Building Literacy with Mother Goose Time

Mother Goose Time provides a monthly curriculum for preschool aged children.  Each month comes with all sorts of resources that help develop and improve literacy through fun games, journals, easy to read books and more.  I know when I use this curriculum that my girls are learning important skills that will help create a foundation for reading and writing. Elli is only 2 so she's still learning her letters and the sounds they make.  Every month comes with hands on letters and letter flags to use with the circle time display.  These are really beneficial for young children, since they actually get to hold the letters.  I laminate these pieces and the girls can use dry erase markers to practice tracing them.  

 

Every day has a new topic related to the monthly theme.  I just open the lesson plan book to the correct day, grab the corresponding bag, and we're ready to go.  Each activity in the lesson plan book shows what skills will be gained from the exercise.  For example, the postcard helps with emergent writing.  This is a good way to see what skills your child may need more help with, or what skills can be made more advanced for them.  

 Every month comes with a new book related to the monthly theme.  I pull the book out when we get our monthly box and we read it many times throughout the month.  There are also story telling pieces so the girls get to use those to retell the story.  This is great for seeing how much they are comprehending.  Addie likes to use these to tell the story to Elli.  This month the girls also made their own Johnny puppet based on the book of the month, which added yet another prop for story telling.  All these activities are designed to make reading fun and engaging.  

There are always numerous fun games that help encourage beginning reading.  These are great confidence boosters for Addie, since they are easy words that she can read herself.  I use these activities to work on letter recognition with Elli.

An InLinkz Link-up

Let's Celebrate Fall

This month Mother Goose Time included a pumpkin patch celebration kit with October's monthly box.  It had so many fun ideas in it, that after 3 hours of crafts, games and songs we still didn't finish everything.

The girls painted paper bags orange.  While they were drying we played games and had a snack.  Once they were dry the girls stuffed them with crinkled scrap paper and added faces and leaves. They had so much fun making these.  Addie even made 2 faces, one for the front and one for the back. 

Th girls loved playing pin the patch on the scarecrow.  They took turns rolling a cube and then would tape the matching shape to the scarecrow poster while blindfolded.  This game was a great way for Elli to practice her matching and colors while having lots of fun.

I made jack-o-lantern snacks for the girls.  They ate the cut off edges while I made the faces.  

We carved pumpkins and the girls helped scoop out the insides.  Elli really didn't like getting slimy so she mostly just played with pumpkin seeds.

The girls used pumpkin seeds on the pumpkin counting cards.  Elli worked on counting and matching the numbered cat cards to the correct pumpkins.  Addie worked on adding using the cards and seeds.

The girls also colored their own scarecrow pictures, which matched the pin the tail on the scarecrow game they played earlier.  Mother Goose Time included another celebration kit for November, which looks like it will be even more fun. 

An InLinkz Link-up

Bugs

Day 13's topic this month with Mother Goose Time was bugs.  I did most of the lesson with just Elli while Addie was at school.  

I buried seeds from the provide seed collection in a tub of sand.  Elli pretended to be a bug digging for food. She had a great time playing this and hid all the seeds when she was done and did it all over again.  She played this game by herself for almost half an hour.  Anything that holds a toddlers attention for that long is something we'll be doing again.

I showed her the bilingual word cards and she practiced saying the words in English and Spanish.  She hasn't mastered English yet, so listening to her try and say words in Spanish was amusing.

Bugs can be harmful to orchards because they eat the plants and fruit.  Elli practiced counting fruit beads and then fed them to a bug made from a cup.  She plays with the fruit beads a lot and sat and sorted them into containers and worked on stringing them once she was done counting.

We used a colander to make a spider web.  Elli was able to work on her fine motor skills by threading pipe cleaners in the holes and then balancing a Halloween spider we had in the web.

Spiders are good for orchards because they trap harmful bugs in their webs.  We made a tape web and the girls threw different objects at it to see what they could make stick.  The web kept getting knocked down, but they still thought it was fun.

Since they were having fun with the tape web, but it kept falling, I decided to make a web with leftover streamers.  They had to find different ways to get through it without touching the web, or else they would get eaten by the spider.  They took turns being the spider and added more streamers to make it harder.  This entertained them for a LONG time and they even wound up making a bigger web in Addie's bedroom.

An InLinkz Link-up

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. 

Plums

We just finished up week 2, fruit trees, with Mother Goose Time.  Today we learned about the plum.  The girls looked at the monthly poster.  I read them Little Jack Horner and then Addie read it to Elli.  She's really getting good with her sight words and loves reading to her little sister (or anyone else who will listen).  

The girls made their own plum pies.  They had a lot of fun with this craft.  Elli needed help weaving her pie crust, but did all the gluing and paper crumpling by herself.  I have found that I need to use the Little Goose supplement for toddlers less and less with her.  She wants to do everything her big sister does, and insists on doing it all herself.

 After the pies were done the girls played with them.  Addie reenacted Little Jack Horner multiple times, but changed it to Little Addie Horner.

I brought out a sorting pie that we have.  Elli used it to sort colors and to practice counting.

I showed the girls the science card for today.  Unfortunately I didn't have a real plum to show them so we just looked at pictures and the rubber plums from the sorting pie.  The girls worked together to make play dough.  Elli dumped the ingredients into the pan and Addie stirred it until it turned into dough.  Addie loves cooking and has been learning how to safely use the stove.  Once the dough was cooled the girls played with it.  Fresh play dough is always so much better to use.  They played with it so long we didn't finish up the last main activity.  Next week we start animals in the orchard, which I know they will enjoy.

Cherries

 My favorite manipulative that we got this month from Mother Goose Time is the above wooden fruit beads.  The girls LOVE these.  We talked about patterning and used the beads to make different patterns.  They also used them to make bracelets and necklaces and Addie helped Elli count them and sort them by color into the mini pie tins.  So many activities from such a simple thing.  They played with them for so long I was able to get our dinner prepped and in the oven to bake without the usual distractions. 

They also used the provided fruit cards to work on making patterns. 

tree

thank you

We talked about all the things trees do:  provide shelter, give us fruit, clean the air.  The girls learned sign language for thank you and tree.  Addie always likes the ASL cards and will ask me how to say random words in sign language, to which I never know the answer.  

Elli didn't take my word that glue covered popcorn is gross...she learned the hard way.

The girls really liked making cherry tree pictures.  They painted their arms to make prints for the trunk.  After they dried we made the provided bag of microwavable popcorn and the girls painted and glued them to make blossoms.  After that we had a movie night and ate the rest of the popcorn.  An added bonus for the kids.