Safari Sampler

For school on Wednesday, we took a sampler approach, choosing an activity or two from the remaining four days for this week.  We didn't get to everything I had planned but overall our hour went really well and sparked a couple new ideas we used later in the week.

We introduced the letter E and the country of Egypt.  Living in Utah is a little, um, monochromatic, so it was a good opportunity to about diversity.  We checked out the monthy theme poster and I had them describe what they saw:  a little girl, a mommy, a house.  I mentioned that even though it looked different from where they live and who they live with, everyone was still the same.  Our beloved Daniel Tiger has also addressed the issue so I could refer to those episodes as another way to help them relate to what I was saying.

We spent some time dancing like elephants with big stomping feet, flapping ears and swinging trunks using the song of the day from the Elephant unit.  They had a blast; I sang the song and they came up with the movements on the fly.  I liked seeing their creativity come out so spontaneously. 

We went over the I Can Read book together.  I tried using the sight word arrows with them but it didn't really work.  It might work better for me to do in one on one reading time with Miss M; in a group, they tended to get distracted or fight over the arrows.

The Giraffe Spot Game was fun.  It was a little too easy for them to just count out the correct number of spots to after a couple turns, I started changing it up by having them leave the spots on and the next player would have to add or subtract spots and then we would count the total at the end.  It worked really well and gave them a good introduction to those mathematical functions.

The Teacher Guide recommended letting them draw their own giraffes but we didn't have a lot of time available and a giraffe is little more complicated than drawing a face, which is what they have the most experience with right now.  Instead, I found a free giraffe silhouette online, imported it into Photoshop and created an outline that I printed for them to fill in as they saw fit.  I cut up the left over foam from the giraffe spots so they could use them as stencil, if they wanted.

For the zebra craft, I left the cutouts in the paper until after they had drawn their stripes.  This worked really well and gave nice clean edges when I did punch them out.  They glued them to the background paper, we talked about what they eat and they drew grass and sun to finish the pictures.  Miss M was very proud of her picture and insisted it go up on the refrigerator, along with her sister's.  Whenever Littlest sees her zebra, she starts neighing.  

I also hid some of their Little People
animals for another safari variation.

The girls have really enjoyed the safari theme so far.  They found some binocular sets I got for free for listening to some spiel and have been going around the house "spying" things.  I took the daily topic posters from this week and put them around the downstairs for them to find.  This has been a very popular activity.  Miss M likes to take the lead, naming the animal and some descriptive quality about it (the rhino has a big horn, the giraffe has a long neck) and Littlest gleefully follows and makes the sounds.  Her elephant impersonation is simply adorable.  It is also fun to turn it into an "I Spy" game and have them run to the animal I describe. We will be playing this many more times this week.