A House For Hermit Crab

This week, the miss and I are doing lessons based on the book, A House for Hermit Crab, by Eric Carle.
I found the ideas for most of the lessons at the Homeschool Share Site.
And for this particular book, there are tons of lapbooking materials on the Homeschool Share site as well.
I thought I'd go ahead and share with you what we are doing each day, as well as provide links to the other sources I found for this particular theme, just in case you may want to do the same lessons with your 3-6 year old.



Day 1 (Social Studies)
After reading the story, we talked about homes. We discussed various animals and their homes.

We then took a large piece of paper and drew a layout of the inside of our house. She then looked through magazines and cut out pictures of items found in various rooms in our house, and then glued them onto our drawing.
We didn't spend a lot of time on this particular activity, however. She got bored with it rather quickly, because it took a long time to find the pictures in the magazines. I think I should have already had a bunch of different things cut out for her to choose from.

What she was most excited about was getting to decorate a shell. In the book, the hermit crab finds a new shell to live in but thinks it's plain, so he wants to decorate it. So we ripped out the glue, glitter and cut outs of the crab's friends, and she decorated a shell. She had a lot of fun with it.

Finally, we used a My Address folder (lapbooking item from the homeschool site) and learned about our address.

Day 2 (Social Studies, Bible)
After reading the story, we talked about the Hermit crab's friends in the book.
We looked at how hermit crab made friends. He was nice to them and complimented the new friends that he met.
We talked about how it is important to be nice to people, because it encourages them and builds them up. And yes, we then opened up mommy's Bible to 1 Thessalonians 5:11.
We used another Homeschool Share's lapbook pocket for our Bible verse. So that we can put it inside our finished lapbook.
We also completed their Sea Creatures Tab Book.

Day 3 (Math)
Tomorrow we will review the months of the year. Since in the book, the crab does something new each month. We will use the
Month Cards and Pocket from the homeschool share site.
We will also look at our kitchen calendar and discuss how many days are in a month and what holidays occur in the different months.
We may also play around for a bit on the Starfall Calendar Site.

Day 4 (Art and P.E.)
On this day, we will do a fun collage painting art project, based on the art in Eric Carle's book.
We will also learn how to walk like a crab and we will have some crab races.

Day 5 (Science)
We will have some fun learning about different sea creatures, especially the ones mentioned in the book.
She will complete this sea animal shapes page.

We will also color and play with this Sea Animals Memory Game.

If there is still spare time, we will make Lantern fish puppets, using glow in the dark paint.

Day 6 (language arts)
It's vocabulary day. I will use the
prepared vocabulary cards, to help the miss learn some new words that were found in the book.

We will also color and trace a couple of Letter H Printouts.

And finally, we will finish off the lesson by baking Starfish Biscuits.
Using a star cookie cutter, cut out a star from refrigerated biscuit dough, bake. Then when only a few minutes are left on baking, add cheese strips onto each star limb.