Starting Again. Mother Goose Time with the Youngest

It's finally happened. My youngest is old enough to enjoy this preschool curriculum!
I started using Experience Early Learning formerly Mother Goose Time with my two boys several years ago. We used it for about 3 years. Then we had the Little Miss. I was overwhelmed with 3 children. I tried to keep up with the learning activities, but it was too much and I took a break. But now a few years later, I felt like I was in a place to do it again. I have a ton of old units leftover that are pretty much complete.
So, this week, Little Miss and I started with the unit, Ocean Commotion from April of 2018. We've had a great time so far. I actually forgot how much I liked it and needed this time to connect with my children too. Over the years, I've become bored and complacent and knew something was missing. I just didn't know what. My 3-year-old, Little Miss, was just watching TV all day while the boys were at school. We both needed a change.

Little Miss and I began our EELfMGT unit by taking a trip to Sea World to visit some sea life. Her favorite thing to do is pet the bamboo sharks, so we were there for quite some time.

Dolphins are silly when swimming upsidedown.

We love touching the bat rays too and fed them lots of fish.

We watched a sea turtle work his way out of a tight spot and the school of fish swim back and forth.

Day 1: Ocean Water
This was a fun day. Little Miss taste-tested different types of water. She came to the conclusion that regular water is better for humans and the saltwater is just right for the fish, sharks, and whales. She doesn't want to be a fish.
One of our projects provided by EELfMGT was an Invitation to Create. The inspiration photo is an aerial shot of the ocean. Since most of the earth is saltwater, the paint was watered down. With an eyedropper, Little Miss collected paint and squirted it onto her paper then sprinkled salt on top. She loved this!

She said several times, "I like you for letting me do this Mom. I love Mother Goose Time."

After starting her second picture, Little Miss decided to pour the paint. She loved watching the colors mix together.

Little Miss decorated her EELfMGT nametag also. She loves the stamper markers.

Since the earth is covered in water, the main bodies have names. To learn them, we had containers of water with the ocean names. The pocket cube was rolled to find out how many shells would be dropped into one of the oceans. We also found the ocean on the globe.

Our last experiment for Ocean Water was to see if objects would sink or float in regular, salt or sugar water.
What a fun day.

Day 2: Ocean Floor
We learned about things that you would find on the floor of the ocean; Sand, crabs, shells, plants, rocks...
Our Make&Play craft was to make an oyster with a small paper plate and bead. Little Miss colored her oyster and glued on her bead. She got a little inspiration from a few real pearls that I had collected over the years.

We used kinetic sand to play the shells for a while. We counted them and hid them underneath.

After a little while of playing with just shells, I remembered we had a ton of animal figurines and so we found all of our ocean animals. Then we picked out the ones that might be found on the ocean floor.

Day 3&4: Ocean Caves and Ocean Plants (I combined the 2 days)
Using a few blankets and a table we made a cave. We also glued some green strips of paper together to make some plants to camouflage the entrance. After talking about some animals that would live in a cave and some that wouldn't, Little Miss collected shells using a flashlight and placed them on the number cards. She's getting better at counting. Number 4 is one that she always skips though. But, we did do a lot in our cave that day. We read books by flashlight, we ate lunch, we played with play-doh. Even the dogs investigated the cave and hung out with us for awhile.

Learning about the Ocean Zones was not very interesting. She didn't care one bit about the Sunlight, Twilight or Midnight zones of the ocean. All she wanted to do for the Invitation to Create was to cut the paper. But that's ok. Sometimes your brain just doesn't care about any more information.

Thanks to Mother Goose Time (Experience Early Learning), we have had better days together this week. Hopefully, we can keep it up. By day three of the week though, I think Little Miss was going through TV withdrawals. It was a bit harder to keep her attention because she did want to watch her shows. But, it will take time to adjust.