Mars and Venus

Addie has wanted to travel to the red planet since she was 3, so she was especially excited that the Mother Goose Time topic of the day was Mars.  After we did the calendar and weather we talked about why Mars is red.  Then we reviewed stars with a simple puzzle.

picking the weather

Every month Mother Goose Time provides a new book.  This month it's Up In Space, A Counting Book.  The girls really enjoyed the book, which has nice bright pictures.  If you want to get your own copy it's available  here. Later this month I will be hosting a giveaway for 4 other preschool books published by Experience Early Learning, so be sure to check back.

Next the girls decorated their UFO's, which they painted the day before.  Then they pretended to fly them while dancing to the Blast Off to Space CD.

dancing with her UFO

 Addie worked on her math and reading work books while Elli worked on spaceship puzzle, which was an idea provided in the Little Goose book.

Once they were done we searched for red items throughout the house.  Then the girls collected red "rocks" and put them on a blanket that we pretended was Mars.  We shook it to create a dust storm and then counted how many rocks fell off.  The girls loved this so much; we did it so many times.  Even after it was all cleaned up Elli went and got the blanket back out and tried to do it again.

I couldn't get a good picture, but you can tell the girls are having so much fun.

 Mars has the largest mountain in the solar system, so we wrapped up the lesson by building tall towers out of blocks and counting how high we made them.  After we finished this we moved on to Venus.  I wound up combining days since the girls and I have all been sick and missed a few days.  We started off with an I Can Read Book.  Addie read the whole book, except for one word.  These books are great for building her confidence in her ability to read. 

 While Addie worked on patterning by herself, I worked with Elli on matching planet pictures. 

We discussed how Venus is the hottest planet.  Addie said it was because it's so close to the sun.  I filled a sock with rice and heated it in the microwave then we passed it around while listening to the Blast Off to Space CD.  When the music paused the person holding the sock had to do a silly dance.  The girls loved this, and had me warm up the sock to play again later in the evening.
Elli played planet memory, an idea from the Little Goose book.  She didn't really understand the concept, but she was quite content to sit by herself and play with the bottle caps.

While Elli played with the caps Addie and I talked about what it means to estimate.  She spun around the room pretending to be a planet until I said stop.  Then I would put the sun cutout from day 4 somewhere on the floor and she would guess how many steps it would take to get to it.  Then we'd count and verify.  I normally would have spent a little more time on each daily topic, but since we're trying to catch up we shortened everything a bit.  Tomorrow we'll be moving on to Pluto. 

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