In The Desert

We spent last week learning about the rodeo, and this week we learned about the desert.  Mother Goose Time provides lots of fun games and activities that incorporate language, literacy, math, science, art, motor skills, etc. through thematic units.

All month long we use the my little journals to work on the letter, number, shape and color of the month.  

Each monthly box from Mother Goose Time comes with loose letter parts and letter card templates.  This months letters are N, W and Z.  The kids use the pieces to build the letters, it's a hands on approach to letter recognition.

Anybody who is traveling in the desert will need a canteen.  The kids made canteens out of paper plates, souffle cups and string.  

They played race to the oasis to practice counting, taking turns and following rules.  

We learned about a tribe in Yemen that has contests to leap over camels.  We used pillows as camels and the kids took turns seeing how many they could jump over.  We kept adding to the pile until no one could make it over.  

Camels have 1 or 2 humps, but the kids make playdough humps and added them to the camel cutouts and then we counted how many there were,  

I read Sally the Camel to the kids while they took turns picking numbers to add to the lines.  

We played desert animal memory which is another game good for taking turns.  

The kids created their own silly desert animals by adding a back to a camel and a head to a lizard.  

We played don't spin the scorpion.  The kids took turns spinning and adding colored cubes to a pile.  If you spun the scorpion all the cube colors had to be tallied up to see which one had the most, and then the game started back over.  

We spent a day learning about Egypt and the pyramids.  The kids practiced drawing hieroglyphics in their journals.  

They sponge painted bricks onto pyramid shapes and added sand.  

They also used this months manipulates to build pyramids using the shape design mats. 

Their favorite activity of the day, and probably the week, was when they worked together to create a long tunnel into the pyramids and took turns crawling all the way through it.  

The kids used scissors to cut up brown paper and glue on as tree trunks.  They used spools dipped in paint to make olives.  They got to look at pictures of desert plants and an olive tree for inspiration, and were free to create whatever they wanted with the provided materials.  This type of open ended art helps promote creativity and decision making.