Porcupines

 Today we started learning about animals in the orchard.  Up first, the porcupine. 

Each monthly Mother Goose Time kit includes a lesson plan book.  This makes it so easy to just open and go.  Very little prep, if any, is needed.  

We start each day with circle time, where the girls put up a new calendar piece and also pick out the weather of the day.  We looked at the monthly theme poster and found the porcupine and then sang Prickly, Pokey, Porcupine.  

We talked about porcupine quills and how they are used for protection.  The girls touched different pokey items and had fun poking each other.  They also made their own porcupine puppets.  Elli's turned out a little crazy, but she likes to do things herself.  Unless she asks for help, I try not to step in.  

Porcupines like to eat the fruit from orchards.  They usually do this at night.  I hid the fruit bead manipulatives from this months box around the room.  The girls pretended to sleep while the lights were on, and when I turned them off they would climb out from their home and hunt for the fruit.  They worked together to try and find all the fruit before the lights came back on and they had to go back to their porcupine homes to sleep.  They LOVED this game and we played it many times, until it started to drive me a little crazy.  Addie asked if we could play it again tomorrow.

Porcupines dig for food.  I hid word cards in some sand and the girls dug around until they found them all.  Then they rolled pokey balls onto cards and flipped them over to reveal a letter.  They added them to the "ig" card and made the words they found in the sand.  Addie was able to correctly read all the words.  When Elli turned over the "p" card she said it was the letter p and even made the puh sound.  They are learning so much while having fun.

Porcupettes, or baby porcupines, have soft quills when they are born.  We talked about how that could be dangerous for them.  The girls felt the difference between cooked and raw spaghetti. They tried to stick both into the play dough we made last week when we learned about plums, and decided hard quills would be better to have.

We read a book and also watched a youtube video, which another blog ambassador had shared.  My girls loved watching Teddy Bear the porcupine.  We watched quite a few videos about him.  They got a huge kick out of the noises he makes.