Ice Investigations and Invading Insects: Letter I Week!

This is an ongoing series on our homeschool preschool adventures. You can read more about what curriculum we're doing and why here:

What Little Kids Think About Homeschooling

Doing this "letter of the week" type curriculum has led me to REALLY notice how uncommon certain letters are in the English language. I is sneaky. It's a vowel, so it appears often, but is still uncommon as a beginning letter. Therefore our week really centered around ice and insects.

This was one of those weeks where I went off book a lot.

Take, for example, our illustrated letter I. I've decided to save each of the letter sheets and make an alphabet wall in the kid's room (will update with a picture later!) That really only works with making the letter out of, relatively, long lasting objects. Most of the recommendations for I were making the letter out of ice or icing - not really going to work on my wall.

Instead, I had John cut out "ice cubes" out of blue construction paper and glue those onto our traced letters.
I have zero pictures of this because I took the opportunity for longer preschooler activity to make dinner. Sorry, dinner wins.

I have been following the youtube channel What's Up Moms for a while now. One mom made a video back in the summer about ice activities with kids. I decided to try out ice painting!

Each cube is between 1/3 and 1/2 paint and the rest water.

I used some paints I found on the side of the road. Yea college town!

Remembering to put toothpicks in the cubes halfway frozen would make this a lot easier. I just had John wear some latex gloves and he got a solid lesson in what it is to hold something frozen!

I made a black ice paint. That was stupid. John liked to cover all of the colors with black, but I got this picture before he finished his plan of color annihilation. 

Once we finished with the week, it occurred that many of those Frozen (movie) themed activities and food that have flooded Pinterest would be super applicable for this week. Oh well.

We did lots of insect hunts! We found an Insect eyewitness book at the library as a kind of kid field guide, and John carried it with him all over the neighborhood.

Finding the multiple colonies of flying ants was not my favorite part of the week, but John LOVED it.

That is not spilled rice. Nope, nope, nope.

We did learn about the difference between arachnids and insects. John was very interested in the builder insects: bees, ants, etc. 

There is a farmers market on the next block from us once a week, and there is a honey booth. Being Berkeley, the beekeeper brings empty hives, different honeycombs, beeswax blocks, and beekeeper equipment with him to show to curious little kids. John was fascinated by the honeycomb that was somehow made into these perfect little shapes by the mouths of bees. 

There were not too many I books on the list, but John did like Inch by Inch by Leo Lionni.

A bug that is also a measuring tool? John was sold.

Catch the previous installments of this series:

7 THINGS THAT HAPPENED THE FIRST WEEK OF PRESCHOOL HOMESCHOOL

HOMESCHOOL PRESCHOOL: LETTERS B AND C

PRESCHOOL HOMESCHOOL: LETTERS D AND E

YOSEMITE!

PRESCHOOL HOMESCHOOL: LETTERS G AND H