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.