Just Pick Something

I pulled out a game provided by Mother Goose Time in the curriculum for the day about Shipwrecks. Shipwreck Hideaway came with little fish popper as your moving piece. They boys played the game for a few minutes until one of them pressed the fish down all the way until the suction cup stuck. The game was over after that. They had a great time waiting for the fish to pop and fly somewhere around them. It was fun to watch them wait in suspense and get startled each time the little fish finally flew.

I got out the Divers day packet and cut out the flippers for Mr A. Yesterday from the store he got new pool goggles. So, he tested them out with his paper flippers. He liked them, but they didn't stay on well and he ripped the first set we tried.

One of the activities I grabbed from the Divers day packet, was the Storytelling Set. Mr A and I went through each page of the book provided in the curriculum, Ocean Animals A to Z. When we came to page that had one of cutouts, he added it to the ocean poster. Then they played with the cutouts after all of them were on the poster.

We had a major dance party for a little while too. It was fun. We love the music cd's and listen to them often. Mr A can sing along to all of the songs by the middle of the month.

I still have yet to get him to actually participate in the Dance N Beats Dvd's. I think I figured out it's because he thinks the moves are too girly. He mentioned the other day that there aren't any 'boy moves' in the dances.

Finally, this morning, I pulled out the boys' MGT scrapbooks. The scrapbook is keepsake book with a review of what letters were worked on, the number of the month and simple question pertaining to the month. This month the sentence to finish was: My favorite ocean animal is ...? They each glued on their pictures for the different letters. Then added the others to the sea star, instead of drawing a self-portrait. Mr Z colored with concentration.

Mr A likes to color his shape with two colors, red and blue, since those are his favorite. He can't choose just one.

We had another fun, yet simple morning. I randomly grabbed activities from packets that we missed over the last few weeks. I like the flexibility of teaching at home, especially with MGT. Quick lessons/activities sometimes work best for us. Attention spans are low since we are out of routine. To ease back into it, we are doing one thing at a time and rather quickly.

Quick Activities for Busy Days

First of all: I had taken pictures of the boys doing these activities but had accidentally deleted them instead of sending them in an email to my blog... so they are lost forever. Oops.

Second of all: We are super behind in our Mother Goose Time lessons. Last week we had long days and nights with practices and performances of Mr A's play, Peter Pan. It was so amazing to watch him on a real theater stage and sing and dance. However, it put a damper on our education. I also went to train at Warfighter Academy a few days and had to drive the boys back and forth from family. This week, I spent packing up food for our house to get fumigated for termites. So, our days have been full.

Finally, this morning, I squeezed in a few activities. But because our routine has been fuddled for quite some time, it sure was a hassle. These few things lasted all of 10 minutes.

 

I had this fun little game laminated and stapled the seahorse pouch onto the larger picture. Mr Z had a great time stuffing Daddy Seahorse with his babies. Mr A didn't want to take the babies out to pick a new number card, so he ended up with all 8 babies in the pouch by turn #2.

More Math workbook for Mr A. He prefers this one over the More Literacy book. First we cut out the ruler on the seahorse page. I explained how to line up the end near the #1 to an end of the seahorse. And Mr A measured all the seahorses. He was quick to see which inch was accurate for each seahorse. Although, he was discouraged and ready to quit after his 4 looked more like A to him because it wasn't good enough.

I know it will be a struggle to get him to complete tasks in the future. He wants things to be perfect the first time and if it isn't to his standards, he gives up. Ugh, How do you encourage him to keep trying?

Next, Mr A cut out his sea sponges from the next page in his workbook. The directions were to put them order from smallest to largest and he did it in less than 15 seconds, I think.

Mr Z colored his Seahorse page... a little bit. Lol. He did a fine job trying to trace the tail.
In the 10 minutes that it took to do all of these things we learned that seahorses are poor swimmers, the are actually classified as fish since they use fins to swim where they can and breathe through gills, the males carry the eggs until they hatch, they usually mate for life, they can change color to camouflage and their tails are strong to hold onto anything to keep them from drifting away with currents.

So, I guess it doesn't have to be a long drawn out lesson to learn some new facts.

An InLinkz Link-up

Science in the Ocean

I can't believe how much science we actually do everyday... especially in our Mother Goose Time activities.
In our MGT lesson we learned that Jellyfish are actually a type of plankton because they drift with a current and cannot swim against it. Many types of plankton are an important food source for many other organisms in the ocean. Most plankton live near the surface, where there is some light, but not at the very top so they don't get eaten by sea birds or burned by the sun.
When we took our field trip to the aquarium, we did an experiment about plankton. We recreated it here at home. I actually don't have photos, since I was in on the action. The object was make your own plankton and see how slow you could make it drop to the bottom of a tall tube of water. The materials used were a clump of clay, feathers and chenille stem pieces. At the aquarium, Mr A made one and retested it several times. We compared the speed and tried to judge which version of his plankton dropped the slowest. We found that if the clay was flattened and feathers were stuck into the sides, covering a larger surface area, it drifted the slowest to bottom. At home, we did it again, but in a smaller tube.. actually I cut off the top of a large juice bottle. Mr Z just liked dropping all the materials in the water.

X-Ray Fish & Sea Star Crafts with MGT

Our week is really busy. Mr A has final rehearsals for Peter Pan at the real theater all this week. Its a long week of late nights. Mr A was so nervous about the real stage, but after just doing what he's supposed to with his friends, he loves it.

Anyway, we've only been doing the crafts provided from Mother Goose Time and a few simple activities.

I made an outline of a simple fish and cut up straws. First we played a game: roll a die and add that many bones to the fish. Then we used glue to make bone designs. They didn't want to add the straws themselves to the glue, so we just let it dry.

MGT provided paper with a water design on it. I painted the boys hands with several colors that they wanted and we made some handprint fish.

Sea Stars! They are an eye on each arm, 2 stomachs, tubed feet, can regenerate arms if lost.
Mr Z played with our Sea Star figurines and matched them up to the focus picture.

We made our own sea stars out of Play-doh

Mr A's has 10 arms and lots of spikes, with eyes on each arm and her name is Arzza.

Our Bumpy Sea Star craft was fun. MGT provided the star cutouts and self-adhesive pearls. It was funny watching Mr Z. The pearls stuck to his hand and he couldn't get them onto the paper himself. So, I placed them where he wanted them.

Mr Z's newest thing to draw is circles. He loves circles and will always try to make them.

I glued a piece of paper to the punched out paper from the sea star craft. The boys drew faces on their stars. Mr A said his was a picture of himself when he is a grown up and is a daddy. Then he cut it out.

Mr A loved helping make his own breakfast from the MGT recipe card. Bread cut into the shape of a star, peanut butter and chocolate crispy cereal. He said it was so yummy.

Even when we're super busy with other things sometimes, we can still fit in some fun learning activities... thanks to Mother Goose Time.

An InLinkz Link-up

Sea Turtles & the Galapagos Islands

While we waited for our friends to join us for MGT, we started building our islands. We had to stay on the different carpets so we didn't get attacked by sharks. Mr A instantly put some of the longer blocks between the two carpets to make a bridge. I thought it was pretty genius. We used our Safari LTD Toob of animals from the Galapagos Islands including a Sea turtle, Marine Iguana, Land Iguana, Blue Footed Booby, Tortoise, Penguin and several others. We looked over our World Map provided by Mother Goose Time in the Welcome Kit and tried to find the Galapagos Islands. (I would like to learn more about these islands. They are fascinating.) We watched this video about the Marine Iguanas too.

When blocks was enough, I got out the Sea Turtle coloring page from the Member Resources online. I shoved them into plastic page protectors and we practiced tracing... kind of.

On the back, I had quickly drawn outlines of a few of the islands in the Galapagos chain. The kids liked taking the paper out of the plastic and seeing the "picture" they had drawn.

We compared a tortoise and sea turtle using the photo/fact cards included in today's packet. We used more Safari Ltd figurines to compare the land and sea animals.

The kids loved playing with the tiny turtles, which led to our life cycle figurines. (Mr Z liked to hog all of the sea turtles, so it was difficult to get the adult in its rightful place on our chart) Our friend, Miss E,  loved our turtle activities. We tried to stack the little turtles on top of the largest one. It was pretty tricky. I could only stack 3 babies on the mommies back.

Since the kids were getting squirmy from being inside, we took MGT outside to dig holes for our turtle eggs. (I got left over plastic decorating eggs from Easter for $.50/dozen.) We dug holes with shovels (although using just arms would have been more fun) and counted how many could fit in the hole.

Mr Z dug a little bit, but he was more into over-seeing I guess. Miss E said "this is a lot of work". I would imagine its a lot of work for a turtle with only flippers to dig a hole large enough and deep enough for up to 200 eggs. We could only fit 7 or 9 at most in the holes that were dug... or just 1.

(We stepped away from our Sea turtle eggs to go play our game, then came back to find the eggs again).  The kids searched for the buried eggs and it was a little of a task trying to find all 24 of them. They seemed to have forgotten where all of them were buried. Again, Mr Z is over-seeing. Lol.

So while our sea turtle eggs were "hatching" in their sand holes, we  made our Who is Hatching Game provided by MGT. The kids practiced cutting and cut out their card eggs. I gave them their pompom ball and they had a great time tossing them around the yard.

Then, I set out everyone's cards and they played the game. You toss your pompom onto the card and wherever it lands, you find the matching egg of the space you landed on. The turtle hatches and from the egg and you place that turtle on the card until all the spots are filled.

Mr Z just liked putting his hatched turtle eggs on his card.

Mr A practicing a long shot to his card.

Yay, everyone wins! On the cards are some of the topics for the month, Letters O X & W, numbers 8 & 18, sight words What & Am

We had such a great time learning about sea turtles, the Galapagos and playing with friends! Mr A says his favorite thing to do today was burying the turtle eggs.

Gearing Up for Growing Gardens

Growing Gardens is the theme for May 2015 with Mother Goose Time.

Focus topics are:

Letters F Y R

Numbers 9 & 10

Shape diamond

Color pink

Pattern AABBCC

Sight Words said, little, like

Friendship trait Honest

 We will be learning about Gardens!

What you need to plant a garden. Watching the garden grow and the different parts of a plant. What kinds of visitors the garden will have. The different vegetables that can be grown in the garden.

 Activities included in this month are matching games, building a scarecrow, feeding a crow and playing vegetable dominoes.

 

 The Add-ons that I chose to get this month are the Experience God and More Math and Literacy workbooks. The theme for Experience God for May is God is Wise with the accompanying Bible story Sowing Seeds based on Luke 8. There are four crafts included for each child (one per week) with daily devotionals to help inspire learning about God. We will see how this goes. We've never really been people to talk about religion in the home.  

Mr A loves these workbooks. They are just advanced enough to review skills needed to prep for school.

The manipulatives included in the curriculum kit every month are among my favorite things. For this unit we received another set of the plastic shapes with a design mat. We have quite the collection of these now and they are so fun to play with. The little plastic bunnies will be fought over though. They are so cute. There are a few different sizes and will be great for sorting and sizing.

The Bonus Day included in May is Mother's Day. The kids will be able to make a flower pot craft, play a matching game and learn about mother's and how to appreciate them. 

For extra themed play and activities I got extra seed packets, a Safari LTD Toob of fruit and vegetables, kids gardening tools and the book From Seed to Plant.



I also found my life cycle box and will throw in these plant models and cycle spinner.

I can't wait for another fun month with Mother Goose Time. This is such a great way to spend the day with my kids. Learning, crafting, playing and experiencing the world and nature in different ways each day.