Family Picnic Variations

I have always loved the extra celebration packs MGT adds to many of their monthly curriculum boxes.  This month was a family picnic, full of ideas for games and treats.  I find them very inspiring and usually end up coming up with some of my own ideas using the materials provided.  I thought I'd share some of those ideas today.

The spinner that came in the packet can be used for lots of different things.  I came up with a spin-off of the pasta salad game using it.  I didn't have plastic ants and didn't want to go buy any since we have little things coming out of our ears right now.  Instead, I used some of the foam shapes I've collected from previous month's boxes and added it to a bowlful of expired penne I found hiding on the top shelf of my pantry.  Using tweezers from another month of curriculum, the girls would take turns spinning and then pick out the corresponding number of shapes from the noodles.  You could also use little sticky notes, draw shapes on them and place them over the number for another variation.

After they finished that game, we continued to use the spinner and the pasta.  I cut long pieces of  yarn, made a tape "needle" on one end and tied a piece of pasta to the other.  They then took turns spinning and threading the corresponding number of pasta pieces onto their yarn to make a necklace. Miss M made a nice ABC pattern.

We then took our magnifying glass (from last July's nature box) outside and started looking for things in nature.  Originally I was going to have them observe some of the ants that live at the end of our patio but those little suckers were super fast so we settled for closely examining our roses and lavender flowers as well as the honeybees visiting them.  The girls then drew chalk pictures of what they saw (I see this as a precursor to nature journals, which I'd like to start with them next summer).  We talked about the different parts of the plants, the colors, smells and how they felt.


Daddy joined us outside and came up with a fun but definitely adult-supervision only activity.  Being a boy and former Scout, he decided to show the girls how to use the magnifying glass to concentrate the sun's rays and melt crayons onto a piece of paper.  We talked about safety as well as why the crayon was changing from solid to a liquid.  They had fun swirling the melted wax and drawing with the stubs.

Those were my variations to some really fun activities as we end the month of August.

Structures

We've been doing from the Structures lesson and inspired by it for a few days.  We started at my parents house with my nephew.  I'll be honest, I couldn't figure out how to fold the Strong Shapes, except for the cylinder.  I tried but after nearly a week of very little sleep (thanks to Littlest's sudden need to be rocked to sleep and hold my hand all night) my brain just wasn't functioning at it's highest capacity.

I gave my nephew a few of the letter cards and he did his best to twist the pipe cleaners into the same shapes.  Obviously sinuous letters like S were easy but he had a harder time with some of the others.  Miss M wasn't interested in participating at this time and I didn't push it.

We did use the pictures to create the shapes with straws and pipe cleaners.  Miss M enjoyed figuring this out, although it was a bit over Littlest's head.  We turned the triangle into a necklace, which caught her attention, though.

I talked with my nephew about which shape was the strongest (he guessed a square).  I think it would have been a good idea for me to elaborate on this by showing pictures of buildings with triangular elements, as well as bridges.  We spent some time building the strongest structures we could with his blocks (unfortunately, no pictures).

When we finally got home from our long car ride, the girls wanted something to do so I had them build with their blocks.  Of course, they chose to build castles for their princesses.  I think they did an amazing job.  I did help them with spacing their pillars and we talked about how if they wanted it to stand up, the base of each block had to be completely on top of the one below it, not hanging off.

Another activity was more shape-related than structures but it worked on their fine motor skills.  Thanks to Mother Goose Time, I have a plethora of foam shape pieces and at least two nice sets of tweezers.  I dumped the shapes on the floor, gave them each a set of tweezers and containers (because sharing is not a strong skill right now) and let them have it.  It actually kept them occupied for about five minutes.  Miss M chose to only pick up pink shapes while Littlest seemed drawn to the tiniest ones.

P, Q, R

It's been a while and a crazy, difficult couple of weeks.  Our temperatures have soared into the high 90's and we've been cooped up inside to keep from roasting my littles in the afternoons.  Thank goodness for some ready at hand fun from Mother Goose Time.

On Friday we had a long overdue class with our friend and learned about Polar Bears, Quail and Rattlesnakes as we did projects and played games.

The included Zoogo card game was a huge hit and I plan to play it with the girls tonight with Daddy.  It's basically played the same as Uno, except instead of numbers they use animals we have been learning about this month.  You could easily make your own version of it by printing a sheet of pictures of your own choice (farm animals, transportation, items of clothing, letters, numbers, shapes) on four different colors of paper.  This game is great for helping children work on problem solving skills as they decide whether to match by color or picture, as well as reinforcing vocabulary and/or early academic skills.  I had them put their cards face up on the table and at each turn, asked them if they had a card with the same color or animal as the card in play.  After a few times around, the older girls no longer needed reminders and Littlest would place the correct by herself with a verbal cue.

We talked about rattlesnakes and they practiced their best slithering and snake sounds before making the rattlesnake rattle project, which of course evolved into bracelets because all three of these little girls love jewelry.  String beads onto pipe cleaners is a great fine motor project, even better than using yarn or string for young kids, because the pipe cleaner is nice and firm so they only have to concentrate on getting the bead on and not holding it still.  You could work on patterning with the beads but I chose to let them do it their way.

I think the favorite activity of the day was painting their feet for the Polar Bear project.  We talked about what they would need to protect their feet out in the snow and ice and discussed how polar bear feet are special in that way.  These girls love getting painted and each very patiently waited for me to get to her, then giggled as the paintbrush tickled their toes.  I had to watch Littlest carefully after she was done because liked it so much, she wanted to do it herself.  Make sure you get that paint out of their reach or you may end up with an adorable little toddler toe path painted on your floor.  I loved their responses when I asked them what would happen if they met a polar bear; our friend said it would eat her, Miss M insisted it would protect her from the snowstorm with its warm fur and Littlest shouted "Boo!" indicating that it would either scare her or she would play games with it.  :)  These will be fun to look out in a few years when their feet have gotten so much bigger and I yearn for the little days.

For the Quail egg game, each girl made her own cozy nest and took turns carrying an egg from basket back to it, where she opened it and identified the letter tile inside.  Littlest told me the sounds they make, which I thought was super impressive.  The older girls also listed animals and people they could think of with names that started with that letter.  Miss M then tried to incubate her eggs by sitting on them.

That was all we had time for, although I plan to go back and do the rattlesnake skin shedding activity today or tomorrow, just for fun.

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.

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.

All About Butterflies

We have had a blast learning about the life cycle of butterflies this week.  We spent our first class learning about eggs and caterpillars and today we did chrysalises and butterflies.

We started off by introducing the concept that animals can come from eggs by hiding toy animals in Easter eggs for the girls to find and open.   I talked about how some of the animals we found came out of eggs (chicken, duck, frog and snake) but some of them (cow and pig) did not.  Then I reminded the girls of one of their favorite stories, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle (which we watched during snack later) and talked about how caterpillars are born from eggs.


I love the new draw and dictate sheets!!  They come with a story title and a prompt to get your child drawing and then you write down the story they come up with (I had the girls write their names by themselves).  These are fabulous and it sparked an idea for teaching the girls to start keeping daily journals.  Miss M's story reads as follows:

"Once upon a time an egg fell and a caterpillar came out.  It fell into a puddle and was so wet.  He sunk in the water and Jesus came and helped him.  He was happy."

The girls were very detailed with their drawings and content to do this activity for quite a while before we moved on to making the egg on a leaf craft.  Littlest loved dotting the glue on by herself and scattering the orzo "eggs" over it.

We read the caterpillar story included in our materials and the girls practiced their color identification and counting skills by finding the fruit that matched the details in the story.  We finished off our first day by making the cornstarch caterpillar sculptures.  I should have had them use a little more water to make them sticky because they kept falling apart.  The straws were also kind of difficult to poke into the noodles for the antennae and legs but toothpicks worked great.


For our second day of class, we talked about chrysalises and butterflies.  First, we reviewed the story "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" again and talked about how he makes a cocoon at the end of the book.  Then we did the number review activity from the Teacher Guide but I changed it just a little.  I gave them each their own cardboard tube and a length of tulle I had left over from a Halloween skirt project and taped one end to the tube.  We used one of the bigfoam dice we've collected from our teacher materials so they could practice counting and had them grape the tulle that many times around.  After a few times through, I realized that their tulle was really, really long and it was going to take forever to finish the activity so then we took turns wrapping our tulle completely and counting how many times it took to finish.

They then took turns getting wrapped in a big blanket and "emerging" from this soft cocoon to get an idea of what a butterfly goes through.  Everyone wanted multiple turns with this activity.

Next we talked about how butterfly wings are the symmetrical.  I made a game out of the activity by making a design on one side and having them copy it on the other side, then they got to design a wing and I had to repeat it.  It was fun and one I will pull out again when they need something to do.

The life cycle activity was so cool!!  I drew quadrants for all the girls but they cut out their labels and glued them on (I checked to make sure the order was correct) by themselves.  I had them draw their own leaves to put the bean "egg" on and they decorated the caterpillar beans themselves as well.  I drew the butterfly shape for them to color, decorate and add the bean bodies and helped them wrap the chrysalis bean so it would fit in the space.  I love how they turned out and I'm going to use it when we order caterpillars in a few weeks.

We finished off with our journals.  Miss M has started trying to write in the last few days and does an amazing job for being three years old.  I tell her what letter to write and she forms it pretty legibly on her own.

That's it for this week!

Bees and Butterflies

We started our new theme today, Bees and Butterflies!  I chose to do activities from the first two days, Homes and Food.

After looking at the topic poster and discussing the different kinds of homes bees can live in, we did the beehive stamping craft.  It can be hard for the girls to use objects that don't really have a handle on them for stamping, like the bubble wrap squares provided, so I took a piece of tape and rolled it around their finger (sticky side out) and attached the bubble wrap to it (bubble side out).  That seemed to work really well for all through of them.  I let the girls pick their paint color and stamp away.  Instead of making them stand up, I taped a piece of yarn to the back of one and used a rolled piece of tape to connect both hive halves, near the top.  The hive opens a bit so they can pretend to fly their bees in and out and we can hang them up rather than have them sitting on a counter.

They even added the flower stamens
so the bees had pollen to collect.

Next we played with our shape of the month (hexagon).  I showed them the wall shape, we counted the sides and talked about how hex means six.  I pointed out the shape of the cells on the topic poster as well.  I gave them black strips of paper to play with to see if they could make their own and then, because they were so interested in the Butterfly part of our monthly theme, I showed them how to trace hexagons onto paper to make a butterfly.  A tip for tracing shapes:  use a piece of rolled tape to attach the shapes to the paper so they don't move while your child traces.  Both big girls decided to draw a flower and attach bees on the other side of the paper and all three wanted their creations hung on the wall.  I think I might need to invest in a wire and clip art system to save my paint.

Fill the Honeycomb was a fun game and a good chance for Littlest to practice touching with one to one correspondence and take turns.  She was in charge of giving the die to the correct person, which she loved.  The girls did very well with this game since they are pretty good at counting.  When we had emptied their flower cards, we counted how many cells were still empty on the honeycomb and filled the rest of them in with our extra circles.

The nectar game was a fantastic fine motor activity that my girls absolutely loved and did for close to ten minutes.  They only stopped because we transferred all the water to the ice cube tray.  Littlest adores anything to do with playing in the water and Miss M liked the gradations in color from having varying amounts of water in each compartment (I added food coloring for fun).  It did take quite a bit of hand over hand guidance to help them get the hang of squeeze, release, squeeze with the included syringes.  Littlest kept trying to scoop and accidentally sucking up the water she had just squeezed into the tray.  I can see us doing this one a lot and adding some color mixing fun as well.

Lastly we started our journals.  Miss M informed me that her self-portrait is her when she used to be a sad bee.  When asked why she was sad, she said it was because she couldn't find a pink flower to drink from.  I love her imagination.  She drew her first initial by herself under the picture and I helped her with the rest of the letters.  That's it for today!

Giddy Up, Cowgirls!

We are finally getting back into the swing of our normal routine after a couple weeks of illness and a family vacation to The Happiest Place on Earth (we had a blast and I may do a blog post on some ideas for making it work with toddlers).

This month our theme is In The Desert and it is looking pretty fun.  We missed the first week while we were in Disneyland but I didn't want to just skip those units so we did a few activities last night before bed from the Cowboy Boots unit and today we did a medley of other activities from the first week.

Miss M has her shapes and colors down so I concentrated on introducing this month's concepts (square and brown) to Littlest after she finished dinner (which included rubbing pizza sauce in her hair, followed by a quick wash in the sink).  I presented her with the circle shape and the new square and asked her to identify them (which she did very quickly).  I want to do a more in-depth assessment of which shapes she knows and doesn't know so we can do some activities to support the weaker concepts.  Then I took the square that came with my MGT materials and a smaller, white square I cut out separately and we worked on the concept of big and little (also one that she knows pretty well).  Lastly we worked on identifying the colors white and brown.  I would put the squares in front of her and ask her to point to one of the colors, then switch them around and ask again.  It's important not to get into a pattern (for example, you always ask about the one closest to her hand first, then the other) so they are really learning the concept and not the order of presentation.  This was a harder one for her so I think colors may be our focus this week.

We did the cowboy boot craft, which of course I altered a little bit to continue to work on the concept of square and some fine motor practice.  Daddy helped Littlest trace the white square I had cut out onto her boot with a brown marker (bringing in the color concept again) and then I gave her square stickers to use to finish decorating it.  Miss M did the same thing but more independently.  She took both boots when they were done and tried to strap them to her feet.  Littlest ran and put on her snow boots.

I used the boots to decorate boxes for the Cowboy Boot toss using our super fun counting block manipulatives that came in this month's box.  I gave each girl a set of ten blocks and had them sit in their new hula hoops.  They took apart their blocks, with me counting while Littlest took hers apart and Miss M surprising us with her ability to count to 9 in Spanish (thanks to Diego episodes on Amazon Prime).  Then they practiced tossing the blocks into the boxes from inside their hula hoops.  This morning Miss M is using them as "ice cream" and randomly dumping them out to use for patterning.

We finished off the evening by reading "Coyote" by Gerald McDermott.  This is a retelling of a Native American folktale.  Besides being a good way to introduce the desert, it also has a good moral about what it means to be a good friend and how not to treat people.

This morning we had our first regular session of school in a while with our friend.  I decided to change up calendar time a little bit by starting with today's date and working backwards.  They are so used to telling me which number comes next, it was good practice to work on which one comes first.  We also practiced the pattern a little bit; I think after nap we will look at it again and try to recreate it with the counting blocks.

We checked out the theme poster using our Looking Glasses.  Thanks to our book last night, Miss M could identify the coyote readily and did a very nice impression of one howling at the moon.  Littlest found the cacti and the cowgirl.

We introduced the letter H and practiced galloping around the living room like horses.  After a couple rounds, they decided they'd rather ride horses so they grabbed blankets to stand in for their worthy steeds and did a few more laps before we started reading this month's story book.  I really like the Who Am I? books that Mother Goose Time does; this one is all desert animals.  There are quite a few animals in the book, most of which the girls were unfamiliar with so they got a little antsy and we only made it halfway through but it was fun to watch them curl up like armadillo lizards, make pinching claws like a scorpion or growl like a bobcat.

I really want to be better about doing our journal this month.  We've gotten a little lax with it the last couple of months and it really is such a great way to practice a variety of skills.  I am thinking about starting Charlotte Mason-style nature journals with the girls and these little ones are a good first step. We did the cover page (the older girls wanted instructions on how to draw a cowboy hat while Littlest scribbled on with abandon), the Brown page (they drew coyotes and spiders that live in a brown desert) and the H page (only the tracing part, we will go back and do the rest of it another day).

Littlest and our friend made the adorable cowboy hat crafts (I declined to use paint today because I was just too tired to pull it all out and they were just as happy with crayons) and ran around the room pretending to be cowgirls while Miss M put herself in a little timeout for a while.  Littlest grabbed a couple Lego horses and was galloping around whinnying.  It was adorable.

Lastly, we attempted the Cowboy Hat Colors game.  I must admit, I found this one a little confusing.  Maybe I'm still recovering from a week of less-than perfect sleep and 41,000 steps in three days.  The instructions were pretty clear but the cowkids were wearing so many colors, I wasn't sure how we were supposed to match the single color hats to them so I changed things up and we only used the hats.  I had each color turn over one hat to begin with and that was the color they were looking for.  If they turned over someone else's hat, they gave it to the person looking for it and got another turn.  When they got a match, they were able to turn over another target hat.  Littlest actually ended up winning, which she liked but her sister did not.

We ended with snack and Disney's Pecos Bill cartoons.  I have a few more activities we may do after nap and tomorrow before starting in with our current week's units on Wednesday.

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.

This and That

It's been a momentous week in our home--Miss M has finally consented to start potty training!  I will admit, I was not pushing this milestone because I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing but when she told me she wanted to wear undies (a Christmas gift from Grammie) I decided to go along with it.  All in all, it's going okay.  Usually she decides she's done with the whole thing around nap time and ends up in a pull up for the rest of the day but we are making some progress.  It has meant that most of our time is spent going to the potty and playing with things we can put down quickly.  School hasn't been as formal as normal but we've still had some fun times with our Mother Goose Time activities.

The Matching Spots and Adding game was a fun one to play, both as written in the Teacher Guide and in a couple variations we came up with on our own.  One of the variations was to give one child the giraffes and one the ladybugs, then they took turns picking a number card and finding their corresponding animal card.  This greatly reduced arguing over who was touching the cards.  Another variation we did helped with addition.  They each picked one card, then drew a number card.  Using a dry erase crayon (you could use a marker), they added that number of dots to their animal and then counted them all.  You could use it as a memory game, too.  Use the giraffes and ladybugs or one of the animals and the number cards.


I altered the Grass unit's craft project to combine it with one that my mom did with my nephew.  Igave the girls the provided green paper and drew lines on it as a guide for cutting (Miss M will cut straight through a paper unless she has a visual reminder to stop).  Miss M did a great job of snipping her grass.  I had both girls trace a circle using one of our plastic stacking rings, which they then decorated as lions.  We glued the grass to the bottom of the page so it looked like the lion was hiding. Miss M added a tree to give the lion some shade and decorated it heavily with the included bug stickers.  She also added a blue sun, in case he got too chilly in the shade and needed to warm up.

Littlest finally let me help her a little with the scissors, although that ended when I tried to show her how to point her thumb up so they'd work better.  She was very engaged in the project, too, which is fun to see.  She liked tracing the circle and did a few on her own, then when I told her to draw a lion, her scribble actually resembled a mane pretty closely.  She loves stickers (one of my favorite fine motor tools) and enjoyed putting them all over her paper while roaring.

We liked the flamingo art project, which we coupled with a fun YouTube kids video on the birds and making bead necklaces with one of this month's manipulatives.

Finally, we played Bigger or Smaller and created a continuum of sizes using some of our toys and the ostrich and chicken egg cutouts.  Before we started, I let the girls gently play with some hard boiled eggs I happened to have in the fridge from the day before so they could actually feel the egg shell without me being nervous about them squeezing it too hard.  They collected objects and I held each one to the ostrich egg, asking bigger or smaller.  If it was bigger, it went to the left.  If it was smaller, we held it to the chicken egg and asked the same question, setting it to the left of the chicken egg if it was bigger and to the right if it was smaller.  They seemed to really understand this concept and enjoy this activity.

Next week we start our Food and Fitness theme, which is perfect timing because I am also starting a Biggest Loser competition in preparation for our family trip to Disneyland n March.  :)