Wrapping up Week 1

We just finished our first week using Mother Goose Time, and so far I love it.  The girls are having so much fun with the daily lessons.  Today when we finished, Addie still wanted to do more.  She was disappointed when I told her we were done for the day, and that was after we spent over 3 hours learning about clouds. The lessons don't normally take quite that long, but I added a few things that I knew the girls would like. 
Day 4's topic was astronomer.  During circle time I introduced the yellow bird. Then the girls flew around the living room and fed him the yellow foam stars that I had scattered on the floor.  They collected the remaining blue foam stars and put them in piles.  I worked on counting the stars with Elli and patterning with Addie. 

feeding the yellow bird

Making an ABB pattern

counting and patterning

star hunting

decorating telescopes

Next I gave each girl a cardboard tube and they used them to search for star stickers.  After gathering all the hidden stickers they decorated the tubes and looked at the provided constellation cards with their newly made telescopes. 

They also used the foam stars from earlier to complete the constellations.

The night before Addie and I colored paper and then painted it using a mixture of black paint and dish soap.  Today the girls used it as scratch paper to draw planet pictures.  It was harder to scratch off the paint than I thought it would be.  Elli gave up after a few minutes and wound up using q-tips dipped in paint to make her picture.

We wrapped up the day with workbooks, and dancing to the dance n' beats dvd.  The girls both love this and we've been using it everyday.  Elli brings me the dvd case and remote when we're not even "doing school" because she loves to dance to it.






Our final day of the week brought us clouds.  We talked about what makes up clouds and how they are different shapes.  The girls were given cards with different shaped clouds on them and went on a hunt around the house to find items of the same shape. 

We sang "Look Up High" and I held the cloud cards up in the air and the girls had to jump to reach them.  Addie loved doing this so much that we wound up doing it 3 more times after the song was done.  Today was warm enough to go outside, so we put on our snowshoes and went to look at the clouds.  We saw deer and snowshoe hare tracks as an added bonus.

After warming up with hot chocolate Addie practiced throwing the correct number of cotton ball clouds onto the corresponding number cards.  While she did that Elli practiced throwing them into a bowl while I counted for her. 

Addie made a smiley face cloud

Then we used the cotton balls to make our own cloud shapes.









 We talked more about clouds and fog, which is formed when warm air passes over the cold ground.  I put ice cubes in a tub and let the girls play with them, and then brought out the hair dryer.  They had fun moving the ice around the tray with the air and watching the ice melt. 

 While Addie drew the results of this mini experiment, Elli sorted clouds into the ice cube tray.

Meanwhile I was preparing our next activity.  Cut a bar of Ivory soap in half and microwave each half on a paper plate for 1 minute 30 seconds. 

The girls played with the soap clouds for over half an hour.  After a while it turns crumbly and messy.  I hid the laminated planet pieces from yesterday and some glow in the dark stars in the bin for the girls to find.  They had a blast playing with this stuff and our whole house smelled like soap.

Next we tried an idea from Coffee Cups and Crayons.  We sprayed shaving cream into a jar of water and then added food coloring.  We checked on it about an hour later and the food coloring had seeped through the shaving cream into the water, turning it blue. 









Addie worked on her math and reading books.  Today there was a little story that she was able to correctly read by herself, with the exception of the word sky.  There was also a puzzle, which just seemed to frustrate her.  All the pieces were the same shape and size which made it difficult to put together. 

Normally we end by dancing, but today we made cloud pets.  The girls both loved them.  Next week we start the planets.