History of Valentines Day, Lion Heart Craft

Tomorrow is Valentines Day, and Monday is Presidents Day, so we have no school Monday. This fun little craft, we will do on Tuesday. The lion head was originally a cutting skill, for my kindergartener. If you click, it will enlarge, and you can print it, to do the cutting exercise, then print another, and the hearts template, and you can make a cool heart mane, all around his head. Just glue it all to construction paper, and hang it up. You can use flowers, shamrocks, hands, or any other template, for different holidays, and seasons. Caitlin loves this one, and I am sure we will be using it many times. I am not a huge Valentines Day person. I think it is really just a waste of money, and serves no purpose. Why show someone you love them only one day a year. I like spontaneous flowers, or kind, loving words, not a scheduled day for it. Just another reason to spend a ridiculous amount of money. Below you will see the history of Valentines Day, in the short video. I am still not convinced, it is necessary. Be sure to go over to Small Town Mommy's tomorrow, it is her birthday, and wish her a Happy Birthday.

What Your Child Should Know By Years End

This is helpful to both public school children, and homeschooled children. If you want to know if your child is on track, and what they should have learned by the end of a particular grade, then these can be helpful to you. I use these to make sure my curriculum is complete, and I don't miss anything. I have for kindergarten, and fourth grade shown, but you can Google search for the grade you need to know about. I got this information here.

By the end of kindergarten, you can expect your child to:

• Follow class rules
• Separate from a parent or caregiver with ease
• Take turns
• Cut along a line with scissors
• Establish left- or right-hand dominance
• Understand time concepts like yesterday, today, and tomorrow
• Stand quietly in a line
• Follow directions agreeably and easily
• Pay attention for 15 to 20 minutes
• Hold a crayon and pencil correctly
• Share materials such as crayons and blocks
• Know the eight basic colors: red, yellow, blue, green, orange, black, white, and pink
• Recognize and write the letters of the alphabet in upper- and lowercase forms
• Know the relationship between letters and the sounds they make
• Recognize sight words such as the and read simple sentences
• Spell his first and last name
• Write consonant-vowel-consonant words such as bat and fan
• Retell a story that has been read aloud
• Identify numbers up to 20
• Count by ones, fives, and tens to 100
• Know basic shapes such as a square, triangle, rectangle, and circle
• Know her address and phone number

By the end of the year, you can expect your child to:

• Begin to make more decisions and engage in group decision-making
• Want to be part of a group
• Think independently and critically
• Have empathy
• Show a strong sense of responsibility
• Be able to memorize and recite facts, although he may not have a deep understanding of them
• Increase the amount of detail in drawings
• Work on research projects
• Write a structured paragraph with an introductory topic sentence, three supporting details, and a closing sentence that wraps up the main idea of the paragraph
• Use a range of strategies when drawing meaning from text, such as prediction, connections, and inference
• Understand cause-and-effect relationships
• Add and subtract decimals, and compare decimals and fractions
• Multiply multi-digit numbers by two-digit numbers
• Divide larger multi-digit numbers by one-digit numbers
• Find the area of two-dimensional shapes
• Have a greater awareness of fairness