’t ready for a good nature study?! We started February with the Caldecott Honor book Play with Me by Marrie Hall Ets. This simple, cute story is about a young girl who is curious about nature. Through her experience within nature the girl learns how to appreciate wild things, and that animals in nature are different than things in our everyday world. After struggling to catch all the wonderful creatures she finds, she learns that to appreciate nature she must be quiet and still and observe the animals as they go about their day.
This opened up many nature study opportunities! February in Washington is still great for nature walks. Everything is green, there are plenty of plants to observe, animals are still bustling about… However, February may not be the best month to study Play with Me for everyone. This would make a great summertime read, too!
Just a Recap…
I kept the structure similar to what I have been doing for these last few books, it really seems to work for us. We always begin our morning with our morning basket, a study time I call Morning Time. Essentially, I stage all of our morning time study stuff for the day or week in a basket which keeps me organized and looks super cute! Our Morning Time consists of reciting the catechism and Bible memory verses, introducing a new catechism question and memory verse with every new book, reading poems and verses from at least two different books, and reading from the Jesus Storybook Bible or Bible. I break up the readings with activities and songs. I’ll either do an alphabet, number or shape activity, and I like to introduce various styles of music, including Hymns. Additionally, I throw in some activities baby Skye can do, too! I do our Morning Time while we are all gathered around the table for breakfast and try to keep it short.
After Morning Time, we do our chores and get ready for the day. Then, Micah and Skye play for a little bit. I normally don’t have a set time, but sometime before lunch we start our daily lesson, beginning with the book we are studying. We only do school lessons three or four days a week, though we begin every weekday morning with Morning Time. The other days we’ll normally go to a museum or park if we don’t have anything else going on. Those days I to reserve for free learning in a fun environment!
For the daily lesson, I continue with the Before Five in a Row curriculum and used the Homeschool Share lapbook for supplementary activities. If you haven’t checked it out yet, I detail the plan for our first year of homeschooling in Our School Year. But just to recap, we read a new story- which quickly becomes a favorite- every two weeks and use the Before Five in a Row guide to structure our lessons. We also supplement it with a lap book mentioned above, found here, and use other stories and nonfiction books, craft ideas, activities, etc. that enhance each lesson. I absolutely LOVE the Before Five in a Row curriculum and explain more about it and our homeschool style here!
That’s it in a nutshell, at least until I refine it again, and again… and again. Anyway…
Let’s Dig into Our Study!
Daily Morning Time
Bible Study
I introduced the second question in the Catechism for Young Children and Genesis 1:1 for Micah’s Bible memory verse. For our Bible reading time, we continued with Jesus Storybook Bible each day. One day, in place Jesus Storybook Bible, we read the Genesis creation narrative of Adam naming the animals to go alone with the lesson of the day.
For a few mornings, we listened to hymns that praise God for His creation. We listened to “This is My Father’s World” and “For the Beauty of Earth” during our music segments.
Poetry and Rhymes
We started working through Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes, for Skye really, and A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. Occasionally, I’d throw in some playtime rhymes we could tell with our hands, and other rhyming books we chose from the library.
Alphabet
The study letter for Play with Me was A- for animal! We studied the letter A like the rest of the letters we’ve been learning. We say the letter and it’s sound, practice the capital and lower-case versions of it, and look and listen for things that start with our study letter throughout the day. I also continued with the ABC laundry activity found in the Homeschool Share lapbook, found here. We don’t do the ABC laundry every day, but it’s fun to do every once in a while.
Looping
In addition to these daily studies, we looped a few subjects. Looping just means doing one or two activities of a subject on your list a day, going down the list of subjects, and repeating the list until the week is over. So, if you have a list of four subjects, you can have several activities for each subject. And as you repeat the subject, you just choose different activities.
For Play with Me, we had three subject areas, Art, Science and Emotions, with several activities within each. So, we were able to hit each subject area twice. Below I list the subjects and activities in no particular order. There’s a ton of ways to study Play with Me, these are just things we had fun with!
Art
For both art lessons, we studied the illustrations. Play with Me’s illustrations are colorless sketches for the most part. The only color in the illustrations are on the girl’s body, and the animals she is interacting with or observing.
For the first lesson, we discussed why the artist might have illustrated the story this way. We talked about main characters and objects of focus, on a toddler level of course. Micah even colored his own main characters, which still looked like scribbles- but that’s okay!
For the second lesson we noticed that the blue jay wasn’t colored. So, we discussed what color it should be and experimented with blue. There’s also a cute craft from the lapbook to go along with this.
Science
There are so many ‘sciency’ things you can do with Play with Me! So, we had a few more science days than the others. I kept to two lessons within the loop but also visited several nature areas on our free days.
For the first lesson we studied forest animals, with particular attention to the animals within Play with Me. We identified the animals, discussed their forest habitats, and learned a few characteristics of each. Specifically, we talked about their homes, families, eating and sleeping habits, and physical appearance. There’s a fun craft in the lapbook that matches animal cards with their characteristics, too.
For our second lesson we read Are You My Mother? and studied animals and their babies. There’s a lap book that goes with this book here. We didn’t do a full study; I just picked a few activities that coincided with our lesson. We also studied the blue jay, briefly because we’ve studied birds before. This time, however, we set up a bird feeder and waited and watched for birds to show up.
Additionally, we went on a nature walk to look for forest animals one day and visited the pond by our house another. I made a scavenger hunt with the animal cards from the lapbook activity. We practiced self-control by sitting still and quiet and waiting for animals to appear. We also hunted for insects on different plants, which we of course later studied. Afterwards, I read a few books on forest animals and pond animals from our collection. I love the book Above and Below by Hanako Clulow. And all our Usborne Big Book of… books!
Another fun activity we did was discovering morning dew! It’s a great way to expand vocabulary and connect the girl’s adventure to our life. On a couple of nicer mornings, we went barefoot outside and giggled and talked about the dew on our toes!
Emotions
Play with Me is saturated with emotion! The girl is so curious and fascinated with the animals in nature. You can see the awe on her face! Soon, however, she becomes frustrated because she can’t catch them. Then, she feels sad and lonely when all the animals have run away. However, she soon becomes peaceful. And as she sits peacefully and quietly, the animals return. Then, she beams with quiet excitement and joy!
For the first lesson, we observed the array of emotions on the girls face and talked about them. I asked questions and prompted Micah to think of times when he felt these emotions. I focused a little more on lonely because we haven’t talked about that yet. There are many ways to talk about feeling lonely, we discussed how it feels and what we can do when we feel lonely.
For the next lesson, we reviewed the emotions discussed earlier. Then, we focused on what we could do if we notice that others are feeling lonely or sad. This doesn’t have to be too complicated. We just brainstormed things we could do for others, like praying, hugging, talking, making cards, etc. Then, Micah made a card for a friend back in Tennessee to cheer him up. We ended by talking about compassion, remembering that we sometimes feel sad and lonely and how we would like others to treat us with kindness.
But Most Important… Have Fun!
Play with Me is yet another treasured book we have had the opportunity to add to our collection. It never ceases to amaze me how much we can get out of our stories! Seriously, I know I keep talking about it, but the Before Five in a Row curriculum is amazing! It’s so perfect for our pre-preschool studies! I just want to mention, though, that we don’t spend much time at all ‘studying.’ I work with Micah maybe 30 minutes to an hour, and not every day, mostly we are talking, playing, doing crafts or activities, or going places. It’s all about exposure and experience and getting his little mind thinking! Our goal is to have fun, and my goal is to make learning something fun that he wants to do and not just something he feels he must do to get good grades.
Comments are closed.