We reviewed the letters O, W, X, S, T and F while practicing story skills using the story set. We made up a story about Diver Dan and the animals he sees while he explores the ocean. I wrote the letters on little cards and the kids took turns choosing one and then finding an animal that started with that sound to put on the story board for Diver Dan to find. After each addition, I would say "Diver Dan saw a ____, a ____ and a ____." while pointing to each one. It was fun and it kept their attention pretty well.
Miss M loved making the mask and flippers although we had some trouble keeping the flippers on their feet without them tearing. I think I will be tearing off the back, punching holes on the side and using yarn to tie them in place. They had fun "swimming" in the living room while we set up for our next activity.
We made a shipwreck hideaway out of the always useful diaper boxes, pillows and a blanket. They had too much fun darting in and out as fast as real fish that Littlest just couldn't stay down for her nap and insisted on joining them. After talking about how sometimes boats sink in the ocean and fish use them for their homes we played the folder game "Shipwreck Hideaway". They loved their little fish playing pieces and had a hard time keeping them on the board but we were able to get some good color recognition and counting practice in.
We also practiced the concept big, medium and little with the fish cutouts. They each caught a fish that matched their size in the group (I was big, Miss M was small and our friend was medium) and then tried to find things around the room that were the same size. That turned out to be a little hard (although they could both find things that were bigger or smaller) so we used Duplo blocks to measure the fish and counted how many were needed for each one (sorry for the blurry picture, I was using an iPad and trying to wrangle kids at the same time).
The bilingual books were fun to put together. They colored them, then I had them identify the page numbers, read the text to them and pointed out the initial letter for each animal so they could figure out which one to put on the page. They have so much pride in having made a book, it's the most adorable thing to see.
We finished off our journals today and I realized I've been selling these kiddos short. Each journal entry includes a dictation element which I assumed they were too young to understand so we hadn't been doing them. However, Miss M decided she was "so hungry" that they had to have snack early and I decided to see what would happen. What happened was they did a lot better than I thought they would! Yes, they needed some examples of what they could say to fill in the sentence but after a little while they both came up with their own ideas that made sense in the context. This is a picture of Miss M's journal entry.
Another fun craft and a game rounded out our ocean experience. Both girls preferred to stamp the inside of their submarine portholes rather than decorate the outside so that's what they did. I had some glittery fish stickers they added as well. Instead of gluing down the shells, we stapled them loose in between the plates where they can be used as a counting game (how many shells do you see? how many shells do you see if I shake it?).I was really excited about the submarine addition game but the girls were more than a little distracted by the introduction of both of their baby siblings and we didn't finish it (I also didn't get a picture as I was trying to keep Littlest from eating the game pieces). I think I'm going to have to keep it out to work with Miss M even as we start our journey into the garden (the May theme) on Monday.
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