Dancing in the Desert

Miss M decided she wanted to dress up as a dancer today so it was the perfect opportunity to pull out our Dance N Beats DVD and teacher guide for a dance party.  I decided to do a mix and match of the activities and songs in order to keep her interest.

Ignore her outfit, I'm just
glad she's dressed.

We started with the warm up song as usual, with Littlest joining in and performing the whole thing flawlessly.  They moved on to Giddy-Up, which prompted Littlest to pull out her cowboy hat and rocking horse.  Next, Miss M requested "the camel song" (Sahara, the Camel).  Something about this song and dance struck a chord in her and she repeated it four times.

She finally decided to take a break and we did the cactus subtraction activity in the book.  I made a pillar-like cactus out of our multicolored play dough and stuck ten toothpicks in it.  They were fascinated.  I grabbed our number die (as opposed to one with dots, to help Littlest work on number recognition 1-3 and to help drag the game out a little longer since two rolls of 5 would pretty much end it) and we practiced taking turns pulling out cactus spines, then counting how many remained.  When they pulled them all out, we reversed the game and started rolling to put them back in, adding instead of subtracting.  We did this two times before they both wanted their own play dough to make sculptures bristling with toothpicks.  Miss M commented that her cactus was for Sahara the camel because camels can eat thorny plants (a tidbit she picked up watching "Diego" during breakfast).


That ended up being the last activity, since they both moved on to playing with their dolls.  I would like to do the Sand Letters activity in the next day or two, using our phonics cards and salt in our rimmed IKEA plates.  I've also thought it would be fun to have them trace printed letters with glue and sprinkle with salt or sand as an art project.  You can color salt pretty easily with food coloring, to make it pretty.  Something along the lines of this.



All of the dance classes have an art project associated with them but the girls weren't interested today.  This subject has so much potential, though.  Last week, we went to an art program hosted by our local university for preschoolers and the theme was "The American West".  It was perfect.  They got to view paintings and sculptures, then came back to the art room and made three different art projects, using different mediums.  I'm not sure what the rules are about posting photos of those pieces so I haven't but they included making a bean/seed mosaic of a cowboy boot, a bolo tie with twine, paper, sequins and drinking straw pieces and a desert scene that they colored and then stamped green spines on the cactus by dipping a plastic fork in paint.

This has been a fun theme to explore this month and I hope to revisit it with the girls in the future.