Finishing Up

We have been having a lot of fun with family this week and didn't get around to a lot of formal school after we left home.  I did make a variation of the bus game that my nearly six-year old nephew has really enjoyed and played several times with a variety of family members.

We used blocks to create bus stops around the living room.  The longest blocks were reserved for our "buses" and a collection of Little People and other block characters served as passengers.  We set up a little depot on one end of the living room.  I used the bus matching cards to determine how many passengers each player could take during a turn and counted out the same number of bus tickets, assigning one to each passenger.  Then we went off on our routes, dropping off passengers at the indicated bus stop (square, circle, rectangle or triangle).  When we had dropped off our passengers, we drew another bus card and picked up more until they had all been distributed.  Then we counted up how many passengers were at each stop and determined which stop had the most and which had the least.  It was a super popular game and entertained him for about half an hour each time we got it out.

We also played the bus matching/number identification game.  He is in kindergarten and quite good at this already so next time we play, I might have him count out an equal number of Unix cubes each time he gets a match and then count up the total at the end.  The person with the most cubes will be the winner, rather than the person with the most matches.

Miss M put on a dance recital on Friday night using Dance N Beats.  She started with some of the choreographed moves but then improvised many of her own while still maintaining the beat of the songs.  She knows all of the dances and likes to do them but lately she has been wanting to make up her own dances.  She's an original and I can't wait to see where she goes with this particular interest.

In addition to playing some of our school games, the girls and I did a lot of art this morning with my mom.  She is a former art teacher and has lots of ideas and materials.  We started with coffee filter Christmas trees.  They used Bingo daubers and smelly markers to
cover their filters with color, then we sprayed them down with a water bottle so the colors would run together.  After they dried, I cut them out into a Christmas tree shape (I stacked them, folded them in half and drew a half shape before cutting it out).  I punched out some circles and cut out Christmas lights and stars from scrap construction paper and they used those to decorate them.  Foil star stickers, glitter or sequins would be really pretty, too.

My dad works for a paper company and is able to bring home end of rolls that make great art paper.  We covered the kids table with a big piece of paper and got out simple stencils and flat crayons to try some rubbings.  It was a little hard for the girls but they liked coloring them in once we created them.  They probably sat and colored for 30-45 minutes without getting up.  It was pretty impressive for their ages.

Row, Row, Row Your Canoe

Happy Thanksgiving! Today I am thankful for time with family.  We live 10+ hours from my extended family so we don't see them nearly as much as I would like and we are enjoying getting to visit with them this holiday.  I hope you are all spending time with people you love, as well.

Thanks to a fast-moving storm we had to change our travel plans at the last minute to avoid driving through snow and ice with two toddlers so but we still had time to do some of the activities from our Canoe unit before we left.  One of the reasons I love doing Mother Goose Time with the girls is because it ensures that I have some really good face to face interaction with them during the day.  It is so easy to just let them play or watch shows on their iPads so I can get things done around the house. Yes, it's necessary at times to do that but I find that their behavior is so much better when I have taken the time to interact with them for a significant amount of time and I feel like a more successful parent when that happens.  So, even though I had a lot to prepare, we spent an (enjoyable) hour doing school and I truly believe the rest of the day went more smoothly because they had some mommy time.

The canoe unit was really fun.  The song for the day was "Row, Row, Row Your Boat", the version we all grew up singing.  Miss M decided to change the word "boat" to "canoe" because that was what was in the picture.  We are still working on categories and understanding that specific items belong to larger groups (such as a canoe is a type of boat, a parrot is a kind of bird, etc...).  She had fun running around the living room singing it three or four times before choosing to move on to another activity.


I got out all the story pieces and we started a story about Duck
wanting to go for a ride.  His friend _____ (lion, goat, fish) would show up and ask if he wanted to ride in his _____ (truck, bike, airplane) and he always said no, that's not what I feel like riding in, until we came to canoe.  Then Duck got very excited and started singing our canoe song again.

We did the math challenge game next, using the canoe prop and people cards to answer the word questions and practice counting, adding and subtracting.  I added a few of my own, like "Two people are in the canoe and they see three more friends on the shore.  They all get in; now how many are there?"  She really liked this although she was quite concerned with the questions that indicated the canoe had tipped over and people had fallen out because none of them appeared to be wearing life jackets.  That might be an improvement to make in the future. ;)

Miss M realized pretty quickly that the people on the cards were matches for each other so after we finished the math game, we played Memory with them.  Well, she played Memory by herself, turning over cards and saying declaring whether or not they were the same.  I verbalized the differences between them, such as "He has red hair and his is black" or "She's a girl and he's a boy".  She's a little young to be able to do that herself but I wanted to provide a model.

Next, we made our own canoe paddles.  Littlest spent a lot of time coloring hers but Miss M rushed through it after practicing her M so she could play boats.  She decided our blanket basket made a perfect canoe and her sister's blue Frozen blanket was a great lake.  She very sweetly invited Littlest to join her and I captured this adorable video as a result.

That's it for now, I brought some activities with me and I'll report on those tomorrow.

Our Week with Mother Goose

Here is a recap of some of our favorite activities from our Mother Goose Time lessons this week.

Miss M decided to be "Mommy Teacher" for a day, relegating me to the floor while she taught from the stool (to be fair, she did offer to let me sit in her blue chair but unfortunately Mommy's hips don't quite fit).  She went through the calendar and weather items, introduced our new letter and led us in song ("Twinkle Twinkle Little Star").  I spread out the day of the week clouds and had her identify the correct day by the initial sound.  It was adorable and reminded me of when I was little and my favorite game was playing teacher.

The foam shape tangrams are always fun to play with although for someone like me who is not great with visual-spatial skills, a key would be kind of helpful.  Miss M was actually pretty good at figuring it out on her own (she gets that from her daddy).

Making elephant masks was fun, although I was surprised they quit after only a relatively few squares of tissue paper.  Gluing is one of their favorite things but they were anxious to be done and play with them.  I cut out the eye and nose holes and the girls ran around the room bellowing like elephants for quite a few minutes.  Littlest will point at hers on the counter (I have an area where I display their crafts for the month) and start making elephant sounds to indicate that she would like to play with it some more.

The older girls really enjoyed the race track game.  I modified it a little by adding a deck of alphabet cards from our July theme.  Before their turn, they had to draw a card, name the picture, identify the initial sound and then try and name the letter that makes the sound (I only had them do so much because they both know their letters and sounds quite well).  If they couldn't remember on their own, they could turn it over and name the letter directly.  Then they got to roll their die, count the dots and move around the board.  Going around three times was a little much for them so we stopped after two times but it still gave them lots of practice in letter/sound identification and counting.

Both girls have had a round (or two) with a stomach bug this week so we didn't press a lot of school.  Our fruit beads from last month have been played with a lot and will be making a trip to Washington with us, as well many of the games from this month.  My nephew is excited to play with them and have some MGT at his house.

An InLinkz Link-up

Moving with Mother Goose Time

I'll admit it, I'm a homebody.  Especially when the weather is too hot or cold or if I'm not feeling well.  That's hard with kids because I feel the need to give them the opportunity to be out and about and moving around so I push myself to do things like go to story time at the library, play at the park or go to one of the various child-friendly museums in the area.  However, there are times when we just need to stay home and I have to find ways to keep the active.

My girls are natural movers so just letting them run from toy to toy in our play area takes care of a lot of that but sometimes we need ideas.  It's one of the reasons I adore the Dance N Beats DVDs from Mother Goose Time.  They are fun, my girls like the music and I find them to be a pretty good work out for me, too.  It's easy to pop in a disc while I get lunch or dinner together and they are ready for a rest after that and go down to sleep pretty easily (double bonus).

The curriculum itself has a lot of opportunities for kids to move around.  A lot of the Circle Time songs involve hand or whole body movement.  We sang about airplanes this week and did the described movements from the Teacher's Guide and then Miss M made up a verse and ran around the living room for about five minutes doing her own variations on the movements.  I loved the linguistic creativity and exercise she gave herself with just a little prompt from what we did first.

Writing in shaving cream activity
from our recent MGT lesson.  She
didn't love the feel of this but other
kids really like it.

I also want to help foster fine motor skills in my girls.  I've recently read an article indicating that children are entering kindergarten with lower fine motor skills, which hampers their development of handwriting skills.  A doctoral dissertation I perused indicated that there is a correlation between poor handwriting skills (the ability to form letters legibly and quickly) and poor writing skills (the ability to communicate effectively in written form).  We have an epidemic of poor writers in our country (just check out Facebook, Twitter or any other social media site inhabited by the current "young" generation if you don't believe me).

I don't want my girls to end up in that population if I can help it so in addition to building language skills, we work with a lot of (supervised) Lego play, blocks, stickers, beads and coloring with varying thicknesses of pencils, crayons and markers in order to build those hand and lower arm muscles.  JoAnn's has seasonal $1 crafts that come with their own little marker set that my girls love (and they come off my little Ikea table with just a diaper wipe).  The crafts included in our Mother Goose Time curriculum are specifically created to support this goal and we always make a point to do them even if that's the only activity we get to that day.   One of my girls' favorite activities is to thread beads onto pipe cleaners (it's easier for them to handle the pipe cleaner, which stays straight, rather than a string that needs more support so they can concentrate on one skill at a time).  I bought a bag of glow in the dark beads for $1.50 and a pack of pipe cleaners for $1 at my least favorite global chain store that I sometimes go to out of the sheer need for convenience but would rather not name.  We use them all the time.  When they are done, the beads go back in the bag and we reuse the pipe cleaners as well.

Please don't misread this and think I'm trying to be super mom.  Probably the biggest lesson I learned from my dad growing up was to find balance in life.  Real life is not well reflected on Pinterest or Facebook.  We definitely do our share of TV watching and iPad playing so Mommy has a chance to get housework done faster than it gets undone.  Miss M has one hairstyle because I don't have the time to research more or the energy to pin her down to create them.  My goal as a mother is to help my children develop into well rounded individuals physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually and I'm thankful for the ideas and resources I have found to help me do that

.

An InLinkz Link-up

Littlest School

Miss M has been going to a preschool playgroup on Fridays for three hours for a couple months now and I looked forward to it as an opportunity to spend some good one on one time with Littlest.  Unfortunately it morphed into "get as many errands done with only one kid as possible" time so I decided to make a concerted effort to change that.  Littlest loves it when we do MGT with the big girls and since we generally only get through 3-4 days of curriculum during the week instead of the five provided, I decided to take one of the units and do it just with her after we drop Miss M off.

After dancing her way to the circle time display, she had a marvelous time getting to put up all our date/day/weather icons without having to compete with anyone for the chance.  I counted the numbers we have up on the calendar, told her it was Friday and pointed out the airplanes on the cards (she loves airplanes and will stop whatever she is doing to find one when she hears them passing overhead).  I am not expecting her to start counting or identifying numbers, just giving her some individualized exposure.  I gave her a choice of the sun or clouds for our weather icon and asked her to find the sun, which she did.

We spent some time exploring our world map with a magnifying glass.  She would look for something through the glass, then cover it with the glass and wait for me to name it.  The map has always been a favorite for all the girls so it was especially fun for her to have it all to herself for once.

I decided to do the "Foot" unit with her since she is obsessed with shoes.  She can identify every family members shoes and will bring them to you when it is time to go outside (or to let you know that's what she'd like to do).  We talked about their colors and sizes and where they go on our body. Then she colored the shoe lacing card provided.  I was surprised that she wasn't interested in lacing it today but she did spend a lot of time coloring it.  I handed her new markers and named the color when she indicated she was ready for a new one.  She practiced taking off the caps and asking for help when she couldn't do it herself.

I found an outline online for a simple girl cut out and we carried on with naming body parts as we gave her facial features and glued pompoms on her feet for shoes.  Miss M saw our person when she got home and immediately requested that she get to do it, too.  She added the pilgrim hat she decorated in playgroup.  It wasn't really to scale but she loved her.

We ended our school time by going for a walk around the block.  Well, a walk around half the block and then it turned into getting carried but her legs are short, she's not heavy and she is super cute so I didn't mind in the least.  We did have to go to the store before picking up Miss M from school but at least I got in a good hour and change of dedicated time and that is what I was aiming to do.

Variations on a Game

We love the games that come in our Mother Goose Time

materials.  I especially love that there are so many ways to play them other than just the rules outlined in the Teachers Guide.  This is handy for when Miss M decides she doesn't want to play "that way" but is still interested in using the materials. Here are some different ways we've used a couple of this week's games.

I came up with four (or six) different ways to play The Parking Game.  The first way was fairly straightforward, using a numbered die and having her choose a car and place it on the matching parking space, then tell me the color and shape on the car.  You could do a variation using a traditional die with dots to help with counting and pattern recognition.  Since my girls love the math manipulatives and I wanted to work on teaching Littlest colors, we added in a color matching component with the planes.

We also did another variation highlighting the shapes on the cars.  I made little tags with corresponding shapes and taped them to the board.  You then take turns drawing a car card and placing it on the corresponding shape space, identifying the number of the parking space.  You can also reverse this by parking the cars in the spaces, then using your homemade shape cards to unpark a car and reveal the number underneath.  If you want to work on colors instead of shapes, either of these variations works for that as well.  

Miss M loved the Race Car Matching game and was able to do it in the traditional manner (she actually beat me and I wasn't even trying to let her) but for a younger child who needed a simpler game, I would have kept the cards divided into upper and lower case, turned over the lower case letters and divided the upper case letters between the two of us.  Each player turns over one card and that is the one they are trying to match first.  Take turns looking for your match and turning over new cards in your personal deck when you find them until all matches have been made.

The Delivery Truck game was really fun.  We started by constructing our delivery trucks.  The girls decided to use stickers instead of coloring.  I've found stickers to be a fun fine motor skill for kids and stock up whenever I can find them cheaply.  I just got a whole book of 208 gingerbread stickers at JoAnn's for $1.49.

After your truck is done, put together the house cards.  I laminated everything so they didn't fold very well and I ended up just getting off the bottom and making a pocket.  I taped out a little road on the floor, put the package cards in a cottage cheese tub and dubbed it "the factory" and Miss M loaded up her truck with five packages at a time, delivering them to the appropriate house and returning for more packages when she'd finished.  After they'd all been delivered, we unpacked them from their houses and identified the pictures on the back.

I also wanted to share our science project, the car ramp.  Miss M was very excited for this one and actually requested it after we had already been doing school for close to two hours and when she is normally ready to just play.  We figured out the right height for our ramp and a slick surface to help them maintain momentum but then she wanted to add a tunnel.  It took a little experimenting to figure out how to make it tall enough and keep the the supports far enough from the ramp to prevent our cars from running it to them but the end result was a lot of fun.

An InLinkz Link-up

Building Bridges

We learned about bridges and reviewed the number 5 during our second day of school this week.

Miss M loves the math manipulative toys we get every month (so does Littlest but as neither is very good at sharing highly sought after objects yet, they don't play with them together often) so we practiced making groups of five with our new planes and trains and then counted by 5 to twenty several times.  We've never counted by groups yet so we will probably repeat this activity often, counting by 2's and 5's.

The cornstarch noodle bridges were a bigger hit than I expected given the girls' reluctance to touch them after they got wet last time we used them.  Littlest was especially keen on soaking hers and smooshing it onto the craft stick and was quick to snatch a stray noodle if the others weren't watching closely.  At least she wasn't snacking on them this time.  Miss M is in a phase of "do it for me, Mommy" so it took a bit of demonstrating and then hand over hand to convince her that she could dip the noodle in water and put it on her stick but she got the hang of it after a while and starting looking for the colors she needed to make a rainbow.  I couldn't convince any of them to make an arch like in the example but stepping stones count as bridges, too, right?

We also included some of the map activities today so we used our tape roads, stacking cups to stand in for buildings and Little People cars to map out our little town and the girls had a blast driving around on it.  Miss M is nearing the threenager stage and has been throwing more tantrums lately, triggered by causes known only to her so she got to sit out for a bit and calm down while the others played.  I try not to shy away from disciplining in front of other people in the hopes that it will help her learn to regulate her behavior at home and in public.

Lastly, we pulled out our new journals for the month, always a highlight for the girls.  I have a hard time keeping them from doing the whole thing at one sitting and they are completing more of the assignment on their own with no prompting.   Miss M is getting much better at writing an "M" for her name.  She's come a long way since we started this in March.

All About Maps

We started off our new unit on transportation by learning about maps.  I'm pretty sure most kids these days haven't seen a paper map since everyone uses GPS on their phones but it's an important skill to have and made for some fun learning.

Both girls adored the new song of the day so we sang "Do You Know How to Read a Map" about 15 times while they took turns finding things on our world map.  I recently read an article on Time.com about an Australian study that found playing with music, changing words to familiar songs, etc...can have a bigger effect on children's academic and social/behavioral development than shared reading time with parents.  The Mother Goose Time curriculum gives you a new song every day relating to the curriculum that utilizes a familiar tune (like "The Muffin Man" or "Wheels on the Bus"), which is a great way to put this research into practice.  I even found it useful throughout the day to sing what I wanted Miss M to do to the tune of "The Muffin Man" and she cooperated much more readily and cheerfully than if I was simply asking her and would do her best to answer back using the same pattern.

After practicing our first number of the month (5) and looking for the letters in the word STOP on our calendar display (I accidentally did one of the activities from Day 2 because I got a little confused by the girls loved it and it never hurts to practice) we headed to the kitchen for art/fine motor practice.  The road map project was really fun but it ended up taking the majority of our time.  It was a great way for the girls to cut some good cutting practice in, though.  I drew lines on the paper for them to follow and then they designed their maps.  The included signs were too curvy for them to cut out without completely destroying so I did those but they put them on the straws and in the bases.  They had a lot of fun with it.  

I am a huge fan of Shutterfly and make books almost every two months (sometimes more often), leading me to get lots of freebie offers via email.  A couple months ago I had an offer to make a free placemat so I had this little road map made.  It's perfect for using with our signs and is bigger than the maps the girls made so two can play at once.  It is a big hit.

We taped off some roads in the living room and played the Traffic Game.  I played music from the CD on my phone while the girls zoomed around.  Every now and then I'd stop the music and draw a card for each one.  They could continue on their way if they got the sun, move slowly around the streets until the music stopped again or have to wait for a specified number of seconds if they were involved in a traffic incident.  It was a great way to practice counting past ten and they had so much fun we didn't even get to snack time before it was time for our friend to go home.  Miss M and Littlest wanted to keep playing after she left.  Four days later, the tape is still on the rug because it was so popular.

Avocados and Bananas

We finished off our In the Orchard unit this week and I thought I'd give a quick recap of the activities we did.

The game board was fun and a great way to review our letters of the month.  The hardest thing for the girls was remembering which direction to move but it was a good learning experience.  We added some difficulty by having them think of a word that started with the letter they rolled on the cube.  We ended up with a lot of octopus and orange because /O/ is a little less common beginning sound in a preschooler's vocabulary.  They enjoyed it and our friend was happy to have her own copy to take home.

Making banana sculptures with the starch noodles was...interesting.  Our friend did not like the texture of the wet noodles and finished quite quickly.  Miss M didn't mind them but wanted to make a smiley face instead.  Littlest thought they were a snack and kept trying to eat them.

We got caught up on our journals and I was very impressed with the way they finished the sentence prompts for most of their pages.  We used green leaves off my potato plant (I need to dig those up at some point...) for some of the number collages and they worked infinitely better than my dried up maple leaves.  Littlest was just happy to color while we worked and has really improved her pencil grip.

We ended with a dance party for about ten minutes.  Dance N Beats is always a hit with these girls, who pick up on the moves faster than I can.  I love that I can pop in the DVD while I make dinner and my kids will be entertained and exercising for the next 20ish minutes.  It's a great program and I'm thinking about getting some extra copies in December to give out as Christmas gifts this year.

We start our transportation unit tomorrow.  I know the girls will love it, Miss M and Littlest both love to play with cars and look for airplanes in the sky.  I'm excited for the special Thanksgiving packet they included.  There is a big turkey I plan to use every day this month to help teach the girls about gratitude.  I'll update you on that later in the month.

Have a great day!