Water and Rainbows

We started our week with learning about the water cycle and rainbows.  My girls are still pretty young so we didn't go into a lot of detail but had fun doing the activities outlined in the Teachers Guide.

We started with the bilingual book, coloring each page.  Miss M is getting more detailed, using multiple colors and trying harder to stay within lines or at least color blocks.  Littlest still isn't really "coloring", she likes to draw circles of various colors but she is starting to add facial features to those the circles, which is fun to watch.  After they colored, I had them show me which page was number 1, 2 and so on and we assembled their books to be read later with Daddy.

For the Puddle Jumping activity, I made a new game based on what they had come up with because I thought it would hold their attention a little longer.  I made ten puddles out of blue paper and numbered them.  I made a trail around our living room that led to our circus tent or "rainbow".  We used one of the foam dice that we received with our materials and the girls took turns rolling it, counting the dots (I counted for Littlest while she touched and tried to say the numbers) and then they hopped that many puddles until they reached the rainbow.  They played this for 15 minutes, easily.  Littlest is starting to be able to leave the ground when she hops now, so it was very exciting for her.  Miss M made up variations where she hopped from puddle to puddle while counting in Spanish or backwards.  It's one we will do again.

They loved making the Rainbow Dancer craft.  Miss M cut out her rainbow colors (although she got frustrated and upset a couple times when she accidentally cut into the next color but I showed her how we could fix it with tape) and did most of the construction herself, except the stapling.  I gave Littlest a piece of construction paper with wider spaced lines to practice cutting on because I thought it would be more developmentally appropriate and I didn't want her to maul the rainbow strips.  She actually did pretty well, holding the scissors up more often and squeezing instead of simple tearing with the scissors.  I put tape on the color strips, then named a color for her to hand me, which we put on the plate together.  She got all of the basic colors (I didn't even try to test her on indigo) and was very proud of herself.  When they were done, they chased each other around the downstairs while Miss M chanted "Rain, Rain, Go Away!"

We enjoyed these activities and they've been timely since we have had rain for a good part of the last couple of weeks.  Hoping that changes sometime soon but looking out my window, that doesn't seem likely...

Rub a Dub Dub

Don't you love being quarantined?  Littlest came down with hand, foot and mouth disease (which Miss M has already had) so our friends stayed away and we stayed in.  Thankfully we had some fun things to keep us occupied.

On Monday we did the Bath Time unit.  I taught them the original words to the poem "Rub A Dub Dub" in lieu of the opening song that day and we set aside the I Can Read Book to look at another day (Miss M just wasn't into it that day).  I love those I Can Read Books, they are great to take in the car.

We watched "Harry the Dirty Dog" and then they decorated their dogs.  Instead of having them paint with dirt and paint (my paint is just not very good and I keep meaning to replace it), I had them color with brown crayons on one side of their dogs.  This was fun because they could see the rubbings of the dot stickers from the other side.  They had fun "washing" their dirty dogs in their play sink.

It wasn't until later that I had the idea that I should have had them put the dots on, them laminate the dogs and let them use our dry erase crayons to make him dirty.  Then they could have cleaned him off and started again.  Oh well, hindsight.  We did talk about different ways they get dirty.  Miss M likes to paint her hands with her yogurt and Littlest's favorite seems to be making mud by dumping sand from her sandbox into her water table, then flinging it.

Later on in the day, Littlest needed something to occupy her time while I made dinner so we did the Boats in Bubbles activity.  I filled up our powder room sink, put her in a smock and dumped a bunch of the boat counters into soapy water.  I gave her a variety of spoons and ladles to use to fish them out.  Our big slotted spoon worked the best because she could easily get more than one and it allowed the water to drain out before she dumped them into the bucket.  I could look over at her while I made dinner and name the colors she fished out and count them for her.

We survived the week and Littlest has recovered quickly, thankfully.  I am looking forward to sharing some of our last week's lessons with friends and family next week.

Gone Fishin'

We've been struggling with colds and busyness this week but we did have a fun day of school on Wednesday with our fishing unit.

The girls LOVED the rhyme time poster activity "Once I Caught a Fish".  I think we did it at least a dozen times because everyone wanted multiple turns to hold the poster and sing the song.  They would all burst out laughing and throw themselves on the ground when they came to the last line ("OUCH!"), especially Littlest.  She took her turn with the poster, pointing to the numbers and babbling happily in a sing song fashion.  It was pretty adorable.

The art activity with the fish was a little more difficult than I expected; they all needed quite a lot of hand over hand help to lace around the fish after they finished coloring the backs.  They enjoyed them, though.  Littlest took off running around with her fish, using it like a kite.

I adapted the fishing for letters game just a little bit, using paper clips and a magnetic fishing rod that we already had.  It was easier than trying to make pipe cleaner hooks.  The girls sorted them by letter (upper and lower case) and again by color.  I had forgotten how much kids love fishing games, it was always one of the most requested activities when I was doing articulation therapy (kids would fish for a target word and then practice it with the correct sound before going again).  Some ideas I have come up with:  colors, numbers, letters, shapes, vocabulary words (to help Littlest start using more words) and word families.  I think I'll make different ponds to sort the fish into (such as -it and -ap word families or different colors).  It would also be fun to play memory with the fishing poles, just to change it up.  You could also make a pond with different shapes, letters, whatever and then when they pick a fish, they have to find the match in the pond.  Just some ideas. :)

We did three journal entries today to get caught up.  The girls had a really hard time drawing diamonds so I'm going to find a practice sheet for them.  The internet is overflowing with already created materials; here are a few I found that I thought looked appropriate:  trace and count, trace and color, trace and cut (scroll down a little for the diamond sheet).

We also played the Boat Race game from the Sailboat unit.  Littlest absconded with the foam die so I gave each girl her own small die and they each had two boats.  Miss M played it a few times on her own after lunch.  She doesn't really need help counting anymore but since I had it laminated, I think I will start writing some of the words from her BOB books on the spaces with a dry erase marker and have her read them before she gets to again.  Another thought I had was to make color cards (ala Candyland) and rather than have them pick a specific color to race, see if they can predict which boat will make it to the end first.  It would go like this:  Child 1 chooses a card, rolls the die and moves that boat the specific number of spaces.  Child 2 chooses another card and so on.  You could also use it to help them work on subtraction ("The red boat moved 2 spaces so it only has 8 more spaces to go).

Fingers crossed everyone sleeps better this weekend and kicks the crud.  We have lots of fun in store.

Beavers and Alligators!

We started our Bubbles, Boats and Floats theme this month.  I predict that Littlest will love it for all of the water play ideas I am sure we will encounter.

We started off by learning about rivers and beavers.  We sat in our imaginary boat and sang "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" about eight times with requested lyric changes (i.e. "when you see a crocodile/lion/alligator/dinosaur, don't forget to scream"--at which point, they all scream).  Then we did a fun group activity to help them work together to keep our ball in the blanket "river" before they decided it was more fun to bounce it out as hard as they could.

The art project was pretty fun.  I drew a river outline for Littlest but let the bigger girls do it themselves.  They tore up their own pieces of tissue paper (luckily I had some extra tissue paper because they really enjoyed this part, as well squishing it up really tiny) and glued them on themselves, even the not-quite two-year old.  They weren't interested in adding sand (which I was secretly grateful for, not being in the mood to clean up sand) or sticks to their pictures but they did draw in quite a few details, such as the sky, sun, plants, fish and turtles.

We had an extra friend with us on Monday and the big girls were a bit distracted playing in our circus tent but I used the fishing game to help Littlest work on her colors a little more.  I had her chose a shape link from a bag and match it to the appropriate fish.  When she tired of that, we counted them and made one long chain while I named the different shapes of each link.  It was a fun and really easy modification to the provided activity in the Teacher Guide.


The beaver puppets were so cute!  I let the girls place the pre-cut pieces on their bags and decorate them as desired.  They immediately began role playing with them, pitching their voices differently to speak for them.  Littlest even did her best to join in with the big girls with cute puppet.

That was it for the first day, they were much too excited over their puppets and getting to play together to do more school.

Later in the week, both my girls were quarantined with colds (courtesy of Daddy spreading contagion) and not feeling very chipper but Miss M request that we do an art project so we pulled out the Alligator unit.  They were both super excited about making the A alligators.  I drew teeth outlines for them to try to cut out but the tracing paper I used was really tricking and kept tearing so I ended up doing it myself and letting them tape them on as desired.  Littlest wanted to use all the eyes, so she did (after Miss M grabbed at least two for herself).  Miss M was so excited about her alligator that she took it to her playgroup on Friday to show everyone.

I modified one of the other activities by printing off a cute alligator coloring page and then having them try doing a rubbing to mimic the texture of alligator skin.  I found a bumpy box that they could color over but one of those large green Lego bases would work really well, as would sand paper.  If it hadn't been raining, I would have had them use the patio.

We finished up our brief school day by learning a couple cute alligator songs on YouTube and then they reverted to being cranky and sick.  Thankfully, they seem to be getting over it and we should have a good time exploring this unit more next week.

Dancing with Bees and Butterflies

I really enjoyed the music and the dances on this month's DVD.  The original choreographer (Maria West) returned from maternity leave and I'm quite happy about it.  I really liked the interim one (Kristy) but her dances were a little harder for uncoordinated me to follow (my girls had no problem).

The songs are the same, fun standard I've gotten used to with the program.  I really feel like I get a good workout when I do them with the girls and I don't hate listening to the music because the lyrics are pretty good and the music is always enjoyable.  These dances are great for helping me stretch as well as work muscles and my girls' coordination gets better each time we put one in.

We often use the DVDs at the beginning of school while I finish gathering materials (I know, I should have everything prepped the night before but I'm in survival mode a lot these days) or when they need to get some wiggles out between more academic activities.  We can never do just one song; the minimum appears to be three.

I've mentioned before that there are dance class lessons included with each lesson book (four, to be exact).  We started doing one of the classes on a rainy, non-school day this week.  We got through exactly one activity, where they had to jump each time they heard a word we selected (we chose 'butterfly') in a song and then estimate how many times that word occurred.  Then, we were supposed to listen to the song again and put a counter in a bowl each time we heard it so we could count the exact number of occurrences.  Knowing my girls, I chose to drop the counters in the bowl while they danced.  I asked Miss M how many times she thought she heard the word 'butterfly' (her guess was two--she was pretty intensely watching the dance moves) and then we counted up how many of the garden beads I had put in the bowl (there were eight).  Of course, they both became distracted by the beads and wanted to switch to that activity (which necessitated bringing out our other beads from previous months because one does not simply share the pretty flower beads with your little sister).

It is fun to have these activities at my fingertips, when we have a play date or just need something to fill the time before Daddy gets home.  When I pull out a unit folder on a day or a time when we are not scheduled for school with our friend, I am usually met with some resistance these days but not so with our Dance N Beats classes.  They are a fun addition to our home school.