We used the Before Five in a Row program two years ago now when our oldest son was 3 1/2 years old and our middle son was just turning 2 years old and loved every minute of it. We did not use the program at all last year (except pulling out some of our favorite books of the shelf for reading fun), but started again this year! We will also be adding some of the Five in a Row books this year. On top of reading the books and using the manual for fantastic activity ides we also use Homeschool Creations Printable Packs that follow each of the different stories.
This week we "rowed" the book If Jesus Came to My House, which is the sweetest story about a little boy who learns that he can "welcome" Jesus into his home by being kind to others. The vocabulary in this book was perfect for our oldest son (5 1/2 years) to read most of it all by himself with out help and the entire book is written in rhyme, which helps so much learning rhyming words! Even our two year old loved the illustrations in the book and pointed out common words for him like "puppy, apple, etc".
Using the Homeschool Creations printable pack our oldest two worked on writing and tracing words from the story. I laminate a lot of our school pages for Before Five in a Row so we can use them over and over again and organize them in special folders, but this year I also bought these awesome Reusable Dry Erase Pockets. The only possible negative of these pockets are with our 3 1/2 year old writing with his left hand I am a little worried that he might smudge the dry erase marker (although this week he did just fine).
In the story the little boy takes Jesus out into the apple orchard to pick the very best apples and we did an activity where we picked apples from the tree and then matched the number of apples to the numerical number. Our 3 1/2 year old also really loved the activity of taking images from the book and having to identify the letter that the word began with. Since he loves letter sounds and phonics so much this activity was right up his alley! Our 2 year old was trying to do some tracing activities, but mostly simply enjoyed just following along during the story time!
We learned the Bible Verse Isaiah 41:10 "Do not fear for I am with you..." and talked about what we do when we get scared. The boy in the story had a scary place in his house where he saw shadows on the wall at night time. We talked about how God is always with us! We also had some fun making our own shadows in the wall! We also went on a walk and bike ride around the near by lake after reading the book one day and the boys picked flowers and talked about the flowers in our own garden, just like the little boy did in the book!
Another day, we had our very own tea party and spoke of how we can be kind to our friends, like Jesus, and invite them over to our home. We also spoke of how when we host people we like to offer them food and drink and be generous and kind.
We had a lot of fun this week rowing "If Jesus Came to My House". We will continue to show you the fun we are having with Before Five in a Row and Five in a Row as our Homeschool year continues!
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