A Whale of a Time!

Our quarantine continues.  Both girls have colds but are hopefully on the mend, however, we were also unintentionally exposed to Fifth's Disease and since you don't know if you have it during the period you are most contagious, we are staying home and away from people for a few more days until we are sure it's safe (Fifth's isn't particularly serious for most people but can cause serious complications in pregnant women and we live in an area with lots and lots of those).  So, we had another day of school with just Mommy and the girls.

We started in our submarines for circle time.  After Littlest dumped herself on her face and Miss M tripped twice getting into hers before popping it up into her lip, I decided to sink the idea of the subs for now.  It was an interesting idea but maybe better for older kids with longer legs.  For now, I'll just deal with the wrangling.  They are great for building sea caves, though, so I won't be sending them to recycling just yet.

I introduced the letter W today and decided to modify the activity a bit by having Miss M use the dry erase crayons to trace it (I laminated it first but you could also put it in a sheet protector instead).  She really liked this activity and actually decided to keep at it for about 15 minutes, even after I told her the next activity involved painting.  I decided to take all the letter and word cards from March and put them in her learning folder (an accordion folder filled with homemade education games) so she can do this activity whenever she wants to.  I'll continue to add the previous month's cards so we can review them.

This was a really cute art project.  We talked about how whales breathe through their blowholes and watched a couple YouTube videos of whales spouting.  I had her practice blowing cotton balls across her table so she could get an idea of what it was like, then we headed outside to paint.  The activity calls for blowing the paint across the whale cutout with the straw but my paint was pretty thick and Miss M is pretty little so it didn't work all that well for us.  Instead, I had her use the cotton balls and sponge paint it, which she really enjoyed.  She crumpled up the tissue paper herself and I helped her twist part of it so it would fit into the straw and taped it in place.

We continued school after lunch by taping a line on the floor that was about 14' long, the size of your average beluga whale.  We talked about how some whales were as long as our house and then found things to measure on our tape line to talk about whether they were longer or shorter (we didn't actually find anything longer than the whale but could compare against each other).  Miss M liked it when I laid down on the tape and she used a pen to mark where I came on the whale.  We measured her and Littlest, as well as their favorite stuffed animals.  After she tired of measuring, she used the tape line as a balance beam and practiced walking fast, slow and backwards, crawling, swimming and skipping.  Littlest enjoyed pulling it off the floor when we were all done with it.

We hope to have our friends back with us on Wednesday as we learn about more really fun ocean animals.