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...

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.

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!

Sahara Desert

We learned about the Sahara desert this week.  We started off by exploring our world map and identifying all the continents, then I showed them where Africa was and told them we would be learning about a desert there called the Sahara.

We read the story from our day bag and the girls insisted on making their own boat when it talked about the men taking a boat to Africa.  They walked and ran around as the story indicated, acting out the journey of the main characters.  They did this unprompted by me, which was fun to see.  It was a good reminder to me not be overly structured and allow them to move around during lessons to see what they come up with on their own.  More often that not, they are actually listening to me and are inspired in their next activities, not simply getting bored and wandering off.

I hung the theme poster on the wall in the kitchen so they could see it as we made our canteens, then they took off to pretend they were trekking across the desert for a while.

I brought them back to the table after a little while to play a game I modified from the teacher guide.  In the guide, it recommended having them blow sand off the first letter of their name but since they are a little more advanced than that, I used all the letters they had in common in their names and they pretended to be sandstorms, blowing salt off the letters and identifying them.  It helped that during breakfast I let my girls watch an episode of Diego where he is in the desert in Egypt; it introduced the concept of sandstorms, needing water and ways to protect themselves in the desert, such as wearing long clothes that cover their skin.

The older girls ended the school day playing the oasis game and practicing basics addition and subtraction.  Littlest had decided to leave the group at this point to have some alone time in the play kitchen before snack.  During snack, I found a YouTube video of animals that live in the desert, which they seemed to enjoy and was a good way to close our activities.  I know some parents have some really strong opinions about screen time but I have found that in controlled situations, it is a real benefit in our family.


Our next class is going to be on the Great Pyramid, which sounds like a lot of fun to me.

Sick Days with MGT

Miss M developed a bad cough last week and Littlest has since fallen into the ranks of the ill with her.  This week consisted of a lot of cuddling and jammie-wearing and not a lot of traditional "school" as we normally do it.  However, we still needed things to do because apparently you can't keep two toddlers in bed while they are sick (at least mine refuse to stay there).  Thankfully we had our Mother Goose Time curriculum so I didn't have to rely entirely on Daniel Tiger, Diego and Little Baby Bum. I picked a few of the activities and we added them in sporadically throughout the week.

The frog craft was fun for both of them.  I had them sponge the paint on with cotton balls.  When it was dry, they put the eyes on while I curled the tongues.  Miss M refused to use is as a headband and instead had me punch holes in the side and add ribbon for a mask even though I explained that it didn't have eye holes so she wouldn't be able to see.  She worked around the issue by wearing it like a visor as she hopped around looking for bugs to eat.

The stretching spinner game has been a hit all week long.  Their favorite stretch is the one where they rock on their tummies.  They have a hard time balancing on one foot but can do it if I hold their hands.  We go through all of them two times, holding the stretches for 6-10 seconds while we count out loud.  Littlest is trying to mimic us as we count, which is super cute. 

"Reading" the book by
naming the letters in the title.

We read our book of the month, "How Are You Peeling?" by Saxton Freeman and Joost Elffers.  It's actually a Caldecott winning book boy Scholastic.  Littlest wasn't as interested in it but Miss M loved looking at the pictures and deciding how the vegetables were feeling and coming up with scenarios to explain their emotions.  I was really impressed with how well she was able to determine which emotion most of them were illustrating and she could give me examples of times when she has felt that way.  I think it is vital to give children the vocabulary they need to express how they are feeling and why; it greatly helps to reduce frustration and gives them a better outlet than throwing a fit (although we still have plenty of those here).

One of the units this week was kicking but I couldn't get them to actually do any of the written activities.  So, I used the general theme as inspiration to get out our pop-up soccer goal and balls they got for Christmas have a kicking contest, which they loved.  This activity kept them entertained for about 10 minutes without irritating their coughs too badly.  You could use a large box (if you order from Amazon with any regularity, I'll bet you have one around) instead of the goal or just put down a tape line for them to get the ball over.  Littlest is in more of a rolling phase than a kicking phase but she liked to watch her sister.  I am trying to teach her to kick with the side of her foot rather than her toes, especially since we don't wear shoes in the house so they aren't protected, but for now I've been overruled by the threenager.  I guess this is one of those times you let them learn by experience, right?

Her look of glee belies the nasty cough
and fever she's been battling all week.

One evening before Daddy came home, we had some fun jumping over a ribbon.  Littlest tries her best, crouching down and giving the cutest grunt as she heaves herself upwards but she still hasn't quite managed to get both feet off the floor at the same time.  Her sister does her best to model proper form.  They jumped forwards and backwards and used the ribbon for a balance beam and eventually a road for their cars as they naturally transitioned into other interests.


We finally got out our geoboards, which I had been nervous to do since Littlest still likes to put things in her mouth.  Both girls were fascinated with making shapes on it although each needed some help in stretching the tighter bands.  I can see this being a great way to develop fine motor skills.  With Miss M, we concentrated on making a variety of shapes and with Littlest we worked on color recognition as I named the color of the bands she chose to use.

I personally loved the throw and catch craft/game.  I set out a variety of markers, crayons and stickers and let the girls decorate their cups while I tied the pompom to the string.  To insert the craft stick, I used scissors to punch a narrow hole that allowed the stick to poke through but kept it pretty tight so it doesn't fall out easily.  I taped the other end of the yarn to the stick inside the cup and it worked quite well.  I have fun seeing how many times I can catch the pompom.  Both girls were excited to try but quickly grew frustrated since they aren't quite coordinated enough yet to make the game work.  Littlest wandered off to play in her kitchen and Miss M invented a new game using additional pompoms from our craft stash.  She rolled them to me following a color pattern she made up (red, blue, green, red, blue green) and then dictated how I was to roll them back to her (blue, blue, green, green, red, red).  She liked it until Littlest showed interest and then we were done.   I tried to interest them in playing golf with them using paper cups tipped on their sides and large mixing spoons but the moment had passed.

I tried to sneak in a little more school with the ball patterning strip but Miss M refused to do it as written because the strip with the pattern wasn't long enough to fit the second repeat and she could not be persuaded that it was ok to put the cards on the table next to it.  A new game was required so we flipped the cards over so she could pick one and sort them into piles on top of the correct ball on the strip.  At the end we counted them and determined which we had the most and least of.

Fingers are crossed that better health is on the way since we are headed out on family vacation at the end of next week.  I am also hoping to have a chance to do more the fun activities in our final week of Food and Fitness.

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.

Safari Sampler

For school on Wednesday, we took a sampler approach, choosing an activity or two from the remaining four days for this week.  We didn't get to everything I had planned but overall our hour went really well and sparked a couple new ideas we used later in the week.

We introduced the letter E and the country of Egypt.  Living in Utah is a little, um, monochromatic, so it was a good opportunity to about diversity.  We checked out the monthy theme poster and I had them describe what they saw:  a little girl, a mommy, a house.  I mentioned that even though it looked different from where they live and who they live with, everyone was still the same.  Our beloved Daniel Tiger has also addressed the issue so I could refer to those episodes as another way to help them relate to what I was saying.

We spent some time dancing like elephants with big stomping feet, flapping ears and swinging trunks using the song of the day from the Elephant unit.  They had a blast; I sang the song and they came up with the movements on the fly.  I liked seeing their creativity come out so spontaneously. 

We went over the I Can Read book together.  I tried using the sight word arrows with them but it didn't really work.  It might work better for me to do in one on one reading time with Miss M; in a group, they tended to get distracted or fight over the arrows.

The Giraffe Spot Game was fun.  It was a little too easy for them to just count out the correct number of spots to after a couple turns, I started changing it up by having them leave the spots on and the next player would have to add or subtract spots and then we would count the total at the end.  It worked really well and gave them a good introduction to those mathematical functions.

The Teacher Guide recommended letting them draw their own giraffes but we didn't have a lot of time available and a giraffe is little more complicated than drawing a face, which is what they have the most experience with right now.  Instead, I found a free giraffe silhouette online, imported it into Photoshop and created an outline that I printed for them to fill in as they saw fit.  I cut up the left over foam from the giraffe spots so they could use them as stencil, if they wanted.

For the zebra craft, I left the cutouts in the paper until after they had drawn their stripes.  This worked really well and gave nice clean edges when I did punch them out.  They glued them to the background paper, we talked about what they eat and they drew grass and sun to finish the pictures.  Miss M was very proud of her picture and insisted it go up on the refrigerator, along with her sister's.  Whenever Littlest sees her zebra, she starts neighing.  

I also hid some of their Little People
animals for another safari variation.

The girls have really enjoyed the safari theme so far.  They found some binocular sets I got for free for listening to some spiel and have been going around the house "spying" things.  I took the daily topic posters from this week and put them around the downstairs for them to find.  This has been a very popular activity.  Miss M likes to take the lead, naming the animal and some descriptive quality about it (the rhino has a big horn, the giraffe has a long neck) and Littlest gleefully follows and makes the sounds.  Her elephant impersonation is simply adorable.  It is also fun to turn it into an "I Spy" game and have them run to the animal I describe. We will be playing this many more times this week.

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.

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Finishing Up Winter

I titled this post "Finishing Up Winter" and then thought to myself with a wistful sigh, I wish.  Once Christmas is over, I'm over the snow and cold and ready for spring.  I live in Utah, though, so we will be in danger of snow storms until April, or sometimes even early May.

Oh well, at least we have some fun things to keep us occupied.  We did activities from the last two days of our December unit on Monday and the girls really had some fun with it.  We started off by reviewing our concepts for the month:  M, V, X, 7, 8, star and white.  I cut up the concept cards, hid them around the living room and then had the girls search for them and tuck them into bed for those long winter nights.  It was a big hit and of course they all wanted a turn to hide them.


Next, we practiced measuring using our night sky paper strips.  I handed out the strips and had the girls select the one they thought was their longest and then compare them to each other.  We kept going until we had them in order from longest to shortest.  This was a little bit of a hard activity for them because they took it personally if their strip was the shorter one but we talked through it and I think they have a better grasp on making comparisons now.

They enjoyed making the snow dough.  I did this activity a little differently than having them build snowy scenes; I gave them each a high sided plate (from IKEA) full of the snow dough and then let them practice writing our letters of the month using chopsticks.  Littlest did pretty well "scribbling" in it until she decided she wanted to see what would happen if she dumped it on the table and used her chopstick to fling it--twice.  I sent a bag of it home with our school friend, saved some for more writing practice later and added about a 1/2 cup of glue to the rest and made cornstarch dough. Littlest and I rolled it out (it was a little crumbly, I probably should have used a little less of the snow dough) and cut out heart shapes which dried nicely on the counter overnight and will make fun tags to add to Valentine treat bags in February.

They were all very excited to decorate their postcards.  Miss M drew a sun as her favorite thing about winter days, she's an optimistic child.  :)  I'm saving this one because she did a really nice job with the sun and writing the letters M and H on the back but in the future we will be sending these to family members, especially as she is able to write more on her own or at least dictate a little more.

"Owl, Who Do You See?" was a fun game.  We chanted it like in "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" before they rolled the cube to reveal either an animal picture or a letter.  For the animals, I emphasized the beginning sound and they identified which letter needed to be put on Owl.  For the letters, we practiced blending all the sounds to identify which animal the Owl was seeing.  We have since played this with my 6-year old nephew, who also enjoyed it.

And that was it for December.  There were a lot of really fun activities that spurred other experiences and a lot of good learning opportunities.  I am excited about the January theme, Going On Safari.  Maybe pretending to be in Africa will trick my body into thinking it's warm outside.

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Our Week with Mother Goose

Here is a recap of some of our favorite activities from our Mother Goose Time lessons this week.

Miss M decided to be "Mommy Teacher" for a day, relegating me to the floor while she taught from the stool (to be fair, she did offer to let me sit in her blue chair but unfortunately Mommy's hips don't quite fit).  She went through the calendar and weather items, introduced our new letter and led us in song ("Twinkle Twinkle Little Star").  I spread out the day of the week clouds and had her identify the correct day by the initial sound.  It was adorable and reminded me of when I was little and my favorite game was playing teacher.

The foam shape tangrams are always fun to play with although for someone like me who is not great with visual-spatial skills, a key would be kind of helpful.  Miss M was actually pretty good at figuring it out on her own (she gets that from her daddy).

Making elephant masks was fun, although I was surprised they quit after only a relatively few squares of tissue paper.  Gluing is one of their favorite things but they were anxious to be done and play with them.  I cut out the eye and nose holes and the girls ran around the room bellowing like elephants for quite a few minutes.  Littlest will point at hers on the counter (I have an area where I display their crafts for the month) and start making elephant sounds to indicate that she would like to play with it some more.

The older girls really enjoyed the race track game.  I modified it a little by adding a deck of alphabet cards from our July theme.  Before their turn, they had to draw a card, name the picture, identify the initial sound and then try and name the letter that makes the sound (I only had them do so much because they both know their letters and sounds quite well).  If they couldn't remember on their own, they could turn it over and name the letter directly.  Then they got to roll their die, count the dots and move around the board.  Going around three times was a little much for them so we stopped after two times but it still gave them lots of practice in letter/sound identification and counting.

Both girls have had a round (or two) with a stomach bug this week so we didn't press a lot of school.  Our fruit beads from last month have been played with a lot and will be making a trip to Washington with us, as well many of the games from this month.  My nephew is excited to play with them and have some MGT at his house.

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