Valentine's Day Homeschool 2011

School time was shortened for Valentine's Day this year. We had some deliveries to make, so we mostly just did some fun math things with conversation hearts and a valentines worksheets I had printed from the internet.

We started by doing a lot of estimating. We estimated how much our conversation heart boxes weighed and checked using our balance scale. We estimated how many were in the box, which color we would have the most of, and which we would have the least of. We found out how much 7 conversation hearts weighed, or 10, or all 21.

Then we sorted and graphed the colors in our box and compared graphs.

Next we chose 10 hearts and put them in alphabetical order.

Maren wrote a story using the phrases from 10 conversation hearts. It was a story about a man who sold cupcakes, and the cupcakes were "too hot".

Joshua and I played "Valentine Battleship" which was an idea I found on one of the educational websites. I'm sorry I don't remember which one. Joshua loves playing battleship, so I knew this would be a great game for him. I just made a grid on 2 pieces of paper and we put hearts on the intersecting points. We took turns writing out our guesses on a different piece of paper so we would remember what we had already chosen. If you found your opponents heart, you got to eat it.

Christopher and I made patterns with the conversation hearts. At first he would just randomly put them in a line, and I kept trying to correct him. Finally he got really frustrated and said "fine mom. see?" and he made a perfect repeating pattern and then said "now I do it my way!" and put them back in a random line. So at least he knows how to make patterns. He just chooses not to.

While we ate snack I read a cam jansen valentine book to them. The rest of the morning was spent tracing, cutting, and writing on hearts to prepare to go decorate Daddy's office as a surprise. We made him a valentine with the kids handprints on it that said "We love our handsome daddy".