We are continuing our study of letters in the alphabet using God’s Little Explorers and this last week we studied the Letter Q. We visited an aquarium restaurant the weekend before for Li’l Bit’s sister’s birthday. We have been looking for the letter q when we are out and about, and Li’l Bit was excited to find the letter in the word aquarium. She said she could really “hear it” too. LOVE IT!!!

The weather has been spectacular here with the fall colors of the trees and landscape surrounding us equally spectacular. So, we’ve spent a lot of time outside especially on this week. On Monday, we took our gator for a ride in the woods, and Li’l Bit was excited to discover some red berries growing on a bush along the way. She counted all the way to 18 with these berries!

While inside, we read about God providing manna and quail to the Israelites for food as they wandered in the wilderness. We studied Letter Q and also continued learning about birds and what they like to eat!

While big sister and brother were working on botany lessons, Li’l Bit loved painting birds with her watercolors. I suggested she cut them out after they dried and layer them on a background she had also painted with the watercolors. Her painting collage turned out beautiful, which is pictured in the middle top photo in the collage below!

In addition to painting with watercolors, Li’l Bit painted with glue and a Q-tip. First for the Q-tip, she was painting letter Qs on her alphabet notebook. She also decided to paint other things that begin with Q, which she came up with all on her own: q-tip, quarter and quilt.

She loves to paint and so we paint A LOT. We picked out some different books from the library including The Very Busy Spider. We talked about how unsuspecting insects get caught in spider’s webs and become food! We also talked about how birds, even quails, eat a lot of insects too. Our children know how much our birds—our chickens—love bugs and insects too!

This was a great activity for Li’l Bit to practice using a glue bottle and seeing that just a little squeeze will release a lot of glue! She also exercised patience having to wait a whole day for the glue to dry before she could add watercolors to the painting for the glue relief spider web to be exposed.

We hung up her spider web art alongside her sister’s art in a window so the sun could shine through. It is very festive for our library this time of year!

Li’l Bit’s all-time favorite book is definitely The Very Hungry Caterpillar. We read it multiple times a week and sometimes multiple times a day. She knows it by heart, but she loves for Mommy and Daddy to read it aloud to her and she giggles and giggles when the poor caterpillar gets a tummy ache from eating so much junk food! (She might be a bit of a junk food junkie, though she eats good foods well too. She has a weakness for candy.)

She has admired her sister’s hungry caterpillar artwork for years now, and she really wanted to make her very own. This week seemed like an appropriate week since we were tying our study of Q and quails into learning about birds of all kinds and the animals they typically like to eat: caterpillars and insects.

As you can see in the collage above, she worked very hard first painting different greens on a sheet of paper, allowing it to dry overnight, and then cutting it into small strips she could then glue down to make the actual caterpillar. We talked about how the book author and artist used this technique when he made the artwork for the book. She is very proud of her finished caterpillar and she also added the legs one afternoon all by herself! Here is her finished masterpiece hanging on her artwork clipboard front and center. (Our children choose what they want in front and change it whenever they want.)

She also used her ladybug numbers for sorting and counting and one-to-one correspondence with black beans that we pretended were like ladybug spots. We talked about the fact that ladybugs are really a type of beetle and we even watched and observed the brown ladybugs that have emerged here and are EVERYWHERE!

She also continues to use ABCMouse on the iPad several days a week. She does fairly well with an occasional redirect on focusing on subject areas for learning. Overall, we’re very happy with the site and using it as a supplement to her learning here at home!

I hope your school week went well this past week and that you are enjoying the beauty that surrounds you whether it be fall or spring where you live! (I know some of my readers live in the southern hemisphere, which is actually really neat to think of it!) My little PreKer has enjoyed jumping and playing in the fall leaves immensely this year!