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...

B is for Bird

Normally we do school on a couple times a week since the girls are so little but this month's theme is so fun and I don't really want to skip any of the days.  We did some of the B is for Bird activities to fill in the time before lunch and the girls loved them.

Miss M ended up modifying the color bird activity.  She saw me cutting them out, grabbed them and the world map from our wall, then started matching the birds to the continents and other objects on the map.  I loved it and let her run with it.  When she had matched them all, she started making up stories about how they were swimming or walking to visit friends on other parts of the map.  She must have played with them for 15 minutes before moving on to something else.  Littlest used them to sort some of the counting manipulatives we have collected over the months.  I laminated mine so they will last longer and thought about taping them to paper plates and having the girls cut out pictures that match the color and gluing them on.  The birds could be removed later without harm because of the lamination.  You could also use sticky tack, post one color a day on the wall above a basket and collect items throughout the day that match the color.

Littlest was smitten with the cute little bird craft.  We got out our alphabet stamps to decorate them with letters.  They both wanted to googly eyes but Miss M didn't want hers on a stick, she wanted to separate birds she could "fly with my hands".  I used a few pieces of double sided tape to stick Littlest's birds together, with the stick between.  She flew around the living room "tweeting" and looking for worms like the robins we've been watching in our backyard.

Just those two little activities kept my girls entertained for nearly an hour.  This is a great theme for keeping kids busy during those hot summer hours.

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!

Playing Doctor

We have continued to struggle with illness here this week, especially Littlest.  She has been pretty much permanently glued to me, making it difficult to do basic activities, let alone full blown preschool.  We did have a window yesterday where they were feeling a bit more chipper after some medication so we pulled out our Teacher Guide (this is a great resource for direct teaching and inspiration for activities outside of "school") and used it to help us come up with a fun play schema we haven't explored much--Doctor.  Since we were just at the doctor's office on Monday to see what he could do for us, it was fresh in their minds.

I brought out the Check Up unit and read through the days activities.  Miss M didn't want to decorate her doctor's bag, just fill it up with anything she could think of like lots of bandaids, tongue depressor, a stethoscope, and a "poky thing" to give shots (we settled on a pipe cleaner as the safest option).  We have one of my husband's old white shirts in our dress up box and it became the perfect doctor's coat. Her flashlight from Grammie was just the thing to use as an otoscope.  We procured a patient (Mr. Henry Bear, a most favorite stuffed animal) and the examination commenced.

I loved how thorough Miss M was with her examination.  She checked his throat and ears, just like she remembered her doctor did.  We even used our new in-the-ear thermometer to check his temperature.  He was diagnosed with an "owie", treated with a bandaid and a kiss and sent on his way.  It was really fun watching her talk to him, listening to the new vocabulary words she picked up at her appointment and was able to use correctly in context.  Play is such a powerful learning tool.  

Littlest played Nurse to Doctor M, which had me smiling like a crazy person.  I am so entertained by my children, I really don't need a TV.  After a while, Miss M decided she was done being a doctor, though, and we played a game of Fitness Dominoes.  I've never been a big dominoes player but I was really enjoying the game and was a little disappointed when her attention fizzled half way through.  It would be fun to challenge her to see what kinds of shapes we could make or put two play figures on either side of the playing area and see if we could build a path to connect them both.

We are leaving town tomorrow and I plan on going through the remaining units to see what will travel well to keep the girls entertained in the van.  I think will bring along the dominoes game, it would be a fun one to play with the grandparents.  I also recorded myself several of our books with my new camera and my husband will be uploading them to their iPads so they can read in the car without having to pack an entire library.  Add some coloring pages and pray for naps and we should be good.

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.  :)

Variations on a Game

We love the games that come in our Mother Goose Time

materials.  I especially love that there are so many ways to play them other than just the rules outlined in the Teachers Guide.  This is handy for when Miss M decides she doesn't want to play "that way" but is still interested in using the materials. Here are some different ways we've used a couple of this week's games.

I came up with four (or six) different ways to play The Parking Game.  The first way was fairly straightforward, using a numbered die and having her choose a car and place it on the matching parking space, then tell me the color and shape on the car.  You could do a variation using a traditional die with dots to help with counting and pattern recognition.  Since my girls love the math manipulatives and I wanted to work on teaching Littlest colors, we added in a color matching component with the planes.

We also did another variation highlighting the shapes on the cars.  I made little tags with corresponding shapes and taped them to the board.  You then take turns drawing a car card and placing it on the corresponding shape space, identifying the number of the parking space.  You can also reverse this by parking the cars in the spaces, then using your homemade shape cards to unpark a car and reveal the number underneath.  If you want to work on colors instead of shapes, either of these variations works for that as well.  

Miss M loved the Race Car Matching game and was able to do it in the traditional manner (she actually beat me and I wasn't even trying to let her) but for a younger child who needed a simpler game, I would have kept the cards divided into upper and lower case, turned over the lower case letters and divided the upper case letters between the two of us.  Each player turns over one card and that is the one they are trying to match first.  Take turns looking for your match and turning over new cards in your personal deck when you find them until all matches have been made.

The Delivery Truck game was really fun.  We started by constructing our delivery trucks.  The girls decided to use stickers instead of coloring.  I've found stickers to be a fun fine motor skill for kids and stock up whenever I can find them cheaply.  I just got a whole book of 208 gingerbread stickers at JoAnn's for $1.49.

After your truck is done, put together the house cards.  I laminated everything so they didn't fold very well and I ended up just getting off the bottom and making a pocket.  I taped out a little road on the floor, put the package cards in a cottage cheese tub and dubbed it "the factory" and Miss M loaded up her truck with five packages at a time, delivering them to the appropriate house and returning for more packages when she'd finished.  After they'd all been delivered, we unpacked them from their houses and identified the pictures on the back.

I also wanted to share our science project, the car ramp.  Miss M was very excited for this one and actually requested it after we had already been doing school for close to two hours and when she is normally ready to just play.  We figured out the right height for our ramp and a slick surface to help them maintain momentum but then she wanted to add a tunnel.  It took a little experimenting to figure out how to make it tall enough and keep the the supports far enough from the ramp to prevent our cars from running it to them but the end result was a lot of fun.

An InLinkz Link-up

Our Beautiful Modified Art Piece

We did activities from the Walnut and Chestnut units on Monday.  I had fun figuring out how to combine the art projects into one since we only have an hour twice a week and the girls love to do the crafts.
I started with some 12x12 scrapbook cardstock and cut rectangles for the girls to glue onto their backgrounds for their tree trunks.  I had them draw their own branches with markers and then we talked about how not just fruit grows on trees.  I'm allergic to walnuts so I don't have them in the house but they seemed to understand the concept from the picture and the YouTube video in the guide.  I had some little round flower seeds I had gotten for free so the girls used those to stand in for their walnuts.

We gathered leaves from our maple tree but I think next time I use leaves in a craft, I will make sure they are not so dried out.  These were very crunchy and curled, which made them difficult to attach securely without ending up with powdered leaf everywhere.  They glued a couple on their pictures but it didn't really work well.

I punched out the pear poem from the Chestnut unit but rather than have them putting glue and glitter on the one they made into a necklace, I used the outline left in the paper to trace some extra pears.  They glued these to their trees, then added the glitter to them.  My reasoning was that they would certainly want to wear the necklaces right away and would end up with glittery glue all over their shirts.  This worked just fine (and they did want to wear the necklaces, which ended up as bracelets because I cut the cords too short).

After talking about the chestnuts and their spiny outerwear, the girls settled on purple paint for the final addition to their masterpieces.  After I figured out how to help them not end up with gobs of paint on their paper (by dabbing the porcupine balls on the paper plate containing the paint), they had a blast adding "chestnuts" to their multipurpose trees.

I really love how the final project turned out.  The girls seemed to enjoy the process, too.  It helped to not spend a lot of time on one step, coming and going as we interspersed the other activities.  It made for a really great balance of creative and academic time.