MFW Kindergarten Update - "Us"

It might be a little bit of a stretch calling this a My Father’s World update. A recent week was the letter “U” and the theme “Us.” We spent a chunk of our week working on “all about me” lapbooks/shutterbooks that aren’t an inherent part of the curriculum; we added them on. We started with a few different printables from around the web, mixed them up, and tweaked some things a little.

Links to the Printables We Used:

Here’s the original blog post that goes to the downloadable booklet.

I printed some of the pieces at 1/4 or 1/2 size, by printing the PDFs 2 or 4 per page. (If you do this, be mindful of how small your children can write, and what else has to fit on the page. I wanted ours to go in a lapbook, though, rather than be stapled together in a book, so I needed them a bit smaller than the original.) The envelope I shrank a bit, too, to match.

For the handprints, I pulled out primary-color paint and let each of the kids choose two colors. We put a small blob of one color on each hand, then let them rub their hands together to coat them with the newly-blended color. Then they finger-painted some paper with the same pair of colors and that’s what we traced their feet onto later.

Folding the House

The original blog shows the folded-paper house, but it doesn’t have instructions, so I took pictures of the steps as I folded the first one. (Livia folded her own, with some help.) Thank you to Ariel for holding the folds in place while I took pictures, since I don’t have three hands!

Using a standard (8.5×11″) sheet of paper, first fold it in half the short way. (Dinah Zike‘s “hamburger fold”)

Next, take the sides and fold them to meet in the center like shutters.

Fold the top corners down, making the top edge line up with the sides.

It should resemble a shirt collar.

At this point, you may want to fold that last crease back the opposite direction, too, so it flexes both directions for this next step (which will probably make no sense without the pictures). Open up one half of the folded doodad you now have, and let the top portion flatten down forming something roughly arrow-like. You might have to help it a little.

Repeat with the other side. You should now have something that looks like a house, which can be opened up in the center to provide an “inside” space.

Livia’s Finished Book

Livia decided where to place her items, determining where we needed extensions. She decided she wanted three of her little rectangular pieces to be paper-clipped together in a single stack. I thought that might result in their getting lost, so we compromised and made a mini-booklet.

(The paint dried a little faster than we expected, so her hands weren’t very wet after photographing them and before doing the handprint. We learned from that and repainted Caleb’s.)

As you can see, we did a combination of their working on the elements themselves and getting help from Mama to cut or to write.

Caleb’s Finished Book

(I don’t have the foggiest idea why he got it into his head to write his name backward on this particular day. He usually writes it correctly, with the only occasional reversal being the “b.”)

Caleb wanted Mama to just put his book together for him (which was probably good for my supply of patience!)

“Feeling”

We do have a small update directly related to MFW. For the feeling activity, these are the items we used. (You want to be sure not to use anything sharp!) We put them in a pillowcase, which I folded over a good ways because we didn’t need it to be nearly so deep.