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.