This and That

It's been a momentous week in our home--Miss M has finally consented to start potty training!  I will admit, I was not pushing this milestone because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing but when she told me she wanted to wear undies (a Christmas gift from Grammie) I decided to go along with it.  All in all, it's going okay.  Usually she decides she's done with the whole thing around nap time and ends up in a pull up for the rest of the day but we are making some progress.  It has meant that most of our time is spent going to the potty and playing with things we can put down quickly.  School hasn't been as formal as normal but we've still had some fun times with our Mother Goose Time activities.

The Matching Spots and Adding game was a fun one to play, both as written in the Teacher Guide and in a couple variations we came up with on our own.  One of the variations was to give one child the giraffes and one the ladybugs, then they took turns picking a number card and finding their corresponding animal card.  This greatly reduced arguing over who was touching the cards.  Another variation we did helped with addition.  They each picked one card, then drew a number card.  Using a dry erase crayon (you could use a marker), they added that number of dots to their animal and then counted them all.  You could use it as a memory game, too.  Use the giraffes and ladybugs or one of the animals and the number cards.


I altered the Grass unit's craft project to combine it with one that my mom did with my nephew.  Igave the girls the provided green paper and drew lines on it as a guide for cutting (Miss M will cut straight through a paper unless she has a visual reminder to stop).  Miss M did a great job of snipping her grass.  I had both girls trace a circle using one of our plastic stacking rings, which they then decorated as lions.  We glued the grass to the bottom of the page so it looked like the lion was hiding. Miss M added a tree to give the lion some shade and decorated it heavily with the included bug stickers.  She also added a blue sun, in case he got too chilly in the shade and needed to warm up.

Littlest finally let me help her a little with the scissors, although that ended when I tried to show her how to point her thumb up so they'd work better.  She was very engaged in the project, too, which is fun to see.  She liked tracing the circle and did a few on her own, then when I told her to draw a lion, her scribble actually resembled a mane pretty closely.  She loves stickers (one of my favorite fine motor tools) and enjoyed putting them all over her paper while roaring.

We liked the flamingo art project, which we coupled with a fun YouTube kids video on the birds and making bead necklaces with one of this month's manipulatives.

Finally, we played Bigger or Smaller and created a continuum of sizes using some of our toys and the ostrich and chicken egg cutouts.  Before we started, I let the girls gently play with some hard boiled eggs I happened to have in the fridge from the day before so they could actually feel the egg shell without me being nervous about them squeezing it too hard.  They collected objects and I held each one to the ostrich egg, asking bigger or smaller.  If it was bigger, it went to the left.  If it was smaller, we held it to the chicken egg and asked the same question, setting it to the left of the chicken egg if it was bigger and to the right if it was smaller.  They seemed to really understand this concept and enjoy this activity.

Next week we start our Food and Fitness theme, which is perfect timing because I am also starting a Biggest Loser competition in preparation for our family trip to Disneyland n March.  :)