No surprise that the mere mention of Angry Birds made Kaleb jump up and down in excitement. He’d only been eyeing the growing pile of games and fun for weeks, hoping that each day would be the day we started.
Well, this week was the it! We had so much more planned to do, but a certain mom forgot that we had a field trip to the planetarium in her enthusiasm to collect every fun idea on the internet related to Angry Birds {cough}.
There may be a few more Angry Bird activities that will now spill over into next week. :)
Fun with Angry Birds Printables
For the most part we kept up with our regular subjects each day {above is our weekly grid}, unless there was something in the printable pack that could take the place of a subject {i.e. for math we worked on several of the math pages in the pack, etc…}. Something about the colorful birds made things extra fun!
One of the math highlights of the week was the prediction page to go along with the roll and graph page in the Angry Bird Printable pack. Before rolling the Angry Bird die, Kaleb predicted which of the six animals would ‘win’. He rolled the die and filled in a square with a Do-A-Dot marker each time he rolled. When he was done, we answered a few additional questions and read the graph together {he was cheering for the black bird to win, so he was VERY excited at the end!}.
The Do-A-Dot markers are still one of Kaleb’s favorite things, so we pulled out a few more to use in the ‘find the word’ story. He loved finding multiple copies of the word ‘the’. Can you tell he was a little dot happy? He had a pattern system worked out at the beginning, but that quickly went to the side and he just dotted away.
Other parts of the Angry Bird Printable pack we worked on: beginning sounds sheet {upper and lowercase}, 1:1 counting, word tracers, letter tracers, mazes, addition, directional words, patterns, find the A’s, word matching, find the difference, more/less/equal, letter P sound, least/greatest number, and following directions. Phew!! That was a lot more than I thought!!
More Angry Bird Fun
There was quite a bit of hands-on fun this week too. Believe it or not, we didn’t pull out the iPad or iPod ONCE to play the game!! Instead we pulled out a few fun things and played it in real life!
Using small plastic cups and Angry Bird pencil toppers, we built fortresses, hid pigs, and tried to knock it all down. We had plans to set up some elaborate block structures, but that didn’t happen – I have a feeling that fun will continue into the weekend for us!
Kaleb painted a bunch of paper plates and made some fun Angry Bird faces {idea found here}.
One of our favorite games this week was a simple Angry Bird cards game. Kaleb was able to pick up the rules quickly and teach it to everyone. It became a fun game for him to play with the others when they were waiting for something {especially since the games last between 5 and 10 minutes overall}.
We also had picked up a set of the Angry Birds knex, and although they were cute, the pieces didn’t stay together well, which ended up frustrating Kaleb. A few of the parts we are using for other things though {the sling shot is great!}. Instead we are getting the Knock on Wood game {which is what I thought I had ordered – oops}. That one has easier pieces to manage.
The Rest of the Week
Something that ALL of the kids enjoyed {mom included} were some great tie-in anger management lessons from The Home Teacher. I really can’t do it justice in explaining it all – just know that you are going to want to download her posters and use them with your kiddos. FABULOUS!!! And something kids will remember because it ties in with a game they love!
Our trip to the planetarium was a lot of fun!! We went with a group of friends and the ‘show’ we watched was entertaining for even the younger ones and then the peek at the night sky was very neat {even I learned a few things!}.
Kaleb is about halfway through his reading program right now – just one more lesson and he gets to try the moon ice cream that came with our kit!! That has been a fun incentive for him to keep reading. There are days when he acts so frustrated and then just minutes later is reading along great – so puzzling. He ‘thinks’ he can’t read and needs a LOT of encouragement to remind him that he CAN do it.
That about sums up our week – I’d love to hear about your week!! What was the most exciting thing that happened with your kids this week? Leave a comment below and share the excitement!
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