Tinkergarten aka Nature School

We've been attending a nature school. Outdoor learning. Getting into the park. It's led by a local leader; usually a mom that loves being outside. We've been having a great time. It's called Tinkergarten. There may or may not be a leader in your area. But, if there is... its worth it to go and check out a class. My husband thinks its kind of pointless. He says its stuff that we can do at home. It is true... we could do it at home ourselves. But, its different when you're with other kids and taught or led by a different adult. Its been a time that the boys look forward to every week.
My boys have developed a great relationship with their leader, Ms Jill. Our second season is just about over; last class this Friday and we're sad. It's been a fun time for sure.
We've done some fun things...

Made magical potions

 Trekked through puddles

 Made stone soup... and a witch's brew

 Played with Pulleys

 Hid in shelters

 Discovered weather like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs

 Investigated nature

 I made personalized Tinkergarten peg dolls

 Tired lots of new flavors of tea

We've also made our own paint with nature items, painted outside on a shower curtain, took a guided tour of the park, went on hikes, went on a Bear Hunt, went on scavenger hunts, made bird nests and animal homes and so much more.

Mr A's school meets M-Th and Tinkergarten has been on Fridays. He is always excited to go to 'nature school' and often times brings something special to show Ms Jill or has something in mind to tell her. Mr A brags about having two schools to attend. The boys always have a good time. It gets us out of the house. It gets the boys time with other kids and a time where they are not fighting over wanting the same toy. =) We've gotten to know the park and it has been great to watch the boys as they run ahead to find Ms Jill. With a happy hop or big smile, Mr Z and Mr A say hi and wait to hear what we'll be up to that day. Its been fun to see their progression through the classes and open up.

Anyway... we love Tinkergarten!

Alligators at the Pond

At the Pond with Mother Goose Time

Alligators

Mr A's has been improving his storytelling skills. He wouldn't let me record a video of his story using the poster and pond animals. I will try to retell it though. He used the fish, turtle, water strider and frog photos from the storytelling set included in the daily bag.
One day there was a water strider. He flew to the pond and landed on the water without making a splash. Along came a frog and sat on a lilipad. "How are you" said  the frog. "I have something to show you." the water strider replied. (he lifted the water strider and made it jump onto the water.) Next a fish came swimming by. "Hello," said the fish. "Hi, I have something to show you." the water strider jumped up and landed on the water without a splash. A turtle popped up from the water. "I have something to show you." the water strider told the turtle. The water strider jumped up but then the frog ate the water strider. Then the fish ate the frog. The turtle ate them all. The end.
Before Mr A's stories weren't really stories, just playing with the animals. No dialogue. The animals just basically chasing each other. Maybe he would say a few sentences to appease me. But, I was surprised with this one. It pretty much had a beginning, middle and end. The school he attends tells stories orally. Pictures are painted in the imagination using words instead of reading a story from a book. So, I think hearing all the stories at school has helped him come up with his own that have a bit more detail.

The Invitation to Create included a picture of alligator skin close up. Also provided was the paper and squares of bubble wrap. I set out a few colors of paints and some brushes. It was neat to see the different ways they boys used the same materials. Mr A brushed the paint onto the bubble wrap and used it like a stamp.

Mr Z brushed the paint onto the paper and then dabbed the bubble wrap over the paint. The different methods made different textures and results, naturally.

Mr Z had to mix all of his colors, of course.

The reason we did alligators today was because Mr A was wearing his alligator slippers. His feet were getting eaten while painting and he thought it was so funny.

In every month of curriculum, there is a postcard. The front has space to draw a picture that coordinates with the theme. The other side is like a regular postcard, a place for a note and the address. Mr Z drew an alligator and a fish that lived happily ever after and scribbled a 'note' for his grandparents.

So, in previous past posts I had mentioned that Mr A was going through some difficult attitude things. We had a rough time for awhile. He had a lot of new things all at once. But, with all the new things, MGT was taken out of our days altogether to relieve some of my stress. One of the things that Mr A missed was the MGT activities and time spent together. With Little Miss older, we have been having a great time together again... because of MGT. Mr A is getting more time together after school and things have been looking up. We are glad to have MGT back in our not-so-daily routine. =)

Don't Worry, Be Happy

Experience God with Mother Goose Time

God Cares About My Worries

(the story of Jesus Walks on Water)

Don't worry about anything. Instead, pray about everything

Philippians 4:6

Experience God with Mother Goose Time is a great way to add Christ and faith into your day.

Today we focused on our worries and how to hand them over to God and Christ after reading the story cards with the story of how Jesus walks on water.

The Experience God guide book is easy to follow. Here's a peek at one of the activities we did today.

This picture below shows a lot about my sensitive Mr A. He sure does have quite a lot on his mind.

So, instead of using blocks for the activity, we used tangerines. They have more weight to them and it was what I had lying around. We discussed what we worried about. Mr A was rather quick to answer and had quite a lot to say. I was surprised. Most of his worries were of family getting hurt, friends being sick, getting in trouble. But every time we mentioned a worry, a tangerine was placed into the plastic bag.  When there were several, we talked about how much the bag weighed. Both the boys walked around with the bag and lifted it. It was pretty heavy after a while.

We talked about how having so many worries is not fun. Its tiring and kind of makes you cranky. But, that's what Heavenly Father and Jesus are here for. If we tell them our worries and struggles, they can help make it better. Take them away and lighten our load. I did have a cross cut out of paper and we placed our worry tangerines on to it. If we pray often, we don't have to carry the weight of worry. The bag was much lighter when we unloaded the tangerines to the cross.

In the Experience God child packs there are materials for 4 crafts and 4 worksheets. The first craft was to make puppets for the story. They didn't want to add the popsicle sticks to the pictures.

Then we colored together...Jesus talking to the people, a coloring sheet in the child pack.

Mr Z asked where Jesus lived. I told him that he actually lives in all of us, though he does live in heaven too. Mr A chimed in that he lives in our heart. He is exactly right. I expanded and told them he does live in our hearts and that's why he can always be with us. We just need to talk to him and ask for help when we need it. Sometimes when we ask our parents, family, or Jesus for help when we are struggling things don't have to be so hard. There is always someone close that help.

Don't worry. Be happy and Pray.

Snail Slime

At the Pond with Mother Goose Time

Snails

The At the Pond thematic study with Mother Goose Time has been all about plants and animals that would live in or around the pond or lake. We've been having a great time with it.

The other day we learned a bit about snails and talked about why they might like to live by a pond, what dangers they would have and where they would go or what they would do.

One of the items included in the daily bag was a game. Mr A helped cut out the pieces before we got started. Normally my control-freak side comes out and I would say no so that edges would be cut straight, but oh well. He wanted to help and I let him. He did a fine job anyway.

This game was to help with the -og word family. The object was to work your way through the spiral snail shell by picking a letter card to complete the -og word. (The letter cards were to be put into the foam cube to be rolled, but I didn't feel like dealing with the cube being thrown everywhere. So we picked up cards.) Once you made your word, your snail inched along to the next available word on the shell. I was impressed that by the end of the game the boys were saying the word on their own after picking the letter card. But, I think Mr A was just color-coding the words. By the end he knew which word belonged to what color. He sees color before letter... like me.

One of the fun things about Mother Goose Time is its flexibility. I come up with ideas but so do the kids. A reason Mr A picked Snails for the topic for the day was because he instantly thought of making slime. Snail Slime... what a great addition to the day. A great way to individualize your curriculum is to follow those ideas that you or kids have. Most of the time, for us they are last minute ideas and you just have to wing it or replace a MGT activity, but it is oh so fun.

So, I found the recipe for the slime and we all helped in making it.

1/2 cup glue mixed well with 1/2 cup water. add 1/2 cup of liquid starch. stir and play.

The boys had so much fun with this slime. We didn't add anything crazy like color or glitter. Plain slime today, but it was awesome. They noticed how the consistency changed as they played. It seemed to get more smooth the longer they played.

They squished it.

They let it drip and ooze to the floor.

They stretched it til it ripped.

They wore it as a glove.

They tried to make letters with it. Mr A kind of has a 'N'

There are many ways to individualize your lessons... by interest, developmental level, age, learning style. So many aspects to consider. Us over here, we usually go by interest since that makes it more fun for the boys, especially since it was Mr A's idea. They played with this slime for close to an hour and had such a fun time. Mr A even said "I used to not like to touch this kind of slime, but now I do. Its fun. But, it doesn't really feel like a snail though."

Tadpoles in Real Life

At the Pond with Mother Goose Time

This has been such a fun unit... and mostly because the lake in our neighborhood came back with all the rain we've had. It was dry for years.

One of favorite things that we've discovered on our hikes around the water were TONS of tadpoles. It was amazing. Swarms of them gathered at the waters edge while feeding. The rains after we discovered them made the water level rise and so we haven't seen them gathering like this in quite some time. They've all dispersed I guess.

We've learned about frogs several times with Mother Goose Time through various thematic studies, but having our very own tadpoles nearby was new. We've gone over the life cycle of a frog before and have plastic figures of the cycle as well so the boys know quite a bit about these creatures already. So we saw them in a new light with this exploration.

Unfortunately, now I think a lot of them are getting eaten by birds that have discovered the new water and such an abundant food source. But, I think there's enough we'll have enough to hear them croaking songs of new frogs in a few weeks.
While we were hiking around the lake and observing the tadpoles, we discussed the tadpoles and frogs by using the focus questions from the different activities in the MGT Teach Guide. I wrote them all down so I could refer to them while at the lake, but mostly we just freely observed. Some of the questions were: How is a tadpole like a frog? How is it different? What might be fun about being a tadpole?What would you like about being a frog? How far do you think a frog can jump... or you? Where do you think frogs like to go in the pond? What about a tadpole? (We combined day 3 & 4 into one: Tadpoles & Frogs.) Of course I also asked my own questions like What do you think eats tadpoles? What is the tadpole eating? Where do they go when it gets dark?
For tadpole and frog day, we spent most of our time out exploring the lake. Honestly, besides writing down and taking the questions from the guide, we didn't do anything else from the daily bags. The field trip wiped us out. But oh mam, did we learn a lot while watching them in live action.

Algae at the Pond

At the Pond

I asked the boys what topic they wanted to start with this time because the Mother Goose Time's March unit doesn't need to be done in order. Mr A picked day 10's Algae since he found some at the neighborhood lake the other day.

After Mr A got home from school, we did some activities before heading to the lake again to explore.

In the daily bag was a shape mat and some foam diamonds. Mr A got right to work figuring out where the different sizes went. Though, the shapes were not the correct size for the spots they were supposed to go. Mr Z would have gotten frustrated that the shapes were smaller than the shape mat.

While Mr A was doing the shape mat, we talked about what algae is and what it does. He was interested that algae was a plant and that it could grow on turtle backs. Mr Z chimed in that it could be food for tadpoles too.

The Invitation to Create was to paint your version of algae using yellow and blue. I forgot to add shaving cream to the paint to make it puffy. But the boys had fun mixing the colors to make several different shades of green.

 The Inspiration photo was of swirly algae with lots of different colors of green.

They added the included glitter and said the glitter was all the tadpoles in the lake.

Since we had glitter left over from the Invitation to Create, we used it for our experiment of cleaning dirty water. In a bin I put water and some vegetable oil, then the boys added the glitter and dirt. Mr Z wanted the frog in there too.

It sure was yucky, slimy water. The oil made everything stick to our hands.

I brought our several utensils to see which would maybe clean the dirty water the best. A cheese grater, small strainer, a scoop, coffee filters and baby wipes.

We began using the scoop and trying to keep the oil, glitter and dirt from getting into the beaker. The strainer and cheese grater definitely did not work. But the coffee filter did. It left the water the cleanest and most of the oil was trapped on top along with the dirt and glitter. Mr A switched the filter with a baby wipe to see the difference between the two. The wipe had let the oil through and was draining much quicker than the filter. Mr A noticed that right away. As we were finishing up Mr A squished his hands together and says "Oh man, I shouldn't have done that activity. My hands are so messy." Our hands were super messy and oily.

PS... Dont ever mix glitter and oil if you hate glitter.

We had a great time exploring the neighborhood lake. Over the last few years all the water dried up. But, we've had crazy amounts of rain and the area is coming back to life. There's tons of water, a gazillion tadpoles, and lots of birds are coming back. We found several spots with algae... well, at least that's what we called it. This algae was the floating-on-top-of-the-water kind.

And just because these brothers are cute together. =)

Algae with Mother Goose Time was a fun time.