Rum, Pum, Pum, Pum

We had a great Thanksgiving holiday with family in Washington state and got home on Wednesday.  I was excited to open up our MGT December curriculum box, which arrived almost as we were walking out the door the week before.  I was not disappointed.

The theme for this month is "Sights and Sounds of Winter".  I love the Christmas season, with all the music, decorations and of course the smell of baking goodies and these units are going to be a great accompaniment to all the fun I hope we have in the next few weeks.

The first unit of the month was Drums.  One of the girls' favorite shoes right now is "Little Einsteins" and at a few places in the show they are always asked to pat to the beat.  Littlest is especially adorable when she does this, so this unit was a big hit.  Miss M decided to play Teacher Mommy again and we actually had almost half an hour of circle time as we reviewed the calendar and weather and introduced the concept of the day, the color white.  We put the white color blob on the painters palette, reviewed the other colors that were already there and then they decided to take some time with the pretend paint brushes to go around the room and "paint" things.  Miss M knows all her colors but enjoyed naming them for Littlest.  We also spent fully five minutes singing the circle time song, subbing in different body parts and items in the room for the word "drum".  The girls took turns naming (or pointing, in the case of Littlest) things and I did most of the singing while they laughed at me.  It was a great vocabulary lesson.

We practiced patting out the syllables in our names as well as identifying their names.  I wrote them on the name tags and would hold one up for us to pat.  We also did all the names of our grandparents and pets before moving on to the craft.

I love the Native American drum craft.  The girls colored the paper plates and chose their beads and I hot glued everything together.  I ended up doing a second round of hot glue after the sticks broke loose on both of them, filling the space with as much glue as I could.  They seem a lot more stable and have been great fun to play.  We watched a Native American drum video on YouTube during craft.

She wouldn't hold it still long
enough for me to get a
clear picture.

I was hoping to lure Miss M into playing the rhythm game but after we finished the craft she was just ready for snack and free play.  Maybe another day.  I am excited to make some more instruments and have our only little family band.

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