Since I originally posted this, the author informed me that I had entitled her story incorrectly.  I have since made the appropriate changes to ensure accuracy.

For my birthday (not really, but I’m gonna claim it), Natalie composed her first short story. It was inspired by a little writing assignment (Critters in the Garden) in her More Literacy workbook from Mother Goose Time. She was instructed to draw a picture of what critters she might see in a garden, and then draw or write a story about it.

She was so creative that my mommy heart can’t help but share it with the world-wide web.

(“Mom, I’m gonna make the rabbit out of an R.
Because some letters look like the animals.”)

 

The No Family Mole
by Natalie Harwood

Once upon a time, there was a mole. And he was very lonely because he didn’t have a family.

There was also a rabbit, who jumped into a hole, thinking it was her den. But it was the mole’s hole.

She jumped in and she found the mole and asked him if he would be her friend.

The mole said yes because he was lonely.

But after a while, they were still lonely.

Then a worm squirmed in and thought it was her home.

AND THEN the worm asked the rabbit and the mole if they wanted to be her friends and they said yes.

Now they were not lonely.

The End.

 

I’m anticipating an illustrated version to come. Stay tuned!

As an official Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador,
I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum.
Click here for more information on Mother Goose Time.

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!

As an official Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador,
I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum.
Click here for more information on Mother Goose Time.

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.

As an official Mother Goose Time Blog Ambassador,
I receive curriculum in exchange for posting about our honest and authentic experiences with the curriculum.
Click here for more information on Mother Goose Time.