Best Laid Plans

So, we had school yesterday.  Or at least I tried to have school yesterday.  We barely made it through circle time and as soon as I brought out the safari counters from our monthly materials bag, school was over.  All they wanted to do was play with the animals.  I did manage to show them some pictures from our trip to San Diego's Safari Park in June so they could get a little bit of an idea of what I was trying to talk about with them.  We taped off our park and I did get them use the safari bucks to pay me for their tickets.  Then it was a race to collect as many animals as possible so I made the girls "buy" them from me for $2 each.  They grabbed up the ones they wanted, we lined them up and counted out $2 for each, then counted all of them together.  That was pretty much the academic extent of the day.

A little later on I was able to cajole them, one at a time, to come into the kitchen for a little art project I put together.  I searched for free "savanna coloring pages" and printed the first one that came up without any animals.  I had a couple pages of zoo animal stickers and designed a quick following directions activity.  I had them color specific items, draw a sun, pond and birds and place stickers different places on the sheet using positional words (under, over, next to and in).  They liked it and did well with the simple 1-2 step directions.  I used to work on this skill a lot as a speech therapist, using activities like this.

Making her elephants "hug"

We didn't even get to snack.  As soon as they finished the coloring/sticker page, they were back to playing with those animals.  Some days are like that.  I was frustrated and a little upset until I took a moment to listen to them.  They were dialoguing with each other, describing their animals' actions and emotions, taking turns driving around the park we'd outlined earlier.  Miss M asked for a chimpanzee.  Her request was denied and a teaching moment ensued.  Some times we don't get what we want, even if we ask nicely and we have to find a way to be ok with that.  I needed to learn that lesson as much as she did that morning.

Seed Explorations

This has been a fun week with our Mother Goose Time materials.  We started Monday by exploring seeds.  We had done a little bit during our In the Garden unit this spring but it was fun to introduce the girls to them again and see what they remembered.  As it turns out, they needed a little reminder about what seeds were exactly but after just a couple of minutes they were telling stories about planting seeds in our gardens this year.

We reviewed our letters of the month and I gave one of the Hands-On letters to each girl along with a some of the seeds from our monthly manipulatives packet to see what they did with them.  Littlest (16 months) enjoyed sifting them through her fingers and dropping them on her letter.  Miss M (2.75 years) lined them up along the edges of her letter and our friend (3.5 years) made a pattern with hers.  It was really interesting to see how each one used them differently and at a different level of complexity.

Next I emptied out an ice tray to use for sorting the seeds (I really just need to buy a couple for sorting).  Our friend helped Littlest put her seeds in the different compartments with her fingers while Miss M practiced using the tweezers to sort her seeds.  This is a great fine motor activity that I would like to do again but maybe with craft pompoms to start with (I think they'd be a little easier to grab).

The girls mentioned that would like to go plant seeds in the ground right now.  Given that our frost date is only a few days away, I let them know that it probably wouldn't be a good idea but it did give me a great idea for an extension activity.  I grabbed a few green index cards (I keep them in the kitchen for writing down recipes but they come in handy for school), drew lines and added numbers at the end and gave each girl a couple of "gardens" to plant with the specified number of seeds.  I let them decide if they wanted to plant all the same type of seeds or a variety.  They worked at this activity for almost ten minutes.

The apple craft was fun, although I didn't get any post-worthy pictures.  I wanted the girls to leave the middle of the paper plate white so I drew lines on the plate, dividing it into thirds.  This was also a good way to teach the concepts of top, middle and bottom as well as following directions containing a negative (they are both pretty good at doing what they are told but need to work on not doing things when they are told not to :).

 I've been lucky to find some really good apples lately (I think we are finally getting to the new crop rather than the mealy leftovers from last year) so we cut one open and I let the girls dig out and count the seeds.  We use the seed counting sheet in our materials briefly but they were ready to eat by then so I sliced up the apple and let them munch away while we watched an illustrated version of the poem "One Seed" on YouTube.  It was a very fun and successful morning.