The Litter Box Summer School

This summer I've been working with two of my favorite boys to keep them thinking over the summer. We've been doing music lessons, math, reading, and Spanish, but the longer I've been teaching, the harder it's been to come up with lesson plans, especially since Big and Little are starting 1st grade and preschool, so they are learning different things.

I did some research and found some teaching materials that I really liked, so I started pinning them, when I finally decided just to go ahead and plan out the rest of our summer. And then I decided to share the plans!


For the rest of the summer, we are going to learn about one animal each day, and then we'll do activities that relate to that animal. I was inspired to do this because the boys are babysitting my hermit crab for the summer (long story), so I figured they should learn a little bit about hermit crabs. One of the activities on our list is to count and name the colors of hermit crab shells in Spanish, and to read Home for Hermit Crab by Eric Carle.

I let the boys pick the animals we will learn about (except hermit crabs), and they picked some crazy ones, like various dinosaurs. I also made a workbook for the boys to fill in facts about the animals at the end of the day. I had to do quite a bit of research to answer all of the questions accurately about each animal, but it will pay off. You can find the facts and such here. I also collected activities for each animal, like making dorsal fin hats on shark day, and counting Goldfish to feed to penguins.

Day One was a lesson about the different types of animals, like mammals, amphibians, arthropods, etc. We talked about the differences, and what animals they new in each category. Day Two will be sharks, so wish us luck!

Happy teaching!
~ kat


Here are links to the materials I made for these lessons.
PDF Animal book:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627918/Chapman/Animal%20Book.pdf
.doc Animal book (for editing) with animals types:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627918/Chapman/Animal%20Worksheet.doc
Lesson plans and Spanish vocabulary:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/9627918/Chapman/Animal%20Facts.doc