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.
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