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.