S and T

So, I love Mother Goose Time buuuuut I had to do something different for S because while Sheep (the animal they chose) technically is spelled with an S at the beginning it does not actually start with an /s/ sound.  I found a cute, free Snake coloring page on the internet and printed off three copies.  I started by showing the girls pictures of snakes and pointing out the different patterns. I had the girls chose 2-3 markers and come up with their own repeating patterns.  For Littlest, I did a simple pattern for her, coloring every other stripe red, and then let her decorate the rest of the picture on her own.  Miss M chose a pattern of four blue, one brown and got a little tired of coloring the four blue after a while so to help her maintain the pattern, I colored the blue stripes and she did the brown one.

The concept review game was fun for the girls.  Since I wanted to reinforce the /s/ sound and we were also doing activities from T is for Tiger, I chose to use letter magnets instead of a small toy to hide under my paper cups.  I randomly placed cut up cards on top of ten overturned cups and hid both letters while the girls closed their eyes.  They then took turns choosing a cup and looking for the magnet letter after telling me about the card on top.  If they chose a number card, I made them count to it.  If they chose a letter card, I made them tell me something that started with that letter.  They had a lot of fun with this game.  Littlest is making good strides with her speech but still can't quite name letters so she just made the sounds and I directed her to identify numbers and shapes instead of choosing them on her own.

These cards could be used in lots of ways.  You could put them in a little Tupperware (to keep them corralled) facedown and use them when playing board games like Candyland and have every player draw one and name it before taking their turn.  You could have your child pick a card, then find something in the room that starts with that sound or is the same shape or color (you could make it into a scavenger hunt for older kids).  For numbers, they could collect that many of a certain object (or different kinds of objects that add up to the total).  You could also use the number cards with coloring games, having them take a number and then color that many items on a page red, for example.  You could do a version of the alphabet car game but have them use names of objects or family members for each letter of the alphabet.

They loved the tiger masks and they turned out so cute!!  I didn't help them at all except to tie the yarn on (I cut it in half first so it was easily adjustable).  After they finished drawing on their stripes and had donned their feline alter egos, all three started growling and prowling around the living room, climbing on the back of sofas.

We finished off the day with masks firmly in place and dancing away to the ABC Zoo Dance N Beats DVD.  We started with the T is for Tiger song and then they chose their favorite letters from there.  I think my favorite was watching them run around like quick quail, especially Littlest who still has that adorable whole-torso toddler run.  It was a fun morning for us.

G is for Gorilla

Another fun preschool day today as we dove into the second week of our A to Zoo Animals theme.  I had planned to do F is for Fox but we only got through the craft before the girls decided they just wanted to play for half an hour.  I was able to rein them back in with the promise of another craft and then we did some of the activities.  I'm really trying to let them lead more and not worry so much about what we do and don't get done.

Littlest really liked the F is for Fox Art activity.  It was similar to one we did a few months ago and turned out just as cute.  I cut out the tail and ears but she had fun shredding the napkin and gluing it on the tail.  She also started doing some actual vertical scribbling for the first time, instead of just drawing circles.  I was impressed.

All of the girls liked the gorilla mask activity and combing the paint on, although eventually they asked for paint brushes.  I need to find a better type of paint for them to use once we finally finish off this horrible stuff I can't make myself just throw out.  It's too thick and gloppy.  With the masks, I noticed that they'd curled a bit after they dried so I ran them through the laminator and then had the brilliant idea that they could use a dry erase marker to add facial features since they had just painted the fur and that was it.  It worked really nicely with the emotion spinner.  Miss M cycled through happy, sad, angry and surprised pretty quickly before deciding her gorilla was happy and wanted to go eat more bugs and berries.

I modified the Gorilla food activity because honestly I was just too tired at that point to pick myself up off the floor and hide the letter tiles.  The girls were just as happy passing the bag around, taking one, naming it and finding the match.  Miss M and I named animals that started with our letters and Littlest made their sounds.  They really liked this game.  I think I may stick it in our file folder box for the month.

We ended our school time by dancing through the entire Dance N Beats DVD for the month.  Littlest is especially enjoying it because there seem to be fewer types of movements and she can pick them up faster in these short songs.  It is super cute to watch.

We are headed to the zoo for Littlest's birthday on Friday so I may make up an animal scavenger hunt based on the ones we have already done (and will do) for fun.  It should be a good time if it's not too blasted hot.  I'm kind of missing the rain from a couple weeks ago...

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.

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.

Beautiful Butterflies

We finished out our Bees and Butterflies unit this week by learning about different kinds of butterflies.  Miss M later told me her favorite is the Blue Morpho.  I love the way she says it. :)

I decided to do the storytelling activity a little differently than we often do; I gave each girl a butterfly, bee and flower and then let them tell me the story.  Our friend started it off, Miss M played off of hers and Littlest buzzed around them both, flapping like a butterfly.  They went back and forth, helping their insects find food and take it back home, for quite a while.  It was fun to watch and I wished I'd recorded it.

You can tell by the blur that they
were pretty into the music.

We made the butterfly wands, giving the girls free rein to decorate however they felt.  Littlest stuck mostly to stickers while the older girls did more drawing and approximated patterns more similar to an actual butterfly.  Instead of just using the music CD, we turned on our Dance N Beats DVD for this month and they danced with their butterfly props for a few songs before I brought them back in for another activity.

They loved the matching game.  I gave each girl a caterpillar and they had to find their matching butterfly.  Miss M remembered days later that she was the Peacock Butterfly.  I may need to make a few more cards to go with that game.

I think my favorite activity this month was the journal.  We were really good about making sure we stayed caught up and both of the older girls are really getting into writing and making up their own stories about the pictures they draw.  Littlest even kept at her journal for just as long as the big girls, even if she mostly just drew circles.  The journal is such a great way to practice a host of skills, including fine motor/writing, counting, language, shape and color identification, etc...This summer I plan to buy each girl a composition notebook and we are going to draw a picture every night after dinner about their favorite activity from the day.  It will be so fun to pull these out when they are older to see how much they've grown and to review the things that were important to them when they were little.

We played the Pollinate the Flowers number identification game as outlined in the Teachers Guide at first but after a while I adapted it to their attention span.  They got really excited when I started spinning the spinner and telling them which number they had to find and bring to me, although Miss M got upset at the end because she wasn't the one to find the last number.  She thought that meant she hadn't won the game.  I didn't even know she had a concept of win/lose because we don't play games that way yet.  It gave me the opportunity to talk to her about the purpose of the game and sportsmanship.  I'm not sure how much sunk in but we will find out the next time we try this game.

Pollinator BINGO was a blast and a great way to work on language skills. Instead of just showing the girls which butterfly or flower I had drawn for them to find on their cards, I described it (three pink flowers, a blue butterfly with dots).  They also had to look closely because some of them shared characteristics but were different (a great way to work on the concept of same/different).  Miss M would yell BINGO really loudly every time she got three in a row and informed me that she was calling the dog Bingo to come play with her butterflies.  BINGO games are super easy to make yourself with clipart or even just a couple sheets of stickers and you can use them to work on colors, numbers, sight words, alphabet skills or vocabulary.

I think one of the girls' favorite activities was the Giant Blue Morpho activity where they measured their hands and different objects to see if they could find something that was the same size as the butterfly.  I pulled out a measuring tape and secured it at the eight inch mark so they could use it themselves to measure the toys they found.

The postcards are always fun and this month Miss M decided to use it as a thank you card for a friend who had invited her over to play in his backyard a couple weeks ago.  She insisted on writing his name (with me telling her the letters) and then trying to copy the message I wrote on it for her.  She was very proud to hand it to his mom.

That was our month.  This was a really fun unit and I look forward to doing it again when the girls are older and expanding on some of the fun details we learned.

Dancing in the Desert

Miss M decided she wanted to dress up as a dancer today so it was the perfect opportunity to pull out our Dance N Beats DVD and teacher guide for a dance party.  I decided to do a mix and match of the activities and songs in order to keep her interest.

Ignore her outfit, I'm just
glad she's dressed.

We started with the warm up song as usual, with Littlest joining in and performing the whole thing flawlessly.  They moved on to Giddy-Up, which prompted Littlest to pull out her cowboy hat and rocking horse.  Next, Miss M requested "the camel song" (Sahara, the Camel).  Something about this song and dance struck a chord in her and she repeated it four times.

She finally decided to take a break and we did the cactus subtraction activity in the book.  I made a pillar-like cactus out of our multicolored play dough and stuck ten toothpicks in it.  They were fascinated.  I grabbed our number die (as opposed to one with dots, to help Littlest work on number recognition 1-3 and to help drag the game out a little longer since two rolls of 5 would pretty much end it) and we practiced taking turns pulling out cactus spines, then counting how many remained.  When they pulled them all out, we reversed the game and started rolling to put them back in, adding instead of subtracting.  We did this two times before they both wanted their own play dough to make sculptures bristling with toothpicks.  Miss M commented that her cactus was for Sahara the camel because camels can eat thorny plants (a tidbit she picked up watching "Diego" during breakfast).


That ended up being the last activity, since they both moved on to playing with their dolls.  I would like to do the Sand Letters activity in the next day or two, using our phonics cards and salt in our rimmed IKEA plates.  I've also thought it would be fun to have them trace printed letters with glue and sprinkle with salt or sand as an art project.  You can color salt pretty easily with food coloring, to make it pretty.  Something along the lines of this.



All of the dance classes have an art project associated with them but the girls weren't interested today.  This subject has so much potential, though.  Last week, we went to an art program hosted by our local university for preschoolers and the theme was "The American West".  It was perfect.  They got to view paintings and sculptures, then came back to the art room and made three different art projects, using different mediums.  I'm not sure what the rules are about posting photos of those pieces so I haven't but they included making a bean/seed mosaic of a cowboy boot, a bolo tie with twine, paper, sequins and drinking straw pieces and a desert scene that they colored and then stamped green spines on the cactus by dipping a plastic fork in paint.

This has been a fun theme to explore this month and I hope to revisit it with the girls in the future.

Catching Up

We've missed a few of our units lately and I didn't want to totally bypass them so we had a sampler day today.  

We started off the morning with some Dance N Beats to help work out the whiny and the wiggly that seemed to infect the girls this morning.

After circle time, we went into the kitchen and I let the girls investigate the horse counters that came with this month's theme.  Miss M immediately wanted to lay claim to all the purple ones so instead we passed them out randomly until everyone had the same amount and that actually seemed to appease them.  I thought it would be fun to the do the Quicksand activity.  I used the sand packet from the Great Pyramid activity last week and let them take turns stirring the glue into it.  It was hard for Littlest to give up her turn and she cried a lot but it was a good learning experience.  We added the liquid starch and then I divided the quicksand into three bowls to let them experiment with having the horses sink or just making patterns with their feet.  They did not love the texture when it got on their fingers but still spent a lot of time playing with it and Miss M asked to use it again after lunch.

Littlest decided she needed a break so she went off to the living room while the older girls and I played the Tortoise Pattern game.  I adapted the rules a little, allowing them to stack a block of the same color if they didn't have any more spaces for one, which headed off some of the whining that has been prevalent in our house lately (I blame the weather).  This game actually took a pretty long time to finish with each of us having our own tortoises.  Miss M stuck it out but our friend got a little bored so I might just do one tortoise for the group next time.  The game ended with the first person to complete their shell pattern (thankfully it was Miss M, no so whining).  After it was done, we grouped our stacks of two blocks, stacked our singles and counted all of the blocks by 2 for some math practice.

I am determined to complete our journals this month so I bribed the girls with popcorn to do their H page.  They actually both really liked putting the toothpicks into the shape and gluing them on the page (although Littlest got a hold of the glue bottle and it will probably take 12 hours for her page to dry enough to close).  Miss M tends to want to color and make sure she's covering all the dots so we did a lot of hand over hand and then she wrote a pretty nice H all on her own later.

That was it for the morning.  I've got the Desert Matching game cut out and waiting on the table for them to do after nap, while I'm trying to put together dinner.  I am brainstorming ideas for keeping the games available for use during the month without losing track of where they go in the units.  I did make an amazing discovery last week--the cute Mother Goose Time box that the materials come in will nicely fit all of the units in file folders.  No more bankers boxes and hanging folders for me; from now on I'll be storing the materials in the box they came in.  Woo hoo!

The Great Pyramid

What a fun day!  We learned about the Great Pyramid in school.  While I was describing what a pyramid is, Miss M remembered she had seen in a program and promptly decided to build one using the couch cushions.  It wasn't very stable but she enjoyed piling up the pillows and quickly laying down next to her "pyramid" so they could fall on her.  I enjoyed watching her brainstorm which pillows should go where and was happy I didn't try to rein her back into our original activity too quickly.

Next we did some prewriting with the hieroglyphics activity.  I poured salt over the cards and they used their fingers to trace the design, then I gave them paper to try and draw their own versions.  Littlest did circles and the older girls quickly decided they needed to add rainbows and birthday cakes but it was still good practice.

They all really enjoyed stamping the rectangle bricks on the pyramid structure.  I opted to use the salt that was left over from the previous project instead of opening the bag of sand included in the materials.  That will get placed in our general art materials for something else.

Our weather has been so weird lately, one day warm and the next cold and blustery.  The girls had been cooped up for a while and needed to let some energy out so we popped in our beloved Dance N Beats DVD to try out some new routines for a while.  It also gave me a chance to clean up the salt and paint while keeping them engaged in something school related rather than letting them loose in the play area, from which it would be more difficult to get them to come back later.  I have found that Dance N Beats makes a good transition or break for all of us.

That was it for the week, as far as structured school went.  It's been one of those weeks where everything tends to go a little askew (kind of like the picture placement in this post--I cannot for the life of me get that first picture to move where I want it).  I am hoping for a more normal week and looking forward to getting to do more of our units.

Dancing with Littlest

Have I mentioned lately how much Littlest LOVES our Dance N Beats DVDs?  She isn't talking much but she requests it almost daily by pointing at the TV and starting the warm up routine.  Last Friday we had no errands to run during her sister's playgroup time and I wanted to keep her out of the way while the electricians hung our new ceiling fan (quite an adventure in our two-story foyer) so instead of just playing the DVD for her, I modified one of the classes outlined in the companion book.  Most of these activities are written for children 3-5 years old but I was able to easily switch them up to apply to my 20-month old.

We followed the lesson plan for the first class in the book.  Instead of having her pick out fruit shapes during the song, I made a simple matching game using construction paper.  She loved having a game that was all hers and did a good job finding the banana, apple, pear and orange matches.  This activity helped her work on colors (yellow, orange, red and green) and the concept of same/different.

The second activity was supposed to be a letter identification one but since she's still so little I decided to change it into a shape identification game.  I cut out green circles, drew shapes on them and then spread out the shapes of the month cards around the room.  I gave her a green circle, named the shape and told her to find the same one.  She did it perfectly and enjoyed playing a couple rounds of this game.

In between each game, we danced to a song that coordinated with our activity.  She is getting better and better at being able to follow along with the dance moves on the first time through.  It helps that they are fairly simple and the songs are catchy.

After she exhausted her attention span (which was about 20 minutes), we practiced some of the spreading skills we learned the first week and frosted cookies for the guys risking their necks to help put our ceiling fan.  Maybe not the healthiest choice given our monthly topic of Food and Fitness but it was Valentine's weekend so we made an exception.

I love that I can use these fun games as a way of observing my girls' development so I know what they can do and what we can continue to work on.  We aren't in a formal learning setting so we don't have "assessments" but I can still keep track of how they are doing just by being conscious enough to watch.  I love how these materials help remind me to do that (they literally have notes of what to observe in the teacher's guide); it puts my mind at ease that they are growing and learning just fine.

Dancing on Safari

Miss M had playgroup today so Littlest and I had an hour of one on one time after we finished our errands and before we picked her up.  We spent about half of that time with our Dance N Beats curriculum.  The dance lessons are written for a little older children so I modified some of the activities to be more appropriate for a 19-month old.

We started with the warm-up dance, which is her favorite.  She can do the whole thing and gets very excited when someone joins her.  I really like this month's music, which is heavily influenced by tribal drums and chants, as well as the dance moves.  It's quite a good Zumba-esque workout if you do the whole DVD.  Littlest tends to watch or do her own dance moves to the other songs since she's not as familiar with them.

We listened to the Colored Beads song and then I modified the corresponding activity.  We took some play dough and I molded it into something of a porcupine/hedgehog shape.  I got some spaghetti noodles and broke them in half, then let Littlest poke them into the dough wherever she wanted to.  Speech therapist mommy took over and we practiced the concept of "in" and "out" as she moved them around the dough.  I gave her a handful of Fruity Cheerios and I counted them and named their color as she slipped them on the noodles.  Along with the counting and language concepts, this was a good fine motor activity that held her attention for a good seven minutes.

Next we made the rainstick.  In the guide, it recommends using a plastic bottle with a screw top lid but  I didn't have one so we used an old puffs container since she hasn't had the finger strength to pry those lids off on her own.  We counted toothpicks as she put them in and she practiced scooping rice and split peas into the container.  We went into the living room to play with our new rhythm instrument during a song and that's where I learned that her fine motor skills have improved in the last couple of days as she decided to test the theory "What happens when I peel this lid off and hold the container upside down while Mommy runs across the room to get to me?"  After an impromptu vacuuming session, we finished listening to a couple songs while she practiced stomping like a rhino, roaring like a lion and bellowing like an elephant.

Dancing on Safari

I just couldn't wait until January to open our new Dance N Beats DVD.  My nephew is in town and he loves it when we do school (even though he is a big kindergartner now, the activities in the Mother Goose Time curriculum really appeals to him) so we did one of the "dance party" lessons in the Dance N Beats manual.

I love that the music this month includes African tribal chants; there is something about the drum beat that really gets to me and could almost make me start dancing spontaneously (as long as no one else was in the room).  We started with a couple dance songs while I gathered our materials for the academic activities (this was kind of spontaneous and it as nice that all of the materials could be easily and quickly gathered).

I had just (literally half an hour before) put an empty wrapping paper tube in the recycling prior to starting our lesson so I quickly retrieved it, cut it into various lengths and we did a quick activity of comparing the different lengths (which played nicely off our class from Monday) of the tubes and then practiced counting.  I had the kids roll a die and then place that many dots or stamps on their "giraffe neck".  For my nephew, I had him use two dice to make it a little harder.  Littlest just scribbled and stamped to her heart's content.  They kept at this for a good 7-10 minutes before moving on to the next dance.

While they danced to the giraffe song, I prepped the art activity.  I used white paper plates and drew lines on them.  I marked every other space with a B (for black) and had them paint stripes for the zebra shaker project in the manual.  It was a little difficult for Miss M to get the concept of skipping a space but I think she was starting to get it.  Littlest just made dots but she had fun doing it so we will just call hers a Dalmatian shaker.  We haven't actually finished these yet because they needed to dry before stapling them together with beans inside and we've been pretty busy but I'll try to update with a completed project photo when we get to it.

One more dance and it was time for Grass Letters.  By this time my girls had moved on to showing their grandparents their favorite Christmas gifts (Duplos, Magformers and a doll) but my nephew was still with me.  I cut up green paper into strips, then made up cards with upper case letters on them.  I started with all the "stick" letters and then added a few of the "curvy" letters for more difficulty.  He used the strips to form the letters on the cards and declared it to be "easy peasy" until he got to the letter C.  We puzzled it out, decided on the best configuration and then he decided it was time to get in on the toy testing so we were done.

I really love these little lessons in the Dance N Beats manual.  They are super simple and a great way to pass the time between nap and dinner that helps get the kids moving during this frigid winter weather and keeps them learning in a fun way.

An InLinkz Link-up

Little Adaptations

This is her version of
"shoulders up and down".

Littlest and I had school alone on Friday while Miss M was at her playgroup.  She thrives on one on one time and I am trying to find ways to give each girl more of that.

We warmed up with some Dance N Beats.  She loves the Warm Up song and can follow along quite well.  It's super cute and she is so proud of herself.

We had circle time.  I focused on lots of counting and pointing out the numbers on the calendar and then we did a little bit with identifying two of our letters for the month: M and V.  I put the letter flag up on the board, said the name and sound several times and traced it with my finger (which of course led to her tracing it with her finger).  I pulled out our card stock letters and helped her find the one that was the same, then repeated the activity with the upper case phonics card (I'll wait to lower case for a little bit).  We only spent about three minutes on this because that was the limit of her attention.

We did activities from a couple different units today.  The jingle bell craft was a really hit (also with Miss M when she came home from school.  I found that putting the little cup on one of their hands while they colored it helped them decorate more than just the top/bottom (which is covered in wax to be water-resistant and thus leads to smeared marker).  They could both help me poke the pipe cleaner through the hole but I had to the bell and twist the two ends into a handle.  It's a fun little musical prop that we will leave accessible for the rest of the month.

The shape manipulatives this month are so much fun!  Littlest gave a little shriek of excitement when I poured them on the table.  She wanted to stack in them in the middle more than connect them from the sides but I named the shapes as she grabbed them and we did a little sorting by color.

I adapted the Owl Shapes game a little to make it more portable.  First I laminated and cut out the shapes, then traced around them onto a piece of card stock that I also laminated after labeling the shapes (I like having the printed names on things even if it's way too early to think about reading because it gives them familiarity with the words).  A little bit of double sided tape on the game board and she was happy to play this about five times while I labeled the shape she was currently matching.

All of that took us about 40 minutes and then it was time to pick up Miss M and do a little feeding at the little farm where she has her playgroup.  They have a kangaroo, calf and tons of turkeys and chickens that both girls get really excited to see every week.  I want them to comfortable (and safe) around animals so I love it, too.

Finishing Up

We have been having a lot of fun with family this week and didn't get around to a lot of formal school after we left home.  I did make a variation of the bus game that my nearly six-year old nephew has really enjoyed and played several times with a variety of family members.

We used blocks to create bus stops around the living room.  The longest blocks were reserved for our "buses" and a collection of Little People and other block characters served as passengers.  We set up a little depot on one end of the living room.  I used the bus matching cards to determine how many passengers each player could take during a turn and counted out the same number of bus tickets, assigning one to each passenger.  Then we went off on our routes, dropping off passengers at the indicated bus stop (square, circle, rectangle or triangle).  When we had dropped off our passengers, we drew another bus card and picked up more until they had all been distributed.  Then we counted up how many passengers were at each stop and determined which stop had the most and which had the least.  It was a super popular game and entertained him for about half an hour each time we got it out.

We also played the bus matching/number identification game.  He is in kindergarten and quite good at this already so next time we play, I might have him count out an equal number of Unix cubes each time he gets a match and then count up the total at the end.  The person with the most cubes will be the winner, rather than the person with the most matches.

Miss M put on a dance recital on Friday night using Dance N Beats.  She started with some of the choreographed moves but then improvised many of her own while still maintaining the beat of the songs.  She knows all of the dances and likes to do them but lately she has been wanting to make up her own dances.  She's an original and I can't wait to see where she goes with this particular interest.

In addition to playing some of our school games, the girls and I did a lot of art this morning with my mom.  She is a former art teacher and has lots of ideas and materials.  We started with coffee filter Christmas trees.  They used Bingo daubers and smelly markers to
cover their filters with color, then we sprayed them down with a water bottle so the colors would run together.  After they dried, I cut them out into a Christmas tree shape (I stacked them, folded them in half and drew a half shape before cutting it out).  I punched out some circles and cut out Christmas lights and stars from scrap construction paper and they used those to decorate them.  Foil star stickers, glitter or sequins would be really pretty, too.

My dad works for a paper company and is able to bring home end of rolls that make great art paper.  We covered the kids table with a big piece of paper and got out simple stencils and flat crayons to try some rubbings.  It was a little hard for the girls but they liked coloring them in once we created them.  They probably sat and colored for 30-45 minutes without getting up.  It was pretty impressive for their ages.