Our Beautiful Modified Art Piece

We did activities from the Walnut and Chestnut units on Monday.  I had fun figuring out how to combine the art projects into one since we only have an hour twice a week and the girls love to do the crafts.
I started with some 12x12 scrapbook cardstock and cut rectangles for the girls to glue onto their backgrounds for their tree trunks.  I had them draw their own branches with markers and then we talked about how not just fruit grows on trees.  I'm allergic to walnuts so I don't have them in the house but they seemed to understand the concept from the picture and the YouTube video in the guide.  I had some little round flower seeds I had gotten for free so the girls used those to stand in for their walnuts.

We gathered leaves from our maple tree but I think next time I use leaves in a craft, I will make sure they are not so dried out.  These were very crunchy and curled, which made them difficult to attach securely without ending up with powdered leaf everywhere.  They glued a couple on their pictures but it didn't really work well.

I punched out the pear poem from the Chestnut unit but rather than have them putting glue and glitter on the one they made into a necklace, I used the outline left in the paper to trace some extra pears.  They glued these to their trees, then added the glitter to them.  My reasoning was that they would certainly want to wear the necklaces right away and would end up with glittery glue all over their shirts.  This worked just fine (and they did want to wear the necklaces, which ended up as bracelets because I cut the cords too short).

After talking about the chestnuts and their spiny outerwear, the girls settled on purple paint for the final addition to their masterpieces.  After I figured out how to help them not end up with gobs of paint on their paper (by dabbing the porcupine balls on the paper plate containing the paint), they had a blast adding "chestnuts" to their multipurpose trees.

I really love how the final project turned out.  The girls seemed to enjoy the process, too.  It helped to not spend a lot of time on one step, coming and going as we interspersed the other activities.  It made for a really great balance of creative and academic time.

Pokey Porcupines

I love porcupines, I think they're kind of adorable.  I'd love to get a hedgehog someday as the smaller, kid friendly version of a porcupine.  As a result, I was excited to do the Porcupine unit and the girls shared that enthusiasm.

They had a great time learning the song of the day and spontaneously made up their own dance moves (this picture shows them being sleeping porcupines).  Miss M already likes to make up her songs to tunes she knows (mostly "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star) so these songs have been really fun ways to give her ideas on how to play with rhyming words and familiar tunes.

The girls changed the rules to the Awake at Night game in the Teacher Guide, deciding to take turns hiding the fruit beads around the living room and then helping the other person to find it.  It was a great opportunity to work on positional words.  I started off describing where they'd find the word (Oh, the cherry was under the couch!) but after a couple rounds, they started doing it themselves.

For the Pokey Words game, I set out the letters and the ending card and had them roll the included ball onto a letter.  We blended the sounds together and then they had to find the whole word card in another pile.  They took turns collecting words and we read them all at the end.

The Pokey Porcupine Puppet was super fun although I did have to help with placement of some of the quills so they didn't turn into weapons.  I cut out a shape for Littlest to color and put the eye, nose and stick on but did not give her toothpicks, which she didn't seem to miss.  The girls had fun making up stories about their porcupines while I put together snack and then we ended the morning with a couple of cute videos about porcupines on YouTube.

One thing I wanted to mention that I've started doing with some of these crafts that have punch out paper shapes is that I'm saving one of the sheets that I've punched out to use as a stencil when we revisit these lessons at another time.  It won't be quite as easy peasy but should still allow us to do the crafts again.  I'm also saving most of them and putting them back in the folder for that day, at the end of the month (I display them or have them available for play until then).  It will be fun to compare the original with later versions and see how their skills have advanced.

My November box arrived on Friday and I'm so excited to dive in and get prepared for it.  One more week of our Orchard theme to enjoy, though!

Birds in the Orchard

Miss M and I are under the weather so we took it easy today but since we had hours and hours to fill (since Daddy had an early meeting and super late class) we pulled out our trusty Mother Goose Time box and did a few of the activities from the Birds unit.

Miss M's favorite activities today were the storytelling pieces and bird egg craft.  I put out all the story pieces and we took turns telling the story.  Littlest was enjoying alone time in the play kitchen with no one to take her spatula so it was just the two of us.  Miss M has a great imagination and makes up fantastic stories on her own. At first when she was faced with all the pieces, she tended to start with "Once upon a time..." and then name all the pictures rather than use actual story structure so I gave her an example to follow, which she changed to suit her fancy.  It was a really simple story with a character introduction in the beginning (Johnny Appleseed), an action by a character in the middle (saved seeds and planted trees, which grew bigger and bigger) and a description of how they felt about the final product at the end (everyone was so happy to have apples).  She got the example pretty quickly and started telling me stories about the squirrel and the family.  It was a lot of fun to watch her figure that all out.

The next activity we did was the bird craft.  I had to help with the glue simply because the bottle is almost empty and she couldn't squeeze it hard enough.  She picked out the color and size of feathers she wanted and placed the eyes where she wanted them.  Littlest joined us long enough to put eyes on her egg and add and just as quickly remove feathers before taking off again.  We made the paper bag nest and Miss M immediately began crooning to her baby birds about how she was going to take really good care of them.  She set about finding a safe place for the nest, because apparently it was very windy in her world.  She ended up constructing them their own tree, which I thought was fantastic.

I wanted to play the birds in the orchard game with the pattern pieces but our energies flagged and we didn't get to it.  I was planning on changing it just a little so that the pieces were actually different kinds of fruit and we were birds coming to eat it off the tree.  With more kids, you could add in one who is a scarecrow and has to tag the birds before they get to the fruit and "eat" it.  With just Miss M, I'd have her search for shape and color but if Littlest played with us, we would focus on a broader category with more correct answers, such as color.  We are not at a point where I can give them different rules, Miss M is totally an oldest and will enforce the rules she has been given with no mercy and doesn't understand that sometimes it's ok for her sister to do something else.

That was it for today, hopefully we will be feeling better soon and can do a few more activities this week.

Buses, Bunnies and Keys

We get so many fun math manipulatives in our monthly Mother Goose Time kits.  Miss M loves to play with them so I came up with some new fun games for her to play while working on colors, number identification, counting and classifying.

Recently, she has been loving playing with the keys we got during our June theme so I made up a simple house picture in Photoshop (trying clicking on it at the bottom and let me know if you can print it) and printed it on colored paper that coordinated with the colors of keys.  I cut them out, wrote numbers on them and set up a little "town" in the living room.  The buses we got a few months ago are also in the same colors as the keys (except for orange) so we got those out too.  I had her pick a bus and drive it to a matching house.  Then she had to identify the number written on that house and use that many keys to unlock the door so the bus could get inside.  There are only four of each color of key but I had higher numbers on some of the houses so she had to figure out how many more she needed in a different color to unlock the door.  Simple but she loved it.  Littlest liked trying to match the buses to the houses, too.

I used the same houses, keys and buses and added the rabbits from another kit (also in the same colors) for another game today.  We set up our neighborhood, dumped all the buses and rabbits on her "sleigh" (a paper plate with yarn threaded through it for a handle) and she got to be Santa, delivering toys to the houses.  This time she shook two dice (I put them in a plastic baby food container and she rolled them in there, to keep them contained), counted the number she got and then found the house with that number on it.  She chose a matching key, unlocked the door and then gave the house the same number of gifts as its "address".  For numbers under 4, she tended to give all of one item in the color that matched the house.  For some of the bigger numbers, she had to mix and match.  This is where the classifying came in.  She could choose to use all the same color of buses and rabbits, all one type of toy in different colors or even sort by size (the rabbits come in large and small).  She liked sorting them into groups and counting out the right number for each house.

I really enjoy making up new activities with the materials we receive every month.  I will try to share more of those ideas in the future.

Apples and Cherries

I'll admit it, this was a tough day at preschool for me.  I have been under the weather and the girls have been a little on the cranky side.  Miss M insisted on wearing her super hero fairy princess costume for circle time, which is not a big deal in general but it was distracting for her.  I decided not to push her to take it off or to even sit at circle time because I knew she'd push back and I was not in a mental frame to respond appropriately.  Littlest enjoyed getting the opportunity to help with the calendar and weather icons (normally under the jurisdiction of the older girls).  She still likes to try and rip everything possible off my display board so I spent a few minutes after school with my hot glue gun making that a much harder process for the future.

We learned "Way Up High in the Apple Tree" and the associated body movements, which all three really liked so we sang it half a dozen times.  They also loved loved loved the Johnny Appleseed book we got in our materials this month.  I liked that there was a predictable pattern to the story, making it easy for them to tell it with me after a few pages.


The Johnny Appleseed puppet was a huge success.  I really liked this craft because it was a great blend of punch and paste (the pieces all came pre-punched so I didn't have to cut them out) and creative space.  The girls were able to draw Johnny's facial features and color his shirt however they wanted to but the other pieces were done for them so it didn't take forever to finish and everything was recognizable as a particular piece of clothing.  If I'd been more with it, this would have been a great craft to help teach some following directions/language skills.  As it was, I had barely finished helping them tape their puppets to the craft stick when the two oldest began a great conversation using very appropriate social language and even making up their own song.  It made this speech therapist's heart smile.  Puppets are a great way to help kids develop conversational skills as well as teach vocabulary.  I can see a Pinterest search for easy puppet crafts in my future.

Miss M took off on her own for a bit so Littlest and our friend worked on patterning.  Littlest just likes to line things up right now and point to them while I name them.  When Miss M rejoined us, we worked on the cherry tree craft (I traced their arms, rather than paint them because I was not in a mood to chase anyone down to clean them up before paint got everywhere).  We had a yummy snack of popcorn and apple slices while we watched Disney's "Johnny Appleseed" cartoon on YouTube.  This was followed by "The Ugly Duckling", giving me just enough time to clean up in peace.

It was a bit of a tiring day for me but I always feel like I've done something worthwhile with the girls when we do a lesson or two, even if the rest of the day isn't spent quite so productively.

A Rootin' Tootin' Fun Time

I'm sick but I wanted to briefly share some of our other favorite activities from this week.

We started with some tree dancing.  It was hard for the girls to stand in one place and just move their arms like they were branches but as you can see they all got into it. It was good for them to have some constrictions placed on their movement, it helped them think about what they were doing in order to make sure they were following the rules.

Journals are always a favorite activity.  I let both girls write their initials without any help this time.  I was impressed with Miss M's M.  Costco recently had a dry erase activity book for sale and I picked one up to use with her when she was ready.  I think I'll be pulling it out in the next couple of days.  She also really loves our dry erase crayons; I've been laminating coloring sheets to use in the car and church but I think I'll add some tracing sheets to our collection.

I'll be honest, it took some puzzling for me to figure out how to demonstrate the function of roots using a piece of yarn and a twig from my salvia bush but I was really happy with the result.  I cut the yarn into four pieces, tied them to the twig and taped them down at equal distances from each other, creating enough tension to keep it upright.  I talked to the girls about how the roots act like straws to help suck up water for the tree and to keep the tree from blowing over.  Last week we were in the Sequoia National Park and were able to see trees that had blown over, including their roots (apparently that's the main cause of death for sequoia's, due to their shallow root system).  The girls did their best to huff and puff and blow our twig down but the roots held it fast.

I pretty much let the girls do what they wanted to with the tangrams.  They attempted most of the designs (some were a little hard for them figure out) but their favorite activity was using the shapes as colored sunglasses, since this month's set is clear plastic.  Even Littlest was doing it, although I restricted her to the hexagons so she wouldn't poke herself in the eye.

The tree friend craft was really fun.  We watched the YouTube video of a little critter popping out of a tree that was referenced in the Teacher Guide (can't for the life of me remember it in my cold-addled state--it was white and related to a weasel, I think a mink) and then the girls had a blast making their own.  I adapted the craft a little, having them glue the green festoon to the inside top of the brown paper before we rolled it up and taped the sides, it was just easier for them.

I love all the materials we get each month for math practice and I've come up with a couple of ideas for new games using some of Miss M's favorite manipulatives.  I'll share those next time.

Seed Explorations

This has been a fun week with our Mother Goose Time materials.  We started Monday by exploring seeds.  We had done a little bit during our In the Garden unit this spring but it was fun to introduce the girls to them again and see what they remembered.  As it turns out, they needed a little reminder about what seeds were exactly but after just a couple of minutes they were telling stories about planting seeds in our gardens this year.

We reviewed our letters of the month and I gave one of the Hands-On letters to each girl along with a some of the seeds from our monthly manipulatives packet to see what they did with them.  Littlest (16 months) enjoyed sifting them through her fingers and dropping them on her letter.  Miss M (2.75 years) lined them up along the edges of her letter and our friend (3.5 years) made a pattern with hers.  It was really interesting to see how each one used them differently and at a different level of complexity.

Next I emptied out an ice tray to use for sorting the seeds (I really just need to buy a couple for sorting).  Our friend helped Littlest put her seeds in the different compartments with her fingers while Miss M practiced using the tweezers to sort her seeds.  This is a great fine motor activity that I would like to do again but maybe with craft pompoms to start with (I think they'd be a little easier to grab).

The girls mentioned that would like to go plant seeds in the ground right now.  Given that our frost date is only a few days away, I let them know that it probably wouldn't be a good idea but it did give me a great idea for an extension activity.  I grabbed a few green index cards (I keep them in the kitchen for writing down recipes but they come in handy for school), drew lines and added numbers at the end and gave each girl a couple of "gardens" to plant with the specified number of seeds.  I let them decide if they wanted to plant all the same type of seeds or a variety.  They worked at this activity for almost ten minutes.

The apple craft was fun, although I didn't get any post-worthy pictures.  I wanted the girls to leave the middle of the paper plate white so I drew lines on the plate, dividing it into thirds.  This was also a good way to teach the concepts of top, middle and bottom as well as following directions containing a negative (they are both pretty good at doing what they are told but need to work on not doing things when they are told not to :).

 I've been lucky to find some really good apples lately (I think we are finally getting to the new crop rather than the mealy leftovers from last year) so we cut one open and I let the girls dig out and count the seeds.  We use the seed counting sheet in our materials briefly but they were ready to eat by then so I sliced up the apple and let them munch away while we watched an illustrated version of the poem "One Seed" on YouTube.  It was a very fun and successful morning.

The Power of Pre-Teaching

A walnut orchard at Ardenwood Farms.

The topic for our Mother Goose Time curriculum this month is In the Orchard.  We are out of town visiting family right now so we won't be starting our daily lessons until we get home but I have still been able to introduce the topic while we are gone in order to lay a foundation for when we start learning in earnest.  We are traveling through central California, an area renowned for its orchards. We were able to actually visit a walnut orchard and we have driven by acres and acres of lemon groves.  I used these quick little experiences to explain what an orchard was to Miss M.  Pre-teaching sets the groundwork so she already has an idea of what we are talking about and can move more easily to grasping the new concepts that are introduced.  Mother Goose Time teaches not only academic concepts but also gives children foundational information for later experiences.

This is important not only for academics but also for social and emotional development.  When children have good foundational information, they can spend their physical, mental and emotional energy in other areas.  It can help ease anxiety and decrease behavior issues, as well as making it easier and faster to pick up important academic skills because they don't have to spend that energy on learning the carrier information.  This is especially important for children who struggle with learning impairments, language disorders or who may be on the autism spectrum.

To give an example, Miss M had her first dental appointment a couple of months ago.  In order to prepare her, I pointed out the office when we walked past after Littlest's well child check up (they are in the same building) and talked about how the doctors in that office checked your teeth to make sure they were healthy and strong.  Daniel Tiger has a couple episodes where he talks about brushing his teeth so we watched those and talked more about taking care of our teeth and what would happen at the dentist office.  While brushing her teeth, I had her lie down so I could look in her mouth and explained that the dentist and his helper would do this as well.  I made sure she had the vocabulary she needed to understand what was happening and told her step by step what she would be doing. When her appointment came, she was a little nervous but complied with the staff and didn't get upset or scared.

Pre-teaching is helpful and can be as easy as pointing and describing, like I did with the lemon groves.  You can also check out books on the subject at the library, watch YouTube videos or take field trips or tours (especially helpful if your child will be seeing a new health care provider).  You don't have to spend days or even hours pre-teaching, although it is helpful for some children to have daily reminders of new activities they will be participating in in the near future.  Make a list of any special words/vocabulary that the child may not know yet (like dentist, hygienist, X-ray for the dental appointment example) and write down the steps of what will happen, if you are pre-teaching for an experience.  Try to look at the subject or experience through the eyes of a child and identify those points that are critical for understanding that child may not yet understand.  Review these points with your child, using pictures if possible, and you will be setting a great foundation.

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Pumpkin Patch Party

We are out of town this week, visiting family out of state.  The girls were excited to visit their cousins and I thought it would be fun to bring the pumpkin patch party kit from my recently delivered Mother Goose Time October curriculum box to give them something to do in case of inclement weather.  I am glad I did, it turned out to be really fun.

I love these extra kits that MGT has been including in the most recent boxes.  They come with their own little teacher guide, invitations, thank you notes and materials for games and crafts that could easily be adapted for a wide range of ages.  We had a morning of no plans so I prepped the materials and we played about half of the games and did one of the crafts.  I forgot to grab the scarecrow poster for the "Pin the Patch on the Scarecrow" game so we had fun making our own (his name is Scarecrow Tim).  This game was the biggest hit among the kids.  I loved how they would help the blindfolded child find the scarecrow, rather than let them wander around and pin aimlessly.  It was sweet.  After they pinned on all the patches, we counted how many they had done, organized them by pattern and counted again.  Scarecrow Tim got played a few times during the week.

We also played the "Beware the Bat" game.  In the guide, you are supposed to hide the cats under the paper bag pumpkin craft that is included in the materials but we only had five kiddos and hadn't gotten to the craft yet so I just spread the cards out on the rug facedown and surrounded them with the numbered pumpkins (out of order).  They all ran to get a card and then raced to find the pumpkin.  The younger ones didn't quite understand that if they found the bat they were supposed to tag someone else before they got to their number and would in fact simply point out the correct pumpkin and cheer on their cousin.  Kids can be so sweet, especially when they haven't been conditioned to be overly competitive.  They had just as much fun matching the cats to the pumpkins and then putting them all in numerical order.

The plan was to play these games in the morning, have lunch and nap and then take them to a pumpkin patch in the afternoon.  We got them all fired up to pick out their own pumpkins, loaded them into vehicles and fought unfamiliar traffic to arrive at a highly recommended patch only to realize it didn't open for two more days.  Thankfully children are resilient and were placated by an hour at a super fun park nearby.  We also promised a pumpkin patch with the planned activity for the next day.  Unfortunately, while it was listed as a reason to come to this particular venue, it too was closed until October 1.

The moral:  check the date on the website, not just the time.  I am grateful for children who don't hold things against me (yet) and a wonderful neighborhood pumpkin patch a few blocks from my house that I know is open.  My plan is to finish the rest of the activities from this pack with our friend on Monday and then go to the patch for Family Home Evening that night to finally bring the whole thing full circle.

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