This week we rowed Truman's Aunt Farm. This was a cute book about a boy who sent away for ants for his ant farm, but got Aunts instead! This was a pretty short unit, but we had fun with it. We read a LOT of books about ants this week. We sent away for ants for our ant farm, and got ants, not aunts. :) They were hard workers, and by the end of the week, they had made lots of tunnels. Lily enjoyed watching the ants up close. We talked a little about homophones, and played a little game with some homophone word cards. Lily actually understood that concept better than I thought she would. I had Lily write a letter to her aunts for handwriting practice. Actually, she traced a letter to her aunts. In the book, Truman fed his aunts rice pudding for breakfast, jelly sandwiches for lunch and little hot dogs for dinner. So, we had to try all of these things! For lunch on Monday, we had jelly sandwiches and tried rice pudding. It was a hit. We love sensory bins. This week, I put some plastic ants in the bin with some Living Sands. This sand is great-it never dries out, is water soluble and vacuums right up. :) The perfect indoor sand. We learned about the body parts of an insect, and labeled them. We also have a cd with insect songs on it from a preschool curriculum that I used in the past, so we listened to that all week. If you have never seen the new show Rachael and the Treeschoolers, you should. It is fantastic. We watched the insect one this week. http://www.signingtime.com/treeschoolers We also watched a Magic School Bus episode about ants. We played games, like guess the number of insects in the cup: and Ants in the Pants: We made ant hills out of coffee grounds, and made ants out of fingerprints. Lily added wings to her ants and said they were the queen ants. I was hoping it would be warm enough for an outside picnic, but it wasn't. We had an indoor picnic instead. We had to have the little hot dogs like Truman did in the book. We also made an ant hill cake to go with our picnic. We ended the unit with our indoor picnic. We had lots of fun this week! We are going to continue with the insect theme, so next week's row will be about bees!