Mercury and Mars

We had another fun day with our Mother Goose Time program.  Before her friends arrived, Miss M and I warmed up for the day with some Dance N Beats routines.  I really love the Red Dust routine, it's a great upper body stretch and I feel good after doing it.  Miss M is getting the choreography down pretty well, too, and always asks to do it again.

We used our telescopes from last week to look for the letters /r/ and /s/, the number 7 and star shapes. We used the spinner and moon manipulative to practice counting and seeing if they could figure out the best way to arrange the small moons on the big one to help it balance.  This was a popular game.


For fine motor and writing skills, we made Mercury wands with hot and cold sides that can be used to play a version of "Red light, green light" and we worked on our journals.  Due to their ages, I modified this activity a bit.  We pointed out the R's at the bottom of the page but didn't push them to trace (they tried for a second but decided coloring was easier).  We did try to work on drawing circles, looking for /r/ in the word Mercury and completing a sentence through dictation ("Mercury is hot. Mercury is cold at night").

We worked on more counting as we used blocks to build a tall mountain like those found on Mars.  We managed to get up to 50 before it became too unstable to continue.  We also used this as an opportunity to talk about tall and short as each child built their own section and added it to the main mountain.

While the kiddos ate their snack, I read this month's book "Up in Space."  It was included in the curriculum box and is a fun rhyming book that works on counting while giving simple facts about each planet (with a nod to Pluto).

We didn't have time to do the UFO craft as a group so Miss M did it by herself while I tended to Littlest (who napped through the whole class, making me one happy mama since she pretty much has not napped at all since Friday).  I put the glue around the edges and she decided what gems and sparkles she wanted and where to put them.

I am really happy with how today turned out and excited for Wednesday.