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!

Eating Fruits and Veggies

This month's theme is Food and Fitness so we learned about the importance of eating  healthy foods from the different food groups, especially fruits and vegetables.

The shape for this month was a heart so I used my handy-dandy Photoshop shape tool to create a quick paper for them to practice tracing.  I'm sure you could find something prettier online for free, this was just the fastest thing for me and I wanted Miss M to get some practice before we work on her Valentine's cards for her playgroup party on Friday.  Littlest had fun with it and even allowed me to help her trace (this is a big deal because she usually throws a fit when you suggest she can't do something by herself).

The vegetable math counters have been a HUGE hit at our house.  As soon as I took them out of the bag, I almost lost the kids entirely because all they wanted to do was play with them.  They divvied them up by kind pretty quickly and we practiced tracing around them and counting them.  They were also a good way to review/teach colors.

The vegetable washing game was a hit as well.  Rather than using water and real vegetables (which would end up all over the floor because Littlest loves splashing and dumping water), I gathered vegetables from our play kitchen and a clean sponge and let the girls take turns counting to 12 as they scrubbed the veggies.  That was pretty easy for them so I wrote out a number line on a piece of scratch paper, circled every other number and had them count by 2s.

Last month we slacked on our journal so I'm excited to get back into for February.  We decorated our covers with pictures of produce from the grocery ads and they named their favorites to eat.  Miss M kept saying how much she loved carrots, although she's never eaten them when I've cooked them so I gave her some matchstick carrots at snack and she gobbled them right up.

I made up a little vegetable soup game with vegetable counters since they all wanted a chance to put them in a bowl and stir them.  I made little cards out of construction paper and wrote each type of vegetable on a card, along with a number that indicated how many were to be added to the bowl.  I made sure not to have more than four of each type of vegetable called for so we wouldn't have to take vegetables out for someone to complete a turn.  So, for example, I had a card that said 1 pepper and another that said 3 peppers since we had four peppers total.  It gave them a chance to practice reading numbers and seeing if they could figure out which vegetable was written on there based on the initial letter.

Instead of having the girls go diving under a blanket to pick the pretend strawberries on Fruit Day (which I knew would lead to them playing other things and not paying attention to what we were trying to do), we used a blanket to make a row where we "planted" them.  It was a good chance to help Littlest with color identification while the others used the die to see how many red ones they would get to put in their baskets.

The girls loved making their own strawberries and pouncing the seeds on with the poky ball.  I drew leaves for them to cut out to give them some more guidance and practice with turning the paper.  Miss M got a little confused and ended up cutting her paper into little green pieces while I helped her sister but we figured out how to make it look good and she was very proud of herself.

We also traced the letter J with orange juice, as written in the Teachers Guide.  The girls loved the smell of the orange and asked for them at snack time.  Littlest was especially smitten with hers and kept running off with it.

I printed off the food groups coloring book from the Member Resources section of the website and they colored the fruit picture. I like to have coloring options for the girls when we go out to eat so this will end up in our "restaurant" bag to help keep them calm and quiet.

Those were a few of our activities from this week!  I hope something was helpful.

Cookies!

The theme for the day was cookies and it provided lots of fun learning experiences as well as a yummy snack.  The focus topic this month is math and there were lots of different ways of incorporating it in this lesson.

We had circle time and practiced counting the days of the month and predicting what that next picture in our calendar pattern would be the next day.  After that, I pulled out Miss M's wooden Melissa and Doug cookie set (it's actually a mixture of two sets that she got for her birthday) and we used it to sing and count along to the song of the day, a reboot of "One Potato, Two Potato".  Miss M actually made up her own version of this song using the cookies a week or so ago.

I brought out the shape manipulatives and they really had a good time with these.  We used the pattern cards in the last to see if they could duplicate the designs.  This was actually a little more difficult than I expected, so I think I will make up a few more examples and have them practice some more.  We tried a little tracing and I realized that I needed to teach them how to hold the shape with one hand use the pencil with the other.  This took a little more coordination than they have at the moment but they tried and that counts.  Mostly they wanted to stack the shapes into tall towers so we counted them and did a little sorting by color and shape.  Next time I think we will talk about how many sides they have and how they are the same and different.

We tried the cookie craft but they were not interesting in making matching pairs or even putting very many of them on the plate.  They liked adding the sticky dots and making designs with them but this activity was over pretty quickly.

I happened to have  a few unfrosted sugar cookies left over from a neighbor activity so I mixed up some quick powder sugar glaze while they decorated their paper cookies.  I gave them each a little container with the white frosting and turned it into a little lesson on color mixing.  Miss M wanted orange and Littlest's favorite color seems to be purple so we added food coloring and they got to mix to discover the new color before frosting their cookie and having snack.  This was a popular activity.  :)

At the end I brought out the play dough I made last week and we had fun adding nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon to it so it really smelled like Christmas.  All three had a great time strengthening their hands by patting out the dough and improving their fine motor with the beads.  They played for fifteen minutes, cutting out their own play dough cookies and decorating them, plus my kitchen smelled nice when they were done.

I was disappointed that my printer wasn't communicating well with my computer so we couldn't do the cookie jar activity with the online printable but I am hoping to do it another time.  It is meant for a handwriting activity but since my kids are still a little young for writing, I've got an idea to make it a shape matching game.  Print two copies, one on card stock if you can, and color them (you could have the kids color them if you wanted).  Laminate and tape a ziplock bag onto the back of the card stock jar.  Cut out the shapes from the other one and put them in the bag.  The children take turns pulling a "cookie" out of the jar and matching it to the front.  Another variation would be to print 3-5 copies of the jar.  Color the master jar and one other jar exactly the same and then color the other shapes differently from these (so the master circle is blue, there is another blue circle, a yellow one and a red one in the bag).  This way you can work on same/different (these are both circles but this one is green and the other is blue) and sorting (let's put all the green shapes together).  I hope that makes sense.

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Making Friends

We have started our September unit, Friends and Feelings.  During circle time I had the girls look at each other and list off the attributes that were the same while I pointed out things that were different.  There is a great episode of Daniel Tiger on this very concept if you're looking for a fun media supplement.

The girls enjoyed learning how to say hello in different languages.  I think I will make this a part of our circle time from now on and maybe look up "goodbye" in the corresponding languages so we can use them both.  We played the matching game by first handing a card to each girl and placing the rest face down on the floor.  I turned their name tags over and picked one to decide who got to go first (I will be doing this from now on, it worked really well) and then let that girl turn over one card.  If it matched her card, she got to keep it and pick another card to match on her next turn.  If it didn't match, she turned it over and kept the original card.  It actually went pretty well.  Littlest even had a card to match but her attention span conked out before her second turn, which was fine.

Making the friend puppets was a huge highlight.  They named them after themselves at first, although Miss M later changed hers to Elsa Tiger.  Littlest liked playing with the feathers and glue and scribbling on paper but otherwise wasn't much interested in the puppet itself.  The older girls zoomed around the downstairs, rescuing each other while I cleaned up the art supplies and set up the bus sorting game.  The puppets were then used to help the buses get to their appropriate stations at the store, church, library, museum and park.

Littlest has lots of fun putting things away so after the girls finished sorting the buses appropriately, I let them zoom around some more and focused on labeling the bus colors while Littlest put them in the container.  We then dumped the container and sorted them together.  It took a lot of modeling but she did get the concept after a while.  With Miss M attending a three hour playgroup on Fridays now, I see a great opportunity to use my MGT materials with Littlest (which she will love having unfettered access to with her sister gone).

It was a really successful beginning of a new unit.  I think the focus on labeling emotions and interacting with friends will be great for Miss M as she meets new children in the playgroup and encounters opportunities to express how she is feeling in an appropriate way.

Bushels of Fun

So far this week we have learned about carrots, potatoes and beans as we practiced counting, identifying colors and letters and retelling stories.

Miss M and her daddy were my students on Monday as our friends were off celebrating Memorial Day with their families.  Our streak of inattentiveness continued but having her dad there definitely helped.  She liked being able to show him what to do with the calendar and dancing to her favorite garden tracks on the Dance N Beats DVD (I have some fabulous video but have been forbidden to post it anywhere).


I took the carrot cut outs and hid them around the room so we could work a little on prepositions (in, on, under and between were our main focus) and this was quite fun for her, especially when she decided it was her turn to hide them.  Unfortunately she wasn't interested in sewing them together but one tip I had for that was to wrap tape around one end of the yard to make a "needle" and keep it from fraying, then tape the other end to the back of one of the carrots so they can't pull it out when they are sewing.  I'm hoping she'll be more willing later, especially as our rather unpredictable weather has been keeping us inside a lot.

She had a blast reviewing colors with Daddy.  I gave each of them one of the laminated magnifying glasses and they took turns picking a craft stick with a color written on it, then they would both go around the room and look for something that color.

The last activity she agreed to participate in was the Eye Chart and only if Daddy was sitting behind her while she sat on one of our footstools.  Whatever, it worked and she did great until the very last line.  She likes to play doctor with her stuffed animals sometimes so maybe I'll keep it out for her to use or make a couple more so we can review more letters and numbers later on.

Yesterday we planted our bean sprout from a couple weeks ago in our garden.  I check on it today and it seems to be liking our rainy weather.  I'm not even sure what kind of bean it is but it will be fun to watch it grow.

Today we only had one of our friend's with us as we did lots of dancing (both kids really needed a physical outlet due to being indoors so much with our unseasonably damp weather), counted beans, made fingerprint beans on our beanstalks and retold the story of "Jack and the Beanstalk" together.  The counting beans activity was actually really fun for them, they liked scooping them into their own bowls.  We used spoons of different sizes and made predictions about how many beans we could scoop with the small, medium and large spoons.  We counted them, made piles and compared which one had less and which one had more.  I would have let them play with them longer but Littlest is dropping her morning nap and was getting a little too hard to keep away from the beans (and the beans from her mouth).

I really love the story kits and am trying to come up with a way of storing them separately so Miss M can use them on her own and we can quickly grab them for story time before bed as well.

Only two more days in this fun unit and then it is June already!

Animals in the Garden

It's a new week and a new set of lessons with Mother Goose Time!  Today we learned about moles and crows as we practiced counting, learning sight words and reviewing our colors and shapes.

After reviewing our calendar, we read the included take-home book "What Do You Like?" This formulaic little book helped us work on the sight words LIKE, LITTLE and SAID.  It works out perfectly with three kids, I gave each one a copy of one of the words and had them hold it up as we read their word in the book.  After we read through it, they got to draw a picture of a food they like to eat (Miss M drew grapes, which she eats by the bushel).

We worked on our journals, practicing drawing a diamond shape, which was a little difficult for them.  They've all mastered circles but straight lines and angles are still a little difficult.  I think I'll try and find an art project we can do next time that will help with that.  I also made sure to do the sentence completion task with them today, finishing the sentence "The crow is ______."  I try really hard not to let me personal prejudices against food or animals come out so I didn't say anything negative about crows, which have seemed creepy to me (thanks to the fantasy fiction I read as a child, where they are inevitably harbingers of evil) but Miss M's sentence was "The crow is eating M (her name)." Hmmm, I guess she's just a very intuitive child...

I think the most popular activity of the day was our mole ball run.  We talked about how moles live underground and dig tunnels to get from place to place.  I gave each child two "mole tunnels" and they got to choose where they put them on the wall.  The first run was very straightforward, literally.  The second one I suggested adding a bend to (which necessitated some patchwork to make sure the ball stayed in the tunnel) and they had a blast taking turns putting the ball down the tubes.  I think this will be staying on our wall until Littlest completely destroys it (so, about a day and a half).

We reviewed colors using the included folder game.  Miss M had a very hard time sitting still and following directions so I let her run off some steam while her friends played it, although she did come back periodically for her turn.  It was an opportunity to teach her consequences as she ran off and was skipped more than once.  She did not like that.

During snack they played "Feed the Crow", a version of the game "Don't Eat Pete".  They each took turns turning over a card that either had food or a scarecrow on it.  Once the scarecrow is found, the game is over and each player counts how many food cards they collected.  We also went through all the cards and talked about which foods they would like to eat (corn, berries and pie were favorites) and what they would not want to eat (ants and worms were definitely gross to them, thankfully).

If we had had time, I would have gotten out the IKEA tunnel for them to play in.  Given that it has rained daily for a week and doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon, a mole game may be in the making for some indoor fun.  I'll let you know if I come up with something worth sharing.

If you want to see what other Mother Goose Time Bloggers are doing, check out these links!

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