Storytime Sunday: Homes Continued

Here are 2 of the very best books about houses that I know. 

"A web is a house for a spider. A bird builds its nest in a tree. There is nothing so snug as a bug in a rug and a house is a house for me!" Everything from a car to a teabag to ink has a house if you think about it long enough. I absolutely love how this book thinks outside the box for the meaning of a house. The illustrations are marvelous and I especially adore the very last 2 pages: "Each creature that's known has a house of its own and the earth is a house for us all." Think about the deeper meaning that could have!

This book is so great for younger ones. It is short and very to the point. The basics of building a house, step by step all the way to moving in. Children will love it and can easily sequence the steps or act out the story.

So some of the continuing activities we did this week about building houses include:

This is AM class's venn diagram comparing 2 different houses from different areas of the world. They were able to come up with some similarities and differences.

This, however is PM class's venn diagram. And I pretty much had to give them these answers. So, I decided  with the PM class being mostly 3s, they might not be ready for this activity just yet.

 So here is what I made for them instead. A much easier concept. We just talked about the parts of the house and the children were able to take apart and put together the house however they wanted it. Much better results with this. Although I think I will pull out the venn diagram again and give it another try.

We used mini marshmallows and pretzel sticks to build houses as well. They were a lot more difficult to stay together than I thought. Probably should have used regular sized marshmallows. But, as you can see, one little boy persisted and was able to build an entire house and get it to stand up!

Then, we sorted photos of different types of landscapes where your house could be located.

I also printed maps of countries where each of the children's family is from. We talked about the purpose of a map and some of the features of maps. In case you can't see, all the maps are different types. Some are just regular maps and some are topographical, etc. 

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Fingers, Toes and Homes around the World

Today I read this book to my class. I have done a previous post about this book, but here are some more details about how we used it in class.

First we did a small group that consisted of using these felt board fingers and toes to count to 10.

Then we took off our socks and shoes to count our toes. Yep, we all had 10 :)

We have also started learning about homes around the world. Here is our sensory table filled with materials for building a house. We got into questions such as what are houses made of, what are the parts of a house, how do you build a house, why are houses different around the world, what is the purpose of a roof? The children had some good answers and seemed like they were becoming interested.

He said this was an apartment :)

Hammering the pieces together.

I introduced a lot of new vocabulary such as carpenter, hinges, plaster, door frame, etc. I am beginning to see that there is so many directions this study could go. We had planned to go into weather around the world next week, but we may stretch out homes for another week. Can't wait to do some more of the activities we have planned for this week. Stay tuned!

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