Giddy Up, Cowgirls!

We are finally getting back into the swing of our normal routine after a couple weeks of illness and a family vacation to The Happiest Place on Earth (we had a blast and I may do a blog post on some ideas for making it work with toddlers).

This month our theme is In The Desert and it is looking pretty fun.  We missed the first week while we were in Disneyland but I didn't want to just skip those units so we did a few activities last night before bed from the Cowboy Boots unit and today we did a medley of other activities from the first week.

Miss M has her shapes and colors down so I concentrated on introducing this month's concepts (square and brown) to Littlest after she finished dinner (which included rubbing pizza sauce in her hair, followed by a quick wash in the sink).  I presented her with the circle shape and the new square and asked her to identify them (which she did very quickly).  I want to do a more in-depth assessment of which shapes she knows and doesn't know so we can do some activities to support the weaker concepts.  Then I took the square that came with my MGT materials and a smaller, white square I cut out separately and we worked on the concept of big and little (also one that she knows pretty well).  Lastly we worked on identifying the colors white and brown.  I would put the squares in front of her and ask her to point to one of the colors, then switch them around and ask again.  It's important not to get into a pattern (for example, you always ask about the one closest to her hand first, then the other) so they are really learning the concept and not the order of presentation.  This was a harder one for her so I think colors may be our focus this week.

We did the cowboy boot craft, which of course I altered a little bit to continue to work on the concept of square and some fine motor practice.  Daddy helped Littlest trace the white square I had cut out onto her boot with a brown marker (bringing in the color concept again) and then I gave her square stickers to use to finish decorating it.  Miss M did the same thing but more independently.  She took both boots when they were done and tried to strap them to her feet.  Littlest ran and put on her snow boots.

I used the boots to decorate boxes for the Cowboy Boot toss using our super fun counting block manipulatives that came in this month's box.  I gave each girl a set of ten blocks and had them sit in their new hula hoops.  They took apart their blocks, with me counting while Littlest took hers apart and Miss M surprising us with her ability to count to 9 in Spanish (thanks to Diego episodes on Amazon Prime).  Then they practiced tossing the blocks into the boxes from inside their hula hoops.  This morning Miss M is using them as "ice cream" and randomly dumping them out to use for patterning.

We finished off the evening by reading "Coyote" by Gerald McDermott.  This is a retelling of a Native American folktale.  Besides being a good way to introduce the desert, it also has a good moral about what it means to be a good friend and how not to treat people.

This morning we had our first regular session of school in a while with our friend.  I decided to change up calendar time a little bit by starting with today's date and working backwards.  They are so used to telling me which number comes next, it was good practice to work on which one comes first.  We also practiced the pattern a little bit; I think after nap we will look at it again and try to recreate it with the counting blocks.

We checked out the theme poster using our Looking Glasses.  Thanks to our book last night, Miss M could identify the coyote readily and did a very nice impression of one howling at the moon.  Littlest found the cacti and the cowgirl.

We introduced the letter H and practiced galloping around the living room like horses.  After a couple rounds, they decided they'd rather ride horses so they grabbed blankets to stand in for their worthy steeds and did a few more laps before we started reading this month's story book.  I really like the Who Am I? books that Mother Goose Time does; this one is all desert animals.  There are quite a few animals in the book, most of which the girls were unfamiliar with so they got a little antsy and we only made it halfway through but it was fun to watch them curl up like armadillo lizards, make pinching claws like a scorpion or growl like a bobcat.

I really want to be better about doing our journal this month.  We've gotten a little lax with it the last couple of months and it really is such a great way to practice a variety of skills.  I am thinking about starting Charlotte Mason-style nature journals with the girls and these little ones are a good first step. We did the cover page (the older girls wanted instructions on how to draw a cowboy hat while Littlest scribbled on with abandon), the Brown page (they drew coyotes and spiders that live in a brown desert) and the H page (only the tracing part, we will go back and do the rest of it another day).

Littlest and our friend made the adorable cowboy hat crafts (I declined to use paint today because I was just too tired to pull it all out and they were just as happy with crayons) and ran around the room pretending to be cowgirls while Miss M put herself in a little timeout for a while.  Littlest grabbed a couple Lego horses and was galloping around whinnying.  It was adorable.

Lastly, we attempted the Cowboy Hat Colors game.  I must admit, I found this one a little confusing.  Maybe I'm still recovering from a week of less-than perfect sleep and 41,000 steps in three days.  The instructions were pretty clear but the cowkids were wearing so many colors, I wasn't sure how we were supposed to match the single color hats to them so I changed things up and we only used the hats.  I had each color turn over one hat to begin with and that was the color they were looking for.  If they turned over someone else's hat, they gave it to the person looking for it and got another turn.  When they got a match, they were able to turn over another target hat.  Littlest actually ended up winning, which she liked but her sister did not.

We ended with snack and Disney's Pecos Bill cartoons.  I have a few more activities we may do after nap and tomorrow before starting in with our current week's units on Wednesday.