Passport to Fun

We started our Going On Safari unit this week!  Yay, I think this is going to be a fun theme.

Circle time took quite a bit longer because I wanted to talk to the girls about the it being a new year as well as a new month.  We talked about how they were born in 2012, both had siblings born in 2014, they were 3 in 2015 and now it is 2016.  We practiced singing the Months of the Year song on the Circle Time album a few times and I'm coming up with a couple of game ideas to practice this concept with them.  I'll share when I get them done.

Since the daily theme was Passports, I brought done (my sadly underused) passport for them to see.  I showed them some pictures from trips I had taken to Europe and Mexico, talked about how long it took me to get to those place and what kind of vehicles I used to get there.  We introduced the color of the month (yellow) and they took turns "traveling" to items in the room that matched.

I took down our world map and each girl selected a Lego "traveler" to play the map game.  After each roll, before they moved to the next continent, we talked about how they could get there (boat or airplane).  I also described locations on their current continent and had them guess what I was talking about, then decide if they wanted to drive a car, take a train or fly to it.  We talked about how some modes of transportation take longer than others but might be less expensive or let them bring more of their favorite toys with them.

I got out a big sheet of paper and let them draw roads on it with markers, then we used the spools to stamp designs on it like a map.  They weren't too enthusiastic about this project and finished pretty quickly.

We moved on to coloring and stamping our passports.  First I had them write their name (or first initial in Miss M's case) and draw a picture of themselves in the front.  I was pretty impressed.  Miss M even included her ears and belly button (although right now, her entire body consists of her head with facial features and arms and legs sticking directly out of it).   They took turns rolling the continent cube, chose a stamp from my itty bitty collection and then colored the continent to match the cube.  We only did a couple since it takes a good deal of coloring to fill the whole thing in and I think we will continue to work on it just prior to snack over the next few days.  My thought is to have them color the continent while watching a short, kid-friendly YouTube video about the continent or a specific country within that continent.  If I'm really on the ball, maybe I'll try to coordinate our snack but honestly, that probably won't happen.

That was it for the first day, they both wanted to go back and play with map and pretend to travel so they did that for a while before snack.  Littlest was under the weather and spent the majority of class resting in her room with books and her iPad.