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.