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.

S and T

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

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

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

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

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

A is for Alligator

I love the theme for June!  A to Zoo Animals has been so fun and we are only a few days in.  It's also nice because Littlest's birthday is next week and we are doing a zoo theme so I've got some built in, already prepared activities to do with her friends. :)

We started with our Dance N Beats DVDs.  The songs and routines for this month are pretty short so we did six of them in just a few minutes.  The girls really enjoyed pretending to be animals and did a good job of following the simple choreography.  This is a great program for getting them moving and excited for the theme, as a transition between activities and as a way to keep them usefully occupied while I prep things for school or simply get some household chores down.  I personally find them a nice way to stretch and wake up my body without requiring too much sweat or coordination.

After we were all warmed up, we started on our zoo books.  I chose to get them all done in one day so they could spend the month reviewing them (plus, our friend doesn't come every day and I didn't want her to miss any of the pages).  I loved watching the girls draw their self-portraits on the ID page.  Miss M is starting to add more details like fingers and belly buttons.  Littlest has started adding facial features and hair.  I need to go through all our art work that I've saved in the curriculum boxes and put together a timeline showing the progression from simple scribbles to recognizable forms.  I think it would be pretty interesting.

With the books, I noticed that they were hole punched on the right side and only once.  I thought this make it a little difficult for the girls to use so I double punch ours on the top and added two rings.  You could use yarn or even a twist tie.  This makes it a little more like a flip book and they seem to like it.

The alligator puppets were a little tricky but a big hit.  I showed the girls how to fold their plates in a triangle and they cut out the faces (I helped Littlest do the curves but cutting is vastly improved from a few months ago).  Then we glued the faces over the plate, covering it completely before we folded the rest of the face down to make the eyes stand up.  I cut out the zig zag paper scraps for teeth and they put the glue along the inside rim of the plates and placed them.  It worked pretty well.  There's no pocket for their hands but they just hold them by the fold and snap them open and shut.  As soon as their puppets were done, they started chasing each other around and looking for food to chomp.  I love listening to the stories they make up on the spot.

I introduced the ABC book that came with this month's materials.  We are only reading the page the coordinates with the letter(s) we are doing that day.  I scattered the letter tiles on the ground and they hunted for the ones in their names.  I might need to make extra tiles so they can make their full names and possibly have their own sets (Littlest is getting quite territorial and Miss M always has been) to play with.

Our final activity for the first day was the alligator nests.  I hid paper eggs with different numbers of dots around the room and Miss M drew a numbered egg from her nest and matched it.  She then decided she needed a bunch of boy alligator babies, wrapped all the paper eggs in her blanket to keep them warm and took the bundle with us to Costco.

Water and Rainbows

We started our week with learning about the water cycle and rainbows.  My girls are still pretty young so we didn't go into a lot of detail but had fun doing the activities outlined in the Teachers Guide.

We started with the bilingual book, coloring each page.  Miss M is getting more detailed, using multiple colors and trying harder to stay within lines or at least color blocks.  Littlest still isn't really "coloring", she likes to draw circles of various colors but she is starting to add facial features to those the circles, which is fun to watch.  After they colored, I had them show me which page was number 1, 2 and so on and we assembled their books to be read later with Daddy.

For the Puddle Jumping activity, I made a new game based on what they had come up with because I thought it would hold their attention a little longer.  I made ten puddles out of blue paper and numbered them.  I made a trail around our living room that led to our circus tent or "rainbow".  We used one of the foam dice that we received with our materials and the girls took turns rolling it, counting the dots (I counted for Littlest while she touched and tried to say the numbers) and then they hopped that many puddles until they reached the rainbow.  They played this for 15 minutes, easily.  Littlest is starting to be able to leave the ground when she hops now, so it was very exciting for her.  Miss M made up variations where she hopped from puddle to puddle while counting in Spanish or backwards.  It's one we will do again.

They loved making the Rainbow Dancer craft.  Miss M cut out her rainbow colors (although she got frustrated and upset a couple times when she accidentally cut into the next color but I showed her how we could fix it with tape) and did most of the construction herself, except the stapling.  I gave Littlest a piece of construction paper with wider spaced lines to practice cutting on because I thought it would be more developmentally appropriate and I didn't want her to maul the rainbow strips.  She actually did pretty well, holding the scissors up more often and squeezing instead of simple tearing with the scissors.  I put tape on the color strips, then named a color for her to hand me, which we put on the plate together.  She got all of the basic colors (I didn't even try to test her on indigo) and was very proud of herself.  When they were done, they chased each other around the downstairs while Miss M chanted "Rain, Rain, Go Away!"

We enjoyed these activities and they've been timely since we have had rain for a good part of the last couple of weeks.  Hoping that changes sometime soon but looking out my window, that doesn't seem likely...

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!

Dancing in the Desert

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

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

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

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


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



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

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

Catching Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.