Under the Sea

We have had a bit of Spring fever lately which makes the temptation to slack off in the home schooling department pretty big. So I decided to reach for the home stretch and plan some theme weeks to make things more fun for all of us! Under the Sea is our first theme. I spent yesterday gathering materials and came up with some pretty fun things, so I thought I'd share :)

First of all, our theme song--(we found a remix Disney CD at the library and the girls just want to listen to this one song over and over again. It is fun, though :)

I will not be showing the girls this video; Layla would surely comment on the immodesty of the blonde girl, ha!

I also dug out all the books I could find on our shelves that had anything to do with the sea. This has been a favorite of ours for a long time:

We also read this one today:

Yes, we know that mermaids are fictional. So, when we watched the following video about sea horses, Natalie said, "I didn't know sea horses were real!" Haha! I guess she had them in the "just pretend" category, along with the mermaids!

We also watched this really cool dolphin one and talked about how cool God's creatures are!

Then the kids made paintings of dolphins and sea horses (and of course, both girls included a mermaid) in their nature journals.

I have so many more great things planned for Under the Sea week! The Magic School Bus is involved--I even downloaded the free interactive app for the Magic School Bus ocean book for Casey's iPad, so that should be fun. I think tomorrow we'll make some popcorn and watch Disney Earth: Oceans (Netflix, watch instantly!) Here's a preview, it looks awesome:

I'd like to take them to the Downtown Aquarium on Friday, but it would be an expense, so we'll see. I was able to get several books from the library to use for the rest of this week too. So, even though we are still doing the basic subjects-math, reading, writing, etc... the theme is definitely making it more fun! What I love about homeschooling is that I get to integrate every subject with the Bible and really point out what an amazing creation God has given us to marvel at! Today I read them the creation story from this book, which was given to me and which I highly recommend!

Some more themes I'm thinking of:

• Little House on the Prairie
• Plants/Gardening
• Recycling
• Rainforest
• Different Countries

Care to add to my idea list??