My Summer Vacation

August 4, 2013

9:30 Sunday morning…a knock on the door…inside laughing and footsteps…Cannon opens the door. With a big smile and sparkling eyes he greets me. He is eager to share his summer adventures, his new skills and to start another year of learning adventures. We put the cover over the table, gather our materials, the white board and markers and begin to make our list of activities for the day.  Now we are ready to unpack the rolling cart.

Mining for Words

First, bright colored tissue paper peeking out from a gift bag, Cannon pulls each piece of paper out of the bag until he finds a very heavy package.  It is a very large heavy book of words, dictionary with 1,000 illustrations.  A word mine!  Cannon is eager to find some words.

 

He opened the book to a random page and put his
finger down.

 

 

 

 

 

 Our first word is “file”.  We find five different meanings for that little four letter word. I write the word on his forehead to “put it in your brain” and then we find the next word.  We collect six words: file, aircraft, paddle wheel, pansy, panda, and sweet potato.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sunflowers

Next we take out the vase of sunflowers from my garden.  Cannon gets out his magnifying glass for a closer look. 

 

Then we look at a dried sunflower seed head.  Cannon explores each flower with his fingers and compares the two. There were lots of textures to explore from the “hairy” stem to the tiny individual flowers packed together in the center and finally the bumpy feel of the dried seeds.

 

He used his left hand fingers to pry the seeds from the seed head while his right hand held the stem.  When Cannon was finished there were sunflower seeds everywhere.  Maybe he can take them to the parrot that lives in the store across the street.

 

 

 

 

 

A New Language!

 This year, I explained, we are going to start learning a new language.  ASL! American Sign Language.  We are going to use total communication!  Cannon will use his spoken words, his own gestures and signs, written words, his talker, and now his ASL signs.

 

We started with “my summer vacation”, the title of the little book he was writing for his first day of school.  We learned signs for other words or phrases as we went through our session. I couldn’t write them down fast enough.  When mom got back from the store he told her the title of his story about his summer vacation.  He used the sign for coffee and asked mom to make a cup of coffee for me. Later when he heard the church bells he learned to sign “hear bells”.  At the end of our session he told mom he was hungry.  Cannon makes very close approximations of the “signs”. They are very “readable”.  

 

Note

Here is a link to the ASL website.

http://www.aslpro.com/cgi-bin/aslpro/aslpro.cgi

You can see the signs Cannon learned and learn them yourself.

 

 

Captain Underpants

We took a break and enjoyed reading two chapters in the new Captain Underpants book. The title is Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunchroom Zombie Nerds).  Then we started making a Captain Underpants board game.

 

In between all of these activities Cannon put on his painting apron and created his impression of the sunflower.  He selected the colors and applied the acrylic paint using an easel brush and his apple core.  He used long and short brush strokes.  He worked in layers separating the colors and allowing one layer to dry before applying the next layer.

 

It was a very full and fun day. Cannon wipes the white board clean and we put all of our materials back in the closet and fold up the easel and the table cloth. Next week a field trip! 

 

ASL words

My

Summer

Vacation

Forgot

Know

Hear

Bells

Hungry

Coffee

Rollercoaster

Water

 

Vocabulary from dictionary search

Aircraft

File

Paddle wheel

Pansy

Panda

Sweet potato