Our last Growing Gardens day was filled with lots of fun journal activities. I personally LOVE the journal aspect of Growing Gardens. I personally love to journal and have for years (here is a sneak peak of most of my journal collection).  I really appreciate that this currciulum is introducing my kids to a really great activity that is going to help them to process the information and store it into their memories. Mother Goose Time does a really great job at giving such a variety of activities within the daily topic to cater to all types of different learning styles (visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinesthetic). I’m personally still trying to pinpoint which style my daughter responds to the best, so it’s realy helpful to have the variety to observe and start to see hints of her learning bent.

As you can tell, the number 10 was a focus for this month, and with our focus on Days 18 & 19 of Beans and Peas, I went with a green theme.

So the first journal activity was to draw 10 pea pods and add different numbers of peas to each pod. Since I knew we would be trying to cover a lot of ground, I drew the pods ahead of time for the kiddos and let them choose how they wanted to fill them.

 

 

Peter wasn’t very engaged at this point, so I tried to bring in little green pompoms instead of just using the marker to draw the peas. He didn’t really appreciate my ingenuity on this one, either. With Natalie, I told her ahead of time that we would be adding up the peas that she drew at the end, so to be mindful of that as she completed the activity.

Peter moved on to the next activity quickly – coloring the bird pink. He actually colored a lot longer than he normally does.

He surprised me with how focused he was on this task. I can see his attention span increasing, especially when it comes to coloring, which he used to have no interest in at all. So that’s been cool to see.

His finished product.

Once Natalie was finished with her peas, we wrote the total of each pod above it.

Once all the pods were totaled, we combined our Rabbit Counters, pattern shape blocks, and our pompoms so she could use them as counting manipulatives. She had gone a bit crazy with her peas.

Peter stole shared the pattern shape blocks and started his own little activity.

I encouraged his show of independence and the fact that he was occupied enough for us to engage in the counting without much interruption. He did, however, start to mimic Natalie’s counting, and even started counting the pom poms as he was cleaning those that had fallen on the kitchen floor.

Natalie using her manipulatives to represent the peas in the pods.

Once Natalie had all her peas counted, we added the total to the journal page and she quickly filled in her pink bird and page design.

We then pulled out the paint and baby q-tips to add 10 seeds to our garden at the back of the journal.

Since the Rabbit Counters were already accessible, I suggested that a bunny jumped into the paint and then rain through their gardens. So we spent some time stamping bunny tracks.

This led to some conversation about how the difference between a clean print (stamping with very little paint) vs what happens with a lot of paint glopped on. Natalie is pretty picky about her work, so she wanted to know how to make the best prints.

My kiddos love to paint, so when we finished our seeds, we put the journals aside to draw and decided to have a little freeplay art time.

It was game on with the different manipulatives to choose from to paint with (rabbit counters, pompoms, pipecleaners, q-tips, and fingers), and we talked about the different textures.

I was reminded to not take my eye off Peter while he’s painting.

He ended up with some fancy new pink streaks in his hair before the end of it.

Natalie decided to draw what she called a “Cat Butterfly.”

“It flies around eating bites of cats. So we better hide our cats.”
So, there’s that. Gotta give her credit for creativity, right? And maybe a little future counseling if this continues. 🙂

We wrapped up our morning with the really fun scrapbooking exercise!

It suggested that we draw a vine with 9 tomatoes (just so happens this is Natalie’s favorite vegetable (or fruit, depending on where you fall in that argument). Natalie decided she wanted a basket of tomatoes instead, and so we planned out her design before she got started.

My lack of artistic skills showing Natalie some basket design options.

Natalie’s finished scrapbook pages for Growing Gardens

I also LOVE LOVE LOVE the scrapbook that helps you to quickly reference the main topics for each month! I really wish that we had the previous months’ fill-ins since we started mid-year. Looking forward to completing the rest of it! Note the really cute idea for the “F”, “R”, and “Y” plants with 2 options for the child to choose from to represent what we’ve discussed.

Since Peter had already moved on from our daily work for the day, I filled in his journal with the remaining options Natalie didn’t pick.

First Month Assessment: LOVE Mother Goose Time! This has been SO helpful for me to ease into schooling both kiddos with a more hands-on curriculum. It’s super cute, very well organized and creative, and the kids have really enjoyed it.  I put all of this month’s Daily Topic Sheets in a binder and while Natalie was painting, I flipped through them and asked her to tell me about each picture. I was really surprised with how much she has retained and it was very encouraging to me to see that the time we’d spent this past month was really having an impact.

Sometimes it’s easy for me to second-guess whether activities are really worth the effort and time investment they require, and so it was nice to have such a quick confirmation that it really seemed to be in this case. And it’s been evident to see Peter’s progress in just watching Natalie play and engage in the projects. I’ve seen his play change and develop in a really short amount of time.

So overall, extremely pleased and thankful that we get to do this together!

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