Caterpillars, Moths and Butterflies

We've been loving learning about bugs this month with Mother Goose Time.

 Every monthly box from Mother Goose Time comes with a new book of the month and a heavy duty puzzle to go along with the theme.  Elli loves doing these puzzles.

It's always exciting when you get the piece in on your first try. 

We talked about camouflage and played a matching game. 

We also talked about symmetry.  Elli painted a picture and then folded it in half to create a mirror image.  She loved making this and thought it was so neat transferring paint from one page to the other just by folding it and pressing down. 

We talked about the difference between butterflies and moths and then played a game to reinforce this idea.  Elli would roll the pocket cube, decide if it landed on a butterfly or math, say how she came up with her answer, and then run to the butterfly or moth photo hanging on the wall

She had lots of fun decorating both sides of her moth wand.

We played Go Home, Bugs a few times.  You have to move your piece to the letter that starts each word you roll, until your bug makes it home.

Elli loves using cornstarch noodles in crafts.  She's always really excited when she sees a daily bag contains these.  She used them to make a caterpillar by adding them to a cardboard tube.

One of the monthly manipulatives from this box were insect builders.  They are little plastic disks that can be hooked together to create all kinds of bugs and creatures.  Elli made a bunch of her own designs and also used the shape design mat to duplicate the suggested bugs.

I read the I Can Read book to Elli while she used the sight word pointers to try and find matching words.  These are super simple books designed for beginning readers. 

Ladybugs and Spiders

This months Mother Goose Time theme is bugs and crawly things.  We just picked up this great bug box on vacation last month, and it's already been a great addition to this months theme.  Days 1 and 2 were spent learning about ladybugs and spiders.

 Elli completed her name tag and then gave it 3 spots, since she's 3 years old.

She worked on counting to 19, one of the numbers of the month.  We took turns spinning the spinner and adding spots to the ladybug until he had all 19.

Elli also made a ladybug headband.

I hid the bug counters from this months box outside.  We talked about where bugs might hide, and then Elli ran around the yard collecting all the bugs she could find.

I read the monthly rhyme time poster, Little Miss Muffet, to Elli.  We talked about which words on the poster rhymed.  

Elli thought it was funny that spiders have more than 2 eyes.  She had fun making her own headband with 8 eyes and 8 legs.

We used the bug counters again to work on sorting color and insect/arachnid type.  Elli used the spiders to "eat" similar colored items around the house, and then other bugs that were the same color.  She ha a lot of fun with this game.

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.

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