F Week was a lot of fun at our house. I didn’t take as many pictures as I should have, but here are some of the ones I did take.

We did a lot of fireman related projects, and Adam loved it. He has really been on a fireman kick lately and in fact he is going to be a firefighter for Halloween. His costume came this week, so that was a happy surprise for him.

We also talked about how frogs are born and he had fun lining up these cards to show the changes from egg to frog. “First the eggs hatch in to poles, then they grow legs, then they grow arms, then they start to look like a frog, then we take their tails away!”

We also made a nifty fox. Adam is getting to be pretty handy with a glue stick.

Normally all of the projects we do come from ideas I find online. I was pretty excited about this next one though, because I came up with it all on my own (I’m a dork, I know).

I made flags using pipe cleaners and masking tape and wrote a different number (1-12) on each flag. Adam’s job was to add the correct number of beads to the flag pole. He worked independently for a while and then started to lose interested about halfway through. So I helped him by handing him the beads. I gave him more than the required amount each time – just to make sure he was really doing the counting and not just relying on me – and he stopped each time when he had the right number (smarty pants).

The best part of that activity was I already had everything on hand to make it. This next one is not one I came up with on my own, and did require a little shopping.

I started with 24 little frogs (thank you dollar store) and wrote numbers (1-9) on the backs of 9 of them and left the rest blank. I had Adam start with the numbered frogs and line them up in order.

Then I got out the lily pads I had made (out of sheets of foam) to go along with them. I had written equations on them for Adam to solve. I knew this was a little advanced for him and would require a lot of help from me, but I wanted to challenge him a bit. In hindsight I shouldn’t have had any of the equations go higher than 5 because he got very frustrated with this initially.

When we first started he told me that he didn’t want to do it anymore because he wasn’t good at it. So I flipped the lily pads over (so they were all blank) and had him group the frogs by color (or family as we called it). Once he had a chance to calm down a bit and build up some confidence we started over.

We kept the blank frogs in the pond (the green basket) and used them to show the addition. Adam and I would put the correct number of frogs on the lily pad to correspond with the equation, then he would count them all up and once he knew what the answer was the unmarked frogs went back in the pond and he replaced them with a numbered frog.

Once he got the hang of it he really seemed to enjoy it. Luke liked to play with the frogs as well – you can see his hand sneaking into the pond in that last photo.

So that was some of our F Week. There were a few projects I wanted to do that we didn’t get to, but I’m sure I’ll be able to sneak them in later.

Next up? Letter E.