February 2021 was an exciting, though too short, month for us. We spent our time in February taking about Valentine’s Day, Chinese New Year, the continent of Asia, and Lent.
We had candles blessed in church the Sunday before Candlemas (so actually January 31st), made walnut boat candles and ate crepes on Candlemas (so fun and yummy). For February 2nd, which is Candlemas nut also Groundhogs day, we also did a Groundhog nomenclature cards to learn the different parts of a groundhog.
We also had about a week of snow (4 days of active snowing, followed by a few days of cold rain which resulted in better snowballs), which meant the kids spend most of their days outside during this time. This made a short month even shorter… but we took this time to look at the different types of snowflakes, make snow cream and maple syrup candy and of course enjoy some hot cocoa together! Mom (me!) also got to work on other projects while the kids happily played independently, which is also a win. We read a few snow books, though sadly our ordered copy of Under the Snow was stolen from our mail box (we, along with most of our neighbors, now have locking mail boxes).
Lunar New Year
My husbands university put on a series for the Chinese New Year over Zoom, so in addition to reading a bunch of books on the Lunar New Year, the kids got to practice Tai Chi with a master, learn and try their hands at painting calligraphy, and help dad make tradition Salt and Pepper Shortribs (so delicious!)
The Continent of Asia
We used the Lunar New Year as an opportunity to introduce the continent of Asia in our geography study. Some of what we looked at included:
Asian Landmarks
Asian Animals
Asian Flags Map Pinning
Cut and Paste Dragon
Books We Read
The books we read for the Chinese New Year and our Asian Continent Unit included:
Popo’s Lucky Chinese New Year
D is for Dragon Dance
Chinese New Year
Who is Marco Polo?
Who is Confucius?
Chinese New Year Colors
We also got an Atlas of the Near East and Southwest Asia, though we only made it through about 2 pages. But we did look at our Usborne Atlas and our Maps book as well.
All of these books I got from the library, and were a bit limited. But there is always next year. We spent quite a bit of time taking about Asia and I feel we barely scraped the surface! But it is a very large, very populated and very diverse continent…so yes, there is a LOT to talk about!
We also worked on…
Language
We introduced the letters h-j-u-l with Apple.
Cookie continued to work on her newfound reading skill, primarily by reading Bob’s books. We also worked on set #1 of our puzzle words, though she’s mostly been figuring out different puzzle words by trying to read various books to herself and her brothers… whatever works!
I also encouraged the children to spend time tracing the cursive letters on the sandpaper letters and our wooden tracing board. With this I reintroduced writing letters on the chalkboard, and even got some colored chalk for them to make it more interesting.
Together we revisited our Letter Adventure game and had a great time reviewing the different letters in this way. It really seemed to reinforce them for Apple, and I saw his game playing skills dramatically increase.
Math
This month Cookie worked on Golden Bead Division, Stamp Game Addition and the Subtraction Snake Game, in addition to practicing concepts we had already introduced.
Apple continued to work on his sandpaper number cards, and using the number rods in various ways. He’s particularly fond of using our number rod extension cards to build interesting structures with them.
Sensorial
This month we worked all together on a few sensorial concepts, namely Geometric Shape Sorting, Geometric Shapes in Nature Sorting, and exploring and learning the names of the Geometric Solids.
We also learned about Gas/Liquid/Solid states of matter and did a sorting activity to support it.
That’s it!
Really. The next weekday is a march so I cannot fit any more learning in to this month! Written down it both seems like a lot, and also seems like nothing. But regardless of how it may seem on paper, we learned a lot and had a ton of fun too!