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!