I'm so over the rainbow ( this week's homeschool theme).

I wrote a post earlier this week about my low expectations after Justice is born-but what I may not have made clear is that my expectations PRE-Justice's birth have also taken a significant nose dive! hahah! I think you'll probably see a pretty radical downward spiral in regards to these Homeschool Theme posts in the weeks ahead. I actually think-without looking-that I may only have two more themes even remotely planned out before I just peter off into nothingness...so I guess that's about all the time we have left, folks ;-)

That said-we will have "completed" ( used in the loosest sense of the word) 9 weeks of school at that point which deserves some kind of extreme reward.....I'll allow for you to all come up with a suitable reward for me since it looks like Ransom will be getting his Light Saber and I have no need for one of those...

So anyway, this week our theme was Rainbows/Colors. I had grand notions of doing a color wheel and discussing color mixing and such-but NONE of that happened. It mostly had to do with my failure of a "science experiment" on Monday when I tried to do the Milk/food coloring/dish soap activity and it utter failed....twice! I still don't know what I did wrong. Here is Ransom trying to swirl the colors after they failed to do so on there own:

Anyway, I basically gave up at that point...hahaha! Which is kind of ridiculous, I know, but such is life sometimes...Anyway, maybe you'll have better luck with this seemingly "impossible to fail" project?! Here's the video: 

We did however do a couple of Rainbow themed things this week that DID turn out:


Activity One: At the end (and beginning) of the Rainbow

I found this really great printable  which I printed and then laminated so that Ransom could just use a dry-erase marker to write the beginning and end sounds of the words on the rainbow. Once again I found that Ransom's concentration was much to be desired and even though there were only 16 pictures that he needed to do we ended up having to do half one day and half another day. *sigh* And yet, these are the very reasons I am homeschool...at the age of 5 I'm all about him learning in lots of different ways than just stuck at the table doing a project with me....

You'll need:
Printable
laminator ( if you don't have one then just do the second half of the worksheet...its not as fun, but doesnt require the added laminating)


Activity Two: Taste the Rainbow:

Once again I found a great printable , and bought two bags  ( Ok fine, I bought three bags and ate one myself) of Skittles and then we set about practicing a bunch of great math skills using candy as an obvious bribe. Ransom had to sort and count each color of Skittle, then write the number into the chart. He then had to add certain colors together. It took him FOREVER. But he finally enjoyed the "fruits" of his labor. I realized as he was telling me what he thought each color flavor was going to be-that he had never HAD skittles before! Ha!

I also used some old stacking cups for Tabitha to sort her skittles by color which she looooooved doing. In fact, she didn't really even want to eat the skittles she was having so much fun moving them from cup to cup.

You'll need:
Printable
patience
Skittles
bonus: colored cups for sorting

Activity Three ( four and five): Balloon Rainbow

So this activity turned out to be the one that kept on giving! It started with an idea I had in my mind that only "sorta" worked when I executed it-which was to put sticky notes on the wall in the shape of a rainbow-each sticky note had a sight word on it. Then I had corresponding balloons with the same sight word on it for Ransom to then stick to the wall and once he was complete he would have made a pretty rainbow. Well, as you can see it did not look awesome or pretty AT ALL...infact, I think calling it a rainbow is a bit generous. That said, Ransom didn't seem to care and he got some good sight word practice in ( reading them first from the sticky note and then the balloon).

THEN as the balloons stuck horribly to the wall and started falling almost immediately, leaving my house looking the day-after-a-party like I came up with a new game for Ransom. The balloons had happily been kicked and moved about throughout the day by both my kids so I sat happily in a chair ( win!) and yelled out sight words and then Ransom proceeded to run around the house looking for the balloon with the right word on it! He had great fun! He got more practice...it was a win.

THEN...by the time Friday arrived all the balloons were collected in a sad pile in the living room, mostly deflated and sad, forgotten by my children. SO as a last I told Ransom that if he could read the word off the balloon then he'd get to pop it. BOY WAS THIS A HIT! He even let Tabitha pop some of them ( after he'd read the word) and he ended up only getting one word wrong out of 15! Hooray! I think he's got it!! BONUS: Tabitha then spent the next hour lovingly playing with the pile of popped balloon debris. Go figure.

You'll need:
Colored Balloons
Sticky notes
Tape
Permanent Marker

Books: 

We ended up not getting to the library this week because we had an errand on post to do when we normally went: But aren't my kids cute with their Daddy?!