Mummies in the Morning

We have been talking about rereading our Magic Tree House "Mummies in the Morning" book. May reminded me of the lesson plans that we used to do with the Magic Tree House books. Even though he loves the books, Jayden didn't think the lessons were that fun so I started searching for ways to make it more exciting.

I stumbled across a really cool idea about notebooking for Magic Tree House books with composition notebooks (found here). So I got to work setting one up for Jayden.

Juan bought Popsicle sticks which ended up being a bit too small for the tree house cover I envisioned. Instead, I used emery boards (nail files) and glued them on top of the template for the tree house. I didn't like the Jack & Annie printables from the link above (because I suck at drawing and they looked ridiculous when I finished free-handing them) so I printed and cut them out from here. I let everything dry overnight and voila! Jayden was very excited to see his notebook this morning!

I printed a map of Egypt from here. Then I colored it by myself since Jayden said coloring maps is lame. Gee, thanks kid!

I printed out the "Story Mapping With Annie" & "Fact Tracking with Jack" pages which can be found here when you click on the Mummies in the Morning book.

We will be loosely following their lesson plan for this book. Jayden actually seems very excited to start and told me this notebook is already better than his boring spelling notebook. I agree ;)


The great thing about these books is that they cover a wide range of educational subjects. Mary Pope Osborne (the author) has a complete curriculum key here with a checklist of each subject the book covers and what you can take from the book to build on in different subjects.  This is the main page of their website which has lesson plans, printables, and tons of ideas for each book!

Reed Boats & Pyramids

Continuing with our Ancient Egyptian studies we used one of our borrowed library books (Explore Ancient Egypt!) to build reed boats. (Instructions here)

We tested them and they float! The kids have had lots of fun putting lego people and other small toys in it for a boat ride.

 We also built a lego pyramid! Well, we tried to anyway.

Cait worked on G-H-I letters this week at her PreK class. They used action words to act out these letters.

 I caught these two playing away together!

Here is what has been happening here:

Jayden built a firehouse with his legos.

Jayden swims under water now and Cait learned a new swimming technique

Library computer time

Library puzzle time

We are moving along in our history book and are now learning about Ancient Egypt. I decided to pause from our history book Story of the World because we all love Egypt and I thought we could take this chapter in our book further.

We borrowed these three books about Ancient Egypt from the library. We read Ms. Frizzle's Adventures: Ancient Egypt which was a really cute and appropriately informative book.

 
 We decided to make sarcophagus' sarcophagi so we took a trip to AC Moore for supplies.

 The kids painted the coffins gold because as we learned, Egyptians loved that color.

 While we waited for them to dry the kids worked on math and reading.

 Best part: Cait read her Bob Books First book 1 all by herself!!! And no it was not from memory, because I never read the book to her! ;)

Cait is still determined to learn how to read so I found some worksheets from Walking by the Way to go with the first book in the Bob Books First! series. She had to circle all of the pictures that started with the letter on top of the page. She did worksheets for A, M, S, & T.

 

 She also did a word search for words in the first book.

I made her an "at" book. I stapled B, C, F, H, M, R, & S on the pink pages. As she flips the pages a new "at" word is made.

I found some more worksheets for the BOB books at In Lieu of Preschool. I printed out some letters to build words. Cait built mat and sat. 

Jayden is still working on his matter unit in science. Today he finished up an article and worksheet from Super Teacher Worksheets and then made a mini lapbook.

   

 

The blue circles represent atoms