This week has been one of those weeks. You know, the kind where you have lesson plans for Tuesday, and you’re still trying to finish up those plans on Thursday? I blame the holiday weekend. You give me an inch of rest and I’ll take a mile.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good family day, and especially celebrating meaningful holidays, like Memorial Day, where we can celebrate what amazing freedom we have here in the US.
But whew, it kills my productivity. Maybe we’ll get our groove back in June.
So, needless to say, the past few days have been an interesting mix of moles and crows and rabbits (oh my). But fun nonetheless. So here are highlights from the past 3 days.
Our first day looking at Day 12’s focus on Crows, we decided to try out the Little Goose “Feed the Crows” activity. We pretended to be crows, using plastic spoons as our ‘beak’ and tried to pick up seeds (pom poms), sticks (pipecleaners), and rocks (pattern shape blocks) from one tray to the other.
(Don’t you love the mix-matched pjs? Just keeping it real, folks.)
Peter was so excited that he actually had one balanced on his spoon.
Natalie explained that she was ‘feeding her babies” and proceeded to make a yellow pipe cleaner worm to add to the mix.
This activity led to some great discussion with Natalie, my 4 yr old, about the difference in difficulty in trying to pick up and balance those objects from one tray to the next, and similarly there are things that crows can and cannot get with their beaks. We also talked about the really interesting fact that crows actually use sticks and other objects to dig & find food. I didn’t know that until this week. Gotta give crows more credit! That’s pretty clever.
After a little time with this, my youngest Peter (2) picked up two pipe cleaners and showed me a letter Y. One of the pipe cleaners was bent in such a way to resemble the letter, and I was really surprised to see that he was starting to recognize his letters out of abstract objects like this. It really goes to show the power of repetition with us focusing on Yy this month. Yay for ‘y’!
AND he picked up two of the red trapezoid pattern blocks, put them together, and said “octagon.” (He’s been quite obsessed with octagons lately.) Although it wasn’t the correct polygon, I still love that he is starting to piece objects together to form new shapes and symbols. I never would have guessed he could do that at this age, which just goes to show much he is benefiting from watching his sister learn and play. So neat!
While Peter was playing as a crow, Natalie also spent a good amount of time designing scarecrows with the different picture options that were provided in Day 12’s supplies. I hadn’t looked ahead that far, so it was neat to see how what we had already talked about regarding scarecrows on Day 11 with Moles really flowed right into that day’s lesson. We then decided to play the “Feed the Crow” cards from the main Mother Goose Time packet for Day 12. This consisted of two pictures of crows (pictured below) and little food cards that you turned upside down. Taking turns flipping over cards, you ‘feed’ the crow each food item, trying to avoid flipping over a scarecrow card. If you flip a scarecrow, you lose. Natalie was NOT a fan of this idea at all, and so we opted to play memory with the pairs of cards instead.
She did surprisingly well considering there were 22 cards. We normally don’t play with that many at a time, so it was good to see that she’s up for more of a challenge.
All the while, the soundtrack for the morning was “caw caw.” Cute at first, and then I was pretty much over it. But at least they were having fun.
Fast forward to today, and we eventually got around to finishing our crows that we had painted yesterday. We spent some time feeding them seeds. Although the wings ended up being more bat-like than crow, it gave me some great ideas for the future! So we’re learning to see the benefits of the less than ideal. 🙂
And then finally this morning we talked a good bit about rabbits.
We made our super-fun rabbit masks. I tried to catch a good picture of Peter, but he is pretty much a rabbit. Can’t keep him still for long.
Isn’t he a sweet Peter Rabbit?!
Natalie put some effort into her rabbit’s ears. It’s been neat to see her artistic side developing.
And then we caught up on some journal activities.
Peter decided to add seeds to his sun’s eyes on the cover. Gotta love a little man with a glue stick, right?
Natalie, unlike my “R” example for Peter’s journal, wanted her rabbit to be sideways so she could add the nose to the side and show the tail. I LOVED that she thought outside the example and chose to do something different. This is not my natural tendency, and so it’s fun to encourage her in her own approach to things, and also to learn from her creativity as well. And of course, she named her Rabbit.
This is Sally.
And we wrapped things up by playing with the rabbit counters.
We used tp rolls for ‘burrows’, and Peter promptly started stuffing all of his in.
Natalie designed a little pattern bunny trail and then explained that she was going to put the little bunnies in the burrow first so that there would be room enough for all of the bunnies to fit. So she was strategically thinking out how to make sure they could all go home, possibly after watching Peter’s attempt at cramming them all in.
Little minds at work – so fun to watch!
As an official Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador,
I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum.
Moles, Crows, and Rabbits (Oh My!)
JennyThis week has been one of those weeks. You know, the kind where you have lesson plans for Tuesday, and you’re still trying to finish up those plans on Thursday? I blame the holiday weekend. You give me an inch of rest and I’ll take a mile.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a good family day, and especially celebrating meaningful holidays, like Memorial Day, where we can celebrate what amazing freedom we have here in the US.
But whew, it kills my productivity. Maybe we’ll get our groove back in June.
So, needless to say, the past few days have been an interesting mix of moles and crows and rabbits (oh my). But fun nonetheless. So here are highlights from the past 3 days.
Our first day looking at Day 12’s focus on Crows, we decided to try out the Little Goose “Feed the Crows” activity. We pretended to be crows, using plastic spoons as our ‘beak’ and tried to pick up seeds (pom poms), sticks (pipecleaners), and rocks (pattern shape blocks) from one tray to the other.
This activity led to some great discussion with Natalie, my 4 yr old, about the difference in difficulty in trying to pick up and balance those objects from one tray to the next, and similarly there are things that crows can and cannot get with their beaks. We also talked about the really interesting fact that crows actually use sticks and other objects to dig & find food. I didn’t know that until this week. Gotta give crows more credit! That’s pretty clever.
After a little time with this, my youngest Peter (2) picked up two pipe cleaners and showed me a letter Y. One of the pipe cleaners was bent in such a way to resemble the letter, and I was really surprised to see that he was starting to recognize his letters out of abstract objects like this. It really goes to show the power of repetition with us focusing on Yy this month. Yay for ‘y’!
AND he picked up two of the red trapezoid pattern blocks, put them together, and said “octagon.” (He’s been quite obsessed with octagons lately.) Although it wasn’t the correct polygon, I still love that he is starting to piece objects together to form new shapes and symbols. I never would have guessed he could do that at this age, which just goes to show much he is benefiting from watching his sister learn and play. So neat!
While Peter was playing as a crow, Natalie also spent a good amount of time designing scarecrows with the different picture options that were provided in Day 12’s supplies. I hadn’t looked ahead that far, so it was neat to see how what we had already talked about regarding scarecrows on Day 11 with Moles really flowed right into that day’s lesson. We then decided to play the “Feed the Crow” cards from the main Mother Goose Time packet for Day 12. This consisted of two pictures of crows (pictured below) and little food cards that you turned upside down. Taking turns flipping over cards, you ‘feed’ the crow each food item, trying to avoid flipping over a scarecrow card. If you flip a scarecrow, you lose. Natalie was NOT a fan of this idea at all, and so we opted to play memory with the pairs of cards instead.
All the while, the soundtrack for the morning was “caw caw.” Cute at first, and then I was pretty much over it. But at least they were having fun.
Fast forward to today, and we eventually got around to finishing our crows that we had painted yesterday.
We spent some time feeding them seeds.
Although the wings ended up being more bat-like than crow, it gave me some great ideas for the future! So we’re learning to see the benefits of the less than ideal. 🙂
And then finally this morning we talked a good bit about rabbits.
We made our super-fun rabbit masks.
And then we caught up on some journal activities.
Natalie, unlike my “R” example for Peter’s journal, wanted her rabbit to be sideways so she could add the nose to the side and show the tail. I LOVED that she thought outside the example and chose to do something different. This is not my natural tendency, and so it’s fun to encourage her in her own approach to things, and also to learn from her creativity as well. And of course, she named her Rabbit.
And we wrapped things up by playing with the rabbit counters.
We used tp rolls for ‘burrows’, and Peter promptly started stuffing all of his in.
Natalie designed a little pattern bunny trail and then explained that she was going to put the little bunnies in the burrow first so that there would be room enough for all of the bunnies to fit. So she was strategically thinking out how to make sure they could all go home, possibly after watching Peter’s attempt at cramming them all in.
Little minds at work – so fun to watch!
I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum.