The Art of a Lasso

Mother Goose Time provides so many wonderful things in the curriculum box. Each month there are customized manipulatives/counters, a new music cd, fun crafts and so much more.

This unit, Discover the Desert has not disappointed us yet.

This month's book-of-the-month is called Who Am I? Friendly and not so Friendly Animals in the Desert. The boys enjoyed it and I read it to them while they played with the kinetic sand and figurines. One page had a description of an animal with a simple closeup picture of a part of the animal using colored pencils. Mr A would think and make a guess. Sometimes he was right, but mostly not. Some were not very easy to figure out. Next was the answer and real-life photo of the animal. There were simple instructions on how to act like that animal too. Mr A acted out most of them really well. The boys do enjoy these interactive books. At the back there is also a Guess Who I Am page. A description of the animal is listed with a few photo options. Mr A liked figuring out what the correct answer was. Mr Z liked to find all the matching pictures of each animal.

We got out some of our other figurines... the desert animals and especially the cowboy since he had a lasso.

Mr Z chose the purple horses since there were only two colors. I was not really by choice since Mr A claimed the 'gold' ones. But he made his kiss.

The cowboy got stuck in some quick sand, so the burros are lining up to help him out of there.

Mr Z lined up his burros one the number 13 card for a few minutes... while Mr A made his bray in the background.

We decided to take our craft outside for a change of pace. The boys needed their cowboy hat headbands from the other day to make a lasso.
The boys cut out the center of a paper plate to make a ring. I had to help hold Mr Z's plate while he cut.

He wasn't interested in coloring it and went straight to tying on the string so he could toss it around.

Mr Z found using a paper plate lasso to be rather tricky. It didn't do much besides go crazy as he whirled it around.

Mr A used markers to color his lasso and was pretty proud of it when he was done. He lassoed things like the sculptures, bushes and soccer ball for a few minutes. But, they both actually preferred playing with the lassos we made just out of twine.

We did not figure out the proper way to throw a lasso. But, I figured because a real lasso is thicker and more stiff. Mr A was bummed that we couldn't find thicker rope.
"What do people actually use a lasso for?"
To catch animals .... Mr A replied.

Hats in the Desert

Day 2 with Discover the Desert: the Cowboy Hat

Remember how I talked about process based art and creative freedom in my last post (here)? Making our cowboy hat headband was another that was completely process based.

Mr A came out of the office with a tub full of foam valentine heart stickers. He wanted to decorate his hat with them. Sure, why not!? Then I don't have to have them laying around anymore.

Mr Z wanted to paint his hat. He's good at mixing up the paint colors. They cannot be separate.

Mr A likes to interfere with his brother's stuff and convinced him that he needed some heart stickers too and helped with the placement.

Mr A loaded his hat with hearts.
I've learned that talking to the boys about the topic while they are doing something helps them listen better. They are busy with their hands and also listening with their ears since they are preoccupied. So, we talked about why people would wear a cowboy hat. The most important reason Mr A came up with, obviously being to keep from getting sunburned. We also decided that it was best to have your hat fit just right... too tight and it would give you a headache, too loose and it would wiggle around and fly off while riding your horse or if it was windy.

I thought his hat would have flopped over from all of the weight of the foam hearts. But, he had them in just the right spots and the hat headband stays up right

One of the activities that was included in our daily packet, was this hat game. I get almost everything laminated to help them last a little longer if the boys want to use it more than a few times and these little hats were kind of annoying to cut out of the lamination. Oh well.
Anyway, there were boys and girls so we sorted them by gender. Then we sorted them by neckerchief's. Then we took turns picking a hat and placing it on the head of the kid that had the matching color boots.

Mr Z matched the second set of hats to the hats that were already on the kids cards.

Mr A helped a little bit, since he likes to get his hands on everything.

Since there were two sets of the colored hats for the game, we played a game of memory. Mr A only wanted to find the matches of the colors he liked best though. Sometimes you just have to adjust the rules to your advantage, I guess.

Discover the Desert with Boots

I've had a pretty rough past few weeks. It's been difficult to do anything besides sleep. One of the things that has suffered was our Mother Goose Time lessons. I was completely deterred a few weeks ago when we reached the protein day in our Food and Fitness unit. I could not stand the sight or thought of raw meats. I've been having trouble with any type of food... raging hormones and heightened senses will do crazy things to you. Anyway, we fell out of 'routine' and skipped this month all together. I was pretty bummed since I had so much extra stuff to add to our Mother Goose Time curriculum. But, I've been feeling a tad better the last few days and received our March curriculum from Mother Goose Time: Discover the Desert, so I decided to get a head start on that instead...

In my MGT blogging group we've been talking about Process vs Product based art. Its been a great conversation.What's the difference? Process based art has more to do with letting the child lead in the craft making, decide what to do and how to do it... the end result doesn't really matter. Product based art is when the 'teacher' expects the child to make the craft/project exactly how it was intended to be or the adult basically does all the work for the child so that it turns out 'perfectly'.

Mother Goose Time provides great opportunities for the children who are participating, to use the process based method quite often and usually encourages it. I'll admit, for awhile I was helping too much. I would do things for the boys because it 'wasn't right' or it was taking too long. I wanted the boys projects to look perfect.

But, then one day, I had an Aha moment and decided that if I was doing the craft for them, they were not learning anything. The only thing that it showed the boys was that what they wanted to do and could do was not good enough. So, we began talking about creative freedom more often and I kept my hands out of their projects. By doing that, I've learned that Mr A has his own vision... sometimes he wants it to look like the example on the instruction sheet and other times he wants to do his own thing. If Mr Z actually wants to participate in the project, he likes to slop things together and is done rather quickly.

Anyway, here is how our first craft of the new unit went...

While the boys painted, we talked about Boots. Why you need to wear boots sometimes, who wears boots, what kinds of boots there are and why cowboys would be wearing boots in the desert.

It was decided that cowboy boots are sturdy and protect the person wearing them from snake bites, cactus needles, mud or poop.

Mr A said that he wished he could put all of our paper boots together somehow to make a boot he could actually wear.

The boys painted their boots for quite awhile. They prefer paint brushes to the porcupine balls that come with craft materials in the daily pack. I tried to explain that it provided a different texture of paint on the paper. They both tried the little balls for a minute, but went straight back to the brushes. I think because they are a little awkward to hold.

Mr Z wanted to help put more unnecessary paint into the bin. I think he got almost the entire container in there.

We use the front door as our art display. It's the only large magnetic space we have and it works out great. Its pretty empty now with just their finished boots, but by the end of the month, it will be filled with their various MGT crafts.

At the end of the month though, what do you do with all of your kid's projects? How do you document what the kids have done or accomplished throughout their lessons?
I keep most of them. I know I shouldn't because it takes up so much space. But, I got in trouble for recycling the boys gecko headbands from our rainforest unit in November of 2014. Mr A still talks about that headband.
Now, most everything makes it into the box. I just have a bankers/file box for now to keep their crafts in. If I was smart enough and thought of it sooner, I would have labeled the back of each one with the child's name, the unit it was from, month and year and a few skills or conversations. But, I did not think of that earlier. I could go back and do it now... I think I only have the name of the kid on the back. That seems like a lot of work though. I'm not great at documenting. It would be funny in several years to have written evidence of what was learned or said. There's always to time to start that with the next project.

Fruit with Food and Fitness

Fruit is my favorite food group! I love the sweet, citrus flavors. Luckily, I usually always have a ton of fruit in the fridge. We cut some open to look at the their insides and seeds. Mr A noticed that most of the ones we looked at had super tiny seeds. The fruit he found the most different though was the strawberry, because the seeds are on the outside of it. When, the boys were done looking at the fruit, we shoved a bunch into the blender to make a smoothie for breakfast.

While they were tossing fruits in, I asked Mr A if he knew the difference between a fruit and vegetable. He said no and couldn't think of a guess so I explained...
Vegetables are part of the part: the root, stem/stalk, leaf, or flower. Carrots are the root. Lettuce is a leaf. Broccoli is the flower. Celery is the stalk.
Fruits are the ovary of the plant and that it holds the seeds to make more plants. All fruits have seeds. Which also means that pumpkin, cucumber, tomatoes, bell peppers are actually fruits... but because of their flavor, people prefer to call them vegetables. Vegetables are usually savory, not sweet like fruits.
Some of that discussion, Mr A got, most he didn't really care about. Meanwhile, Mr Z was tossing in all sorts of fruits that we had out on the counter.

 We found some of the small seeds in the smoothie before we drank them. It was delicious.

In the daily packet we got some foam hearts and fruit baskets. Mr Z worked on making strawberries with his 2 colors of hearts. Mr A used his to make the letter "j" and Mr Z copied a few minutes later. While making some more heart strawberries I asked Mr A if strawberries are always red while growing on the plant. He said, No, they're green and white too. Then turn red when they are ripe.
Most of these questions that I ask while we are doing activities are prompted by the Teacher Guide. While the lesson is pretty much written out for you, there are questions to ask to help with focus and discussion. It certainly does help me. While 'teaching' I keep these questions in mind and ask as they fit into what we are doing. Sometimes the questions lead to completely off topic discussions that loop back around to the lesson. Sometimes they are straight forward. By that I mean, the questions are a great guide to lead the lesson. But, sometimes the answers I receive are random and I have to navigate back to the original question somehow. Other times, Mr A's answers are spot on. Anyway, it just makes it so much easier to have a guide that is already written out to help lead the activity... but where it goes from there is an adventure sometimes.

These are such fun little posters that I had on hand to add to our Mother Goose Time curriculum. The boys love them: Farrah Fruit, Jane Grain and Reggie Veggie. There are a few more characters for the other food groups, but we haven't gotten there yet. These help them visualize and connect with the food group in a fun way. They are always coming back to these little guys to talk about them.

Several months ago, these were a manipulative provided by Mother Goose Time. I completely forgot which unit they were from though. These fruit beads were another perfect addition to our fruit day. We practiced stringing up the pattern of the month with different arrangements of the fruits: ABBC.