A is for Alligator

I love the theme for June!  A to Zoo Animals has been so fun and we are only a few days in.  It's also nice because Littlest's birthday is next week and we are doing a zoo theme so I've got some built in, already prepared activities to do with her friends. :)

We started with our Dance N Beats DVDs.  The songs and routines for this month are pretty short so we did six of them in just a few minutes.  The girls really enjoyed pretending to be animals and did a good job of following the simple choreography.  This is a great program for getting them moving and excited for the theme, as a transition between activities and as a way to keep them usefully occupied while I prep things for school or simply get some household chores down.  I personally find them a nice way to stretch and wake up my body without requiring too much sweat or coordination.

After we were all warmed up, we started on our zoo books.  I chose to get them all done in one day so they could spend the month reviewing them (plus, our friend doesn't come every day and I didn't want her to miss any of the pages).  I loved watching the girls draw their self-portraits on the ID page.  Miss M is starting to add more details like fingers and belly buttons.  Littlest has started adding facial features and hair.  I need to go through all our art work that I've saved in the curriculum boxes and put together a timeline showing the progression from simple scribbles to recognizable forms.  I think it would be pretty interesting.

With the books, I noticed that they were hole punched on the right side and only once.  I thought this make it a little difficult for the girls to use so I double punch ours on the top and added two rings.  You could use yarn or even a twist tie.  This makes it a little more like a flip book and they seem to like it.

The alligator puppets were a little tricky but a big hit.  I showed the girls how to fold their plates in a triangle and they cut out the faces (I helped Littlest do the curves but cutting is vastly improved from a few months ago).  Then we glued the faces over the plate, covering it completely before we folded the rest of the face down to make the eyes stand up.  I cut out the zig zag paper scraps for teeth and they put the glue along the inside rim of the plates and placed them.  It worked pretty well.  There's no pocket for their hands but they just hold them by the fold and snap them open and shut.  As soon as their puppets were done, they started chasing each other around and looking for food to chomp.  I love listening to the stories they make up on the spot.

I introduced the ABC book that came with this month's materials.  We are only reading the page the coordinates with the letter(s) we are doing that day.  I scattered the letter tiles on the ground and they hunted for the ones in their names.  I might need to make extra tiles so they can make their full names and possibly have their own sets (Littlest is getting quite territorial and Miss M always has been) to play with.

Our final activity for the first day was the alligator nests.  I hid paper eggs with different numbers of dots around the room and Miss M drew a numbered egg from her nest and matched it.  She then decided she needed a bunch of boy alligator babies, wrapped all the paper eggs in her blanket to keep them warm and took the bundle with us to Costco.