So we’re playing catch-up, after losing some momentum from the Memorial Holiday Weekend. To try to keep us on track for June (and because I’m pretty eager to jump into June’s theme,  ABC House), I decided to try to pick out my favorite activities from Week 4’s lesson plans. What resulted was a pretty fun couple of days with lots of variety, and a lot of inadvertent learning opportunities!

Since Week 4 was all about produce, we started out on Day 19’s Stone Soup Activity (which I called Vegetable Soup) and started reviewing all the vegetables we would cover. I had previously laid out the  Daily Sheets for Week 4, so we identified the different vegetables for each day and then started adding our veggies to our pots.

I had pre-cut Peter’s, so he went right into pasting them into his pot.

Peter was not interested at all in adding the dried pasta and peas to his pot, calling it a “mess.” He then proceeded to start sorting the letters & numbers from the peas. (Wanna make any predictions on his personality type?)

So while Peter was busy sorting, Nat finished cutting out her veggies (she’s very precise), and got right into pasting hers.

Since Natalie took a little bit longer cutting, I read the story off of the back of Peter’s pot when he finished, and we discussed how the main character was quite sneaky in his attempt to make stone soup and convincing the towns people to contribute their veggies.

When Natalie was ready to add some of the dried pasta to her pot, Peter was not ready to share and had a little meltdown. So he spent a little bit of time in his room to calm down (not pictured). 🙂

While Peter was having some alone time, Natalie and I worked on the Rabbit Is Hungry activity from Day 18 (Topic: Bean).  We read the bilingual cards, and then picked out the appropriate pictures that were provided to paste to each page that described what was happening. Unfortunately I forgot to get a picture of our cute little book, which is missing at the moment (such is life with littles). But it was a really fun activity and I loved the idea of introducing the Spanish terms as we were discussing. We enjoy talking about how big and diverse God’s creation is, and we’ve talked before about how the little boy, Diego, that we currently sponsor through Compassion International speaks Spanish. So it’s neat to be able to introduce more of his culture to her, and will hopefully be a connecting point for them as she grows up and begins to write her own letters to him.

Once we were done with our little book, we used the cards to play memory together. We took a quick break from this to watch a squirrel while he was enjoying a mid-morning nut snack.

By this point, Peter had quieted down and decided he was ready to join us again for Day 16’s Carrot Sewing Activity.

This was a little challenging for Peter’s dexterity, but he did fairly well with my assistance. Once we had the two carrots tied together, he enjoyed swinging the two carrots “open” and “close” for a while, so I let him free-play while I assisted Natalie with hers.

Once we had them all laced, we twirled the carrots.

Then I asked Natalie how she wanted to add the greenery to the end of her carrot (what shape & size she would choose), as well as how we could get it to stick to the carrot. Natalie promptly slide the green rectangle between the two carrots.

She then decided she wanted the greenery to be a triangle.

Once we got all set up, we twirl tested her carrot to see if it would stay intact.

Meanwhile Peter had lost interest and began sorting the rabbit counters.

He then surprised me in making rows by color, which he was mimicing from Natalie’s play a couple of weeks ago. So neat to see what he is learning by watching her!

He was so excited! “Bunnies, bunnies!”

And what really cracked me up was that he kept finding a few stray dried pasta pieces from earlier that morning, and would bring them up to me.
“Mommy, C, a C.” “Mommy, 7, 7!”

(Who knew just scattering alphabet and number pasta around your kitchen floor would become a opportunity for alphabet review? )

Back to the carrot design. Since we discussed her green triangle failed the twirl test, I gave Natalie the options of glue, paste, or tape, to hold it in place. Nat chose tape and wanted to put it on both sides of the triangle and re-insert it back in-between the carrot pieces.

Once her design was complete, we twirl tested it again to make sure it was successful.  The whole exercise was a spontaneous, fun exercise in design and engineering.

I then suggested we fly the carrots like kites.

We then finished up Day 16’s focus on Carrots by completing the carrot puzzle and playing with the eye chart that was included.

We discussed our recent doctor’s visit where she got her eyes checked, how carrots help us to see better, and so that must mean that rabbits can see really well since they love carrots.

Peter continued to play independently on the kitchen floor, now including the pom poms and a set of tongs, the ingredients for hours of successful independent toddler play .

We then moved on to Day 17’s Garden Domino cards.

We had just recently played dominoes with our Leapfrog domino set  that we had scored for free from a classroom that didn’t need them anymore, and so she was familiar with the idea of the game.   This was a  great independent activity for her, and gave me some time to assist Peter with the tongs and pompoms.

Once she was finished, we reviewed her patterns and made a few minor adjustments where needed. But overall she did really well!

(Natalie’s attempt)

(after we adjusted a few things)

By this time, Peter had wandered off down the hall to our bookcase that contains most of our puzzles and other shape blocks, and proceeded to continue sorting and stacking there. So I took advantage of his preoccupation to begin the Garden Postcard activity with Nat.

This girl LOVES to write, so she was pretty stoked about this activity. Since Peter is too young for this, I gave her both postcards and she decided she would send them to ‘people that she loved.’ She began designing while I wrote our address on another sheet of paper for her to copy later. This was such a fun writing exercise for her, where we could discuss the elements of an address (Name, House Number and Street Name, City & State), and how each part of the address was important for the mail person to know where to deliver the postcard. We joked that if we left out our House Number and Street Name, that the mail person would have to knock of every house in Hampton and ask “Are you the Harwoods?” She got a kick out of this and told me that would be pretty silly. And I am suspecting this will flow well into our study of places to live in ABC House, so yay for flow!

Natalie was a bit distracted with Peter and I coming in and out of the kitchen, and so this activity took longer than needed. Needless to say, she was asking me for a nap break by the end of it.

I took this as my cue to wrap things up, and put off the rest of the lesson plan for another day.

I’ll say that it’s a pretty different ballgame trying to do activities simultaneously with two littles. They keep me on my toes, but we’re slowing finding our groove. I’m learning when to flex the plan, but also when to persevere despite their resistance, still keeping my role as the parent and teacher. It seems like such a fine line between being flexible and letting them dictate what we do each day, right? As if what our day looks like is dependent on two moody toddlers.

I am thankful the Lord is showing me that He has given me the role of authority and that I have the ability and power to determine the temperature of our home. I get to set the pace, as I’m following Him, and I can ask Him for wisdom and strength and grace to make the decisions that need to be made each day. I will say that this has been key in feeling less chaotic each day.

As I have told my husband many a hard evening during bedtime routines, “We do not negotiate with terrorists.” And just like we have been learning, if we continue to parent out of consistent, graceful authority, our little ones  – our own little growing garden – will thrive.

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