Puppy Week: A Kindergarten Unit Review

I have used HomeschoolShare for lapbooking resources several times with David and have really been pleased with the results.  Our favorite of all time had to be the My Father's Dragon lapbook!  He still talks about that one.  Amazingly, I never got pictures of our completed book.  The site is free to join and has a lot of free printables for lapbooks, notebooks, and unit studies.

HomeschoolShare has some new Kindergarten Kits coming out soon and I had the chance to try out the "Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit" set with Elizabeth.  She really enjoyed it and I took lots of pictures!  Elizabeth is 4 1/2 years old.  Not old enough to be a public school kindergartner, but we're starting kindergarten this year at home anyway.  She is more than ready!

Disclaimers: "Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit" was given to me to review & test out before the final version was released on HomeschoolShare.  I didn't have all the books recommended for the unit and didn't have a library trip scheduled either, so we made due with what we had.  Also, I love the light in our dining area, but it makes backlight in all the photos, so I apologize for the darkness of the activity in the photos!  And finally, my printer was just about out of color ink, so the printouts are a little dull.  I went over the edges of some things with a marker so they'd be easier to see.  If you have a good ink cartridge in your printer, your printouts will look much better than mine.

Here's all the puppy & dog books that we had.  We read these as we were going through the activities in the pack.  Also had an informational book about dogs that somehow missed the photo.

Going over the days of the week, she decided to count them.

This was the cutting page, but she wanted to trace the lines first.

Then I cut the page into strips for easier handling.

This was really good practice for her because we haven't done a lot of cutting.  Unless you count her bangs.  Doesn't that look lovely?  She and her brother did that.  At least they were working together, right?

Anyway, Elizabeth loves coloring, so the same size/matching activity was right up her alley!

The next activity that she really loved was the

A-E-I-O-U Game.

She could have kept playing this for hours!

I liked that these were lowercase letters.  She identified the vowels, put them in alphabetical order, and identified them by sound.  This opened the discussion of long and short vowel sounds also. 

Then she hid the bone and had me try to find it, except that she always left a little corner of the bone card peeking out... and she thought that was hilarious!

We used our hodgepodge of ABC magnets and a cookie sheet for her to copy some words.  This is  beginning spelling & reading skills.  Then we talked about the sounds that each letter makes and slowly let her sound out the words.

The smile was after sounding out a word, when she realized that she had just sounded out a word!

Doggy, Doggy, Where's Your Bone? had her place the missing numbers on the chart.  The instructions recommended printing the missing numbers on sticker paper, but I didn't have any.  That would have been really fun to use, though!

She was proud that she made it all the way to 30!

We love nonstandard measurement activities, and this one was no exception!

The bone ruler and 3 puppies came in this activity.  She measured each puppy, measured them stacked up, sorted them by size, and then found other things to measure.

Her plate is 6 dog bones across.

The eraser is almost 2 dog bones long.

The little trampoline is almost 7 dog bones tall.

Her foot is 5 dog bones long.

We compared her foot to my foot.

Baby Sarah's foot is 3 dog bones long.

The last thing I got pictures of was the One Stop Puppy Shop Game.  Once again, the games are her favorite!  We used real money, but paper money is included in the kit if you want to print it and use it.  I wrote on the coins with a Sharpie how many cents they were.  We talked about the value of each coin or bill.  We matched the coin to the puppy supply it would buy.  (For example, the quarter is 25c and it will buy the frisbie.)  Then we rolled dice to play the game per the instructions in the kit.  She loved this!

We had a lot of fun with the Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit!  I'd highly recommend it!  Other Kindergarten Kits will be available soon, free of charge, on HomeschoolShare!

Oh, and look... We did the Playful Puppies Kindergarten Kit just in time...

That's our new puppy, Daisy!