those crazy "oat"s

Once upon a time I had time to keep up with my blog.... but now that I've found a minute, I'd better catch up!

The end of last week, while the rest of the state had school "off", we started our "oat family" unit. That's what I love about homeschooling -- working on a schedule that meets your own family! My kids were in a school kind of mood, so we "did" school.

This first drawing is, of course, J's, of the whole "oat" family in their "oat" family boat, floating on the moat, wearing their coats.


Our Town Board, all set up for the "oat" family. The really fun part of this is that I've been setting up the "empty" slots with consonants that make legitimate oat/ote words, so after we're done with the main lesson, the kids make the words, and then ask what they mean if it's a word they're not familiar with. It's been quite a vocabulary expander! The other fun thing is that they then ask each other "What would happen if the 'it' family visited?" and then make all those words as well, and then try out other word families they can think of. Very, very cool....

Zoo Boy's drawing, again of the town board, with each of the "oat" family members displaying their special gifts.









J's writing.

Zoo Boy's writing. Before doing his "oat" words, he asked if he could write more than just the words, so I prepared some extra paper and told him to go ahead and write whatever he wanted to. He eventually decided NOT to write any more than just the "oat" words at that sitting, but later told me that he was going to write "There was a goat by the moat who made the boat float, then he put on a coat." This is his own version of an "oat" family story (there are no goats in the original story, for one thing), although the words are the same. This of course is the next step -- the kids writing their own stories from the family words -- and it's SO amazing to see them coming up with the idea of doing that before I even introduce it!

One more word family for us to all work with, and then I'll turn the town board over to the kids for practice time work so they can make their own word family cards and create their own stories from them.