This week was all about Wolves! We had a lot of fun studying these wild dogs (we even threw in a bit about dingoes and coyotes) and howled quite a bit just for the heck of it!
Wolf Money Math
This was a fun activity I made for Zachary to practice his money awareness. He still can’t seem to remember what a nickel is called, but he doesn’t mix up the coins anymore and he knows what they’re all worth. So i’m counting it as a win!
One of the things my little boy loves studying (and watching if we can find a video of it) is what predators eat and how they eat them. Its gross and a bit morbid, but he’s ALL BOY about it. If I have to watch another video of a crocodile ripping apart a Zebra I might loose my lunch, but the Boy loves that stuff (his favorite part of the three little pigs was when the wolf got boiled at the end… .yeah he’s gross.) And I went off on a bit of a tangent there. Sorry about that…. anyway. The worksheet I made has pictures of animals with ¢ on them. The worm and nuts were worth 1¢, the deer and the sheep were worth 25¢ and all the other animals are in between in reference to their size.
Here is the Worksheet Wolf Coin Work
In the end he decided that the wolf REALLY wanted to eat the deer. So he drew a line from the wolf’s eyes to the deer, so I would know that he had chosen his prey.
Wolf Addition and Subtraction
I have been working a lot on Addition and Subtraction Facts. Its one of the things I never learned as a kid and have since tried to memorize. Knowing the facts by heart makes all forms of math much easier as you go on. I think I hated math because I never REALLY mastered the basics at a reflexive level.
Zachary is still using his fingers to do a lot of the addition and subtraction so I know he can DO it, but I’m still gonna keep drilling the facts until he doesn’t even need to count. It might be a while, but he loves math so I don’t think he will mind. 🙂
The Worksheets are the same as the octopus math from last week. I just change up the picture in the corner and switch around the order of the Math Facts problems. It keeps him on his toes and keeps him interested in the worksheet. The one he’s doing in the picture is Number 2 Subtraction Facts from 1-10. It has a picture of a female with two pups. He thought they were cute and I think he even named the pups.
Number 2 Subtraction Facts With Mother Wolf
Number 3 Addition Facts with Howling Wolf
The Addition was Number 3 this week and I added a picture of a wolf Howling.
“W” Letter Work
Since Zachary’s handwriting has gotten SOOOOO much better recently, I’ve been doing a little less forced writing, but we still need to work on some of his letters so I created this W Letter Work worksheet for him. It combines reading and writing because at the beginning he has to sort the letter W out of all the similar looking letters.
Another Reading Exercise
I’ve decided that Reading Comprehension needs to be at least tried for now. So I made a “Can/Have/Are” worksheet about wolves. I just wrote a little information blurb about wolves at the top and gave him space to write the three sentences at the bottom. The wolf at the top I think is technically supposed to be a type of Fox, but it looked so much like a juvenile wolf, I renamed it and Zachary seemed to buy it as a Juvie. Super cute picture, I couldn’t NOT use it!
His Sentences:
Wolves Can: hunt in packs
Wolves Have: pups (yeah, he took the easiest thing he could think of)
Wolves Are: Endangered (which didn’t come from the blurb, but it was a big word, so I let him have it.
I also tried a trick that seemed to work about 50% of the time. Apparently, if your kid has the issue of looking at the first letter and then guessing, you can put a red dot in the middle of the word and it helps them focus on the whole word instead of just the first letter. We had marginal success with it, but it might have been because the words were too small for the red dot to really be prominent. I’ll probably try it again sometime and see how it goes.
Here’s the Link to the worksheet if you want to use it.
Wolves Reading comprehension CHA
Fairy Tale Finger Puppets
This one is pretty self explanatory. Print, cut out, wrap around your finger and tape. Then go through the story of Little Red Riding Hood. All sorts of cuteness can happen. We didn’t color them but they could totally be colored if your kid is into that sort of thing.
Mothers Day Cards
Mother’s Day is this Sunday, so we did a cute card for all the grandmas and myself. I was kicked out of the room so he could finish my card. Its super cute and makes me very happy because it uses a bit of ASL (American Sign Language).
Steps:
- Gather Materials – Scissors, Glue (or tape I guess could work) Construction paper (2 colors), A hand (preferably a cute tiny one), a Writing Utensil of some sort
- Rip or cut one piece of construction paper in half horizontally. Then fold the two halves in half to make a card.
- Trace the cute tiny hand on the other color of construction paper (we fit 5 on one. One for ME, my Grandmother, My Mother, My Husband’s Mother, and My Husband’s Step-Mother.) Just move the hand around until you get as many as you need, though depending on the size of the hand 4-5 might be the limit.
- Cut out the cute tiny hand tracings.
- Fold the middle two fingers to make the “I LOVE YOU” sign in ASL
- Glue them either to the front or the inside of the card.
- Write Your message (We just did Happy Mother’s day)
- Deliver and watch the happiness. 🙂
I got regular cards for the three moms I had to MAIL stuff to so that I would have an envelope big enough to fit them.
Books we’re Reading This Week (Affiliate Links)
Because the subject of the week was wolves I figured this would be an excellent time to introduce classic stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” “The Three Little Pigs” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf”. Wolves seemed to be a universal antagonist in Once Upon a Time Land and my boy seemed to be woefully ignorant of classic fairy tales.
We also had an extra listener to all of our books this week. Zachary read The Foot Book to his lizard! She was quite a good listener. Though when I read the longer stories she tried to escape a few times. This trend will probably continue. its pretty cute.
ONTO THE BOOKS NOW!
This is (IMO which is the only one that counts on this blog…. mwuahhaha) the quintessential Little Red Riding Hood Story. The girl has a name at the beginning (Elizabeth) and gets nicknamed “red riding hood” because she wears the thing so darn much. She talks to the wolf after her mother told her not to dawdle or talk to strangers, and he convinces her to pick wildflowers for her granny. He runs ahead and eats granny (No namby pamby shoving her into a closet in this story, no sir) then lays in wait for Red to arrive. When she does, she gets eaten too and then the hunter comes in and kills the wolf, slits open his belly and frees the (somehow still living and completely intact) granny and girl. Everything you need from a classic fairy tale. A bit gruesome, but the boy loved that bit.
Red Riding Hood (retold by James Marshall)
Same Story, Wolf eats them and then gets killed. We read both to illustrate how some stories can be told the same way with very subtle differences. Noticed the differences in what the mother packed for the granny, the types of flowers red picked and the illustrations. I think we did a pretty good job of this. I like the illustrations in the previous book better, but this one isn’t bad and might work better in a group setting because the pictures are simpler. You might even be able to find them online or just redraw them and cut them out into stick puppets if you’re hosting a story time.
The Wolf’s Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood
If you’ve started feeling sorry for the wolf after he got killed twice, Give him a chance to tell HIS side of the story. I figured if I was going to do Fairy Tales I might as well include a fractured fairy tale. This poor wolf DOES get part of his tail whacked off, but he doesn’t die in the end. He was really just trying to be a good housekeeper for granny after all.
The Three Little Pigs (Rabbit Ears: a Classic Tale)
This is, again, a very CLASSIC telling of the three little pigs. Although it doesn’t name the pigs with “P” names like some of the classics; they’re only numbered. I added a bit of Huffing and Puffing for fun and Zachary LOVED it when the wolf got boiled in the end. It was requested for a second reading at bedtime. Yup. My kid is a bit morbid. But I love him and he’s actually quite a sweet kid when it comes to real animals. I don’t know why he’s so vicious to fictional ones.
The True Story of the Three Little Pigs
Another Fractured Fairy Tale. They’re so much fun. In this one the wolf wasn’t REALLY going after the pigs. He just wanted to borrow a cup of sugar. It wasn’t HIS fault he had such an awful cold and their houses were so flimsily constructed. I remember reading this when I was younger and it was awesome to be able to share a childhood memory with my son.
Wolves and Other Wild Dogs: Book Author, Mary E. Reid (World Book’s Animals of the World)
And Now onto the NON-Fictional Wolves. I LOVE the world books. They’re always full of great pictures of all the animals and they’re only a LITTLE bit dated. Each page starts off with a question a kid might ask about wolves and then has a few paragraphs answering the question. All in all a great series of books that I’m REALLY glad our library has. Zachary likes that the words are big enough for him to read too.
This book was pretty basic. It’s where I would start if I were going to do a DAY on wolves instead of a week. Its pretty good for beginning readers too. Not TOO many strangely spelled words. The pictures are all illustrations, I prefer them to be actual photos, but its not as “text-booky” as some of the other wolf books we got.
Things I learned from the Week
- Wolf packs can have as many as 20 individuals! That’s a lot of wolves. It’s awesome.
- The Alpha Male isn’t the only alpha, and the Alpha FEMALE is the ONLY one who has babies. I thought several did like in a Lion Pride. I was wrong.
- When the alpha female has pups, she can have A LOT!!! Like a litter can be three pups, or it can be 11 (or even 20)! Imagine having 11 toddlers running around, breastfeeding and such.
- The wolf pack is mostly made up of siblings. It makes sense with what I now know about the whole “One alpha female” thing. But its new information to me.
Next Week: FIRE!!!!!!
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