Catching Up

We had a great trip last week.  The Dance N Beats CD and DVDs were quite helpful throughout the week.  I brought two lessons to do but other than reading the easy reader book and talking about the Goldilocks story sequencing cards, we didn't end up getting to them with all the other fun stuff we were doing.  I was happy to have them, just in case.

Today is a recovery day at home, getting the rest of the house unpacked and letting the girls have some time where they don't have to get into their carseats, with an emphasis on a lot of playing and moving.  I decided to look through the lesson plans for each day we missed last week and choose one activity to do today.  It ended up being a great time.

ABC Soup:  Miss M and Littlest love their IKEA kitchen from Pa and Avi (my parents).  Rather than try to corral them in the living room for this activity, I joined them in our play area and did it there.  We put the letter cards in a bucket and (sort of) took turns choosing one to name (look at, in Littlest's case) and put in their pots.  When we finished that, we went through them again and looked only at the picture on the front.  I held one up and Miss M would decide if it was something we eat or not and we put them in the appropriate pot.  You could extend that to talk about other categories the pictures might fit into (animals, instruments, plants, etc...).

Paper Bag House:  Littlest colored a picture while Miss M decorated her paper bag and cut out her door and windows.  We talked about why the door needed to be closer to the ground and the windows could be farther up.  She loved getting to cut and is actually getting better at it.  Halfway through, Littlest got bored with crayons and wanted to take the lids on and off of the stamps and markers.  That wasn't my favorite idea for her so I gave her a small container with a lid and a handful of pompoms she could take in and out, which kept her decently happy.

Blowing Bubbles:  Miss M loves to blow bubbles so I thought this would be a fun activity for her.  Littlest kept trying to suck the water up the straw so I decided not to let her try it, much to her chagrin.  She got me back by grabbing one of the containers with her lightning fast hands and dumping it.  Miss M had a blast blowing the colored water onto the paper so it's probably one we will do again but next time I'm doing it outside.

Five Little Monkeys:  Miss M loves our board book of the Five Little Monkeys and for Christmas she got a set of monkeys that go along with it.  We used them as we did the booklet.  It took her one time through to figure out how to fold the booklet appropriately and after that, it was all her.  Littlest liked catching the monkeys when I would detach them one at a time, although it was difficult for Miss M to see her precious dolls in her sister's hands.  It was a good opportunity to talk about sharing things that we aren't actually using at the time.  She kept tearfully chanting the snippet from the TV show Daniel Tiger, "You take turn, then I get back".  I was proud of her.

This was by far the favorite activity today.  She probably went through the song with the book at least ten times.  She tried to take it to bed with her at nap time but I had to say no since I know she'd spend the entire time reading it instead of sleeping and I don't need a cranky version of Miss M later on today.

We have our friends coming tomorrow and I'm excited to talk about cleaning up around the house. :)

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