When my husband and I chose to go with Mother Goose Time for our summer curriculum, one of the main reasons was because of the awesome add-ons that are available to the main kit that seemed to really apply to the season of life we’re in currently. There is the Experiencing God devotion book & crafts that are so much fun. There is the Little Goose booklet that helps us bridge the gap between our little one (2) and the main curriculum, giving us some really fun developmentally appropriate activities for him, and then the More Math and More Literacy workbooks for Natalie to help her transition into Kindergarten & higher grade level skills. Each of these add-ons coordinate with the monthly theme, so it’s so easy to fit them all together and it doesn’t feel disjointed.

This particular day we were working in Natalie’s More Literacy workbook, encouraging her writing skills, as well as general literacy skills. One of the fun activities we’ve seen so far was an activity for her to practice finishing a sentence, and then drawing a picture to describe what she had just written.

“Under the leaves, we saw ______.”

Well, we have a lot of bees in our backyard. In fact, a few weeks ago, we had a swarm of them almost set-up camp in the tree in the middle of our yard. Thankfully they decided it wasn’t the most ideal place for their new hive and moved on after several hours of occupying our backyard. I’ve never seen anything like it. Bees everywhere.

Needless to say, the kids are still talking about it weeks later.

So under the leaves, we saw bees.

And then Natalie decided to draw two ‘helper’ bees and a queen, and explained that they were bringing her pollen so that she could go make some honey.
(She’s also become quite interested in the Maya the Bee show on Netflix, so this has definitely added to her inspiration.)

And the grand finale was adding our family to the mix.

It was fun to see her little train of thought and how she decided to complete the activity on her own. And it was nice to still have some one-on-one time with her since we have transitioned to doing school with Peter now. This gives us a time to connect together while she’s exploring her creativity.  I’m looking forward to getting into this more over the next several months.

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.

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.

With our current “Growing Gardens” Theme from MGT, the kids and I have talked a lot lately about how creative God is. Take the  seed, for example. How incredible to know that within the little shell contains the ability and potential for so much more. Just add water.

We’ve thrown a few seeds into zip-locks with a wet paper towel and have been examining how they respond to these conditions, and watching how the water starts to initiate and unlock this process that is already inside of them. Such creative design.

And to think that we are made in God’s image?!

As a rule-following, give-me-an-example-of-how-it-should-look-and-I-will-try-to-duplicate kind of girl, I appreciate abstract creativity from an outsider perspective. I like order and balance, so all of the houses I drew as a little girl all had the same number of windows on each side, the only thing that could be considered off balance was the one chimney on the roof, but I added that because all the other images I saw had chimneys. So, you know. Gotta follow the example.

But my daughter – man, oh, man. She is all about abstract. She is not only great at free-designing pictures and creations out of blocks/shapes, etc., she is also great at identifying things within abstractions, naming them so that I can then see what she sees. She is going to be a great leader some day.

Today, though, took it to a whole ‘nother level.

This is her tree.

And when asked to explain it, she went into full detail, telling me what was the trunk, what parts “helped hold it up” (as though she recognized that it didn’t quite have structural integrity), what were the leaves, and even added that it had a ‘bad white thing’ on top that if you touch it, it can make you sick. On further investigation, I deduced that she was referring to mold that she had recently seen on an orange at the grocery store that I had told her ‘not to touch because it could make her sick.’

I love how she gets so engaged in her art, personalizing it from her own experiences. And I’m so thankful I thought to ask her to explain it to me, that I didn’t immediately brush it off as a 4 yr olds’ silliness, but really it’s a glimpse into her little world. And I love it.

I love being able to see into her little world and learn more about her.

In the same way, I can look at God’s creation and learn more about Him and His Story, the One who created everything out of nothing – no blueprints or examples to go off of.

His own design.

Natalie calls God ‘original.’ I think she nailed it.