Finishing Up Winter

I titled this post "Finishing Up Winter" and then thought to myself with a wistful sigh, I wish.  Once Christmas is over, I'm over the snow and cold and ready for spring.  I live in Utah, though, so we will be in danger of snow storms until April, or sometimes even early May.

Oh well, at least we have some fun things to keep us occupied.  We did activities from the last two days of our December unit on Monday and the girls really had some fun with it.  We started off by reviewing our concepts for the month:  M, V, X, 7, 8, star and white.  I cut up the concept cards, hid them around the living room and then had the girls search for them and tuck them into bed for those long winter nights.  It was a big hit and of course they all wanted a turn to hide them.


Next, we practiced measuring using our night sky paper strips.  I handed out the strips and had the girls select the one they thought was their longest and then compare them to each other.  We kept going until we had them in order from longest to shortest.  This was a little bit of a hard activity for them because they took it personally if their strip was the shorter one but we talked through it and I think they have a better grasp on making comparisons now.

They enjoyed making the snow dough.  I did this activity a little differently than having them build snowy scenes; I gave them each a high sided plate (from IKEA) full of the snow dough and then let them practice writing our letters of the month using chopsticks.  Littlest did pretty well "scribbling" in it until she decided she wanted to see what would happen if she dumped it on the table and used her chopstick to fling it--twice.  I sent a bag of it home with our school friend, saved some for more writing practice later and added about a 1/2 cup of glue to the rest and made cornstarch dough. Littlest and I rolled it out (it was a little crumbly, I probably should have used a little less of the snow dough) and cut out heart shapes which dried nicely on the counter overnight and will make fun tags to add to Valentine treat bags in February.

They were all very excited to decorate their postcards.  Miss M drew a sun as her favorite thing about winter days, she's an optimistic child.  :)  I'm saving this one because she did a really nice job with the sun and writing the letters M and H on the back but in the future we will be sending these to family members, especially as she is able to write more on her own or at least dictate a little more.

"Owl, Who Do You See?" was a fun game.  We chanted it like in "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" before they rolled the cube to reveal either an animal picture or a letter.  For the animals, I emphasized the beginning sound and they identified which letter needed to be put on Owl.  For the letters, we practiced blending all the sounds to identify which animal the Owl was seeing.  We have since played this with my 6-year old nephew, who also enjoyed it.

And that was it for December.  There were a lot of really fun activities that spurred other experiences and a lot of good learning opportunities.  I am excited about the January theme, Going On Safari.  Maybe pretending to be in Africa will trick my body into thinking it's warm outside.

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