October Bonus Day

Before I start in on what we did this day, I want to explain what a bonus day is.  One of the great things about Mother Goose Time is that the holidays are NOT incorporated into the base curriculum.  Why is this a good thing you may ask?  Well for one, this allows you to use the curriculum as you please.  You might work through your curriculum slower and each "month" (20 days of curriculum) may take you 2 months to work through.  So when you order Octobers theme, Down on the Farm, and you are still working on it in November, you don't want to be learning about Halloween.

The second reason this is so great, is that you may not celebrate that holiday.  Obviously, Halloween, is one of those controversial celebrations that not everyone enjoys.  It would be really hard to avoid it if it was part of the curriculum.  This way, you may choose if you want to cover it or not.

Lastly, if you are using the curriculum in a daycare/preschool, or any setting I suppose, it gives you more freedom as to which day, leading up to the holiday, you would like to complete the bonus day.

Let me also say that not all the bonus days are actually holidays.  This months box came with 3 bonus days to choose from.  One about the Fall, Fire Safety or Halloween.

Lachlan has been talking a lot about Halloween, he is dressing up as a pumpkin.  Since he has been so excited about it I decided to do the bonus day a couple days ago.  We chose to do Halloween, but I might revisit the other two.

On Monday it is just me and my 2 boys.  Peter and I both got the flu on Sunday, so we were still a bit under the weather.  Lasted a couple days actually.  So we never did get dressed.  We had been watching a lot of TV and movies because every time I got up I didn't feel so great.  I was fed up with not doing anything and thought Mother Goose Time would be a perfect break in our day.

That morning there was a front loader out front scooping up leaves and dumping them in the back of a dump truck.  The boys were captivated.  Since we were up front I figured I would take the craft to them.  We got to use the little desk I found at a garage sale a year or more ago.  That's why it's pink, we had planned on painting it, but haven't yet.

We were decorating pumpkins.  MGT included a pumpkin cut out and a pumpkin leaf cut out to glue to the top.  The picture in the lesson plan book showed the pumpkin taped to a tongue depressor but one was not included in the bag.  I happened to have some extra from an earlier craft. 

First they colored the pumpkins.

 Glued the leaves to the top and viola a super cute pumpkin for a super cute kid.

 He hopped up on his bed to draw the face on his pumpkin.  He drew sharp teeth like a dinosaur. 

I am smiling Mom, just take the picture already.

Peter followed his brothers lead by hopping up on the bed and drawing similar "sharp" teeth.  I added the eyes.

Next was the lesson called How Many Seeds?  We talked about what was inside of a pumpkin.  We had just carved our pumpkins a couple of weeks ago.  Jeff saved all the seeds and roasted them, they were still sitting on the counter, I hadn't eaten them all yet.  The instructions on the lesson said to get out 10 paper bags and label them 1 through 10.  I had this egg carton already labeled from another activity we had done, so I dug it out.  The idea was to put 1 seed in the 1 bag, or for us the 1 slot in the egg carton.  Then 2 in the 2, 3 in the 3 and so on.

The third lesson was called Ghostly Feet, and it's actually super cute.  But we passed it up for a couple reasons.  One, I still don't have white paint, I really need to get some, Peter loves drawing with white on black.  Second, health wise, I was not quite up to the task of dipping my children's feet in paint. Third, I am not a big fan of ghosts and goblins.  The craft is super cute though.  It's simple, dip their feet in white paint and have them make foot prints on black paper.  When the foot print is upside down, use a black marker to draw eyes and a mouth on the heel part of the foot and they look like little ghosts.

The last activity was called Invisible Ink.  It's such a great idea, I had kind of forgotten about it.  Simply take a white crayon and write or draw on a piece of paper.  When done, paint away with water colors and the paint will not stick to the white crayon wax on the page.  I decided to use water color paper so that the paint wouldn't bleed through.  I don't think it works as well for this water color trick, I also don't think we pressed hard enough, but it still worked a bit.

First they colored with the white crayon.

 Lachlan painted an apple, which we did about a month ago on another lesson and he apparently really liked the idea.

 Peter just painted everywhere and enjoyed trying all the colors out. 

At the end I painted the blue over where I had written Lachlan's name to see if it would show up.  It did, but not too noticeably.  Honestly, I am a bit sad that I decided to put paint on his art.  I would have rather this been all his work.  But I was curious as to whether or not the white crayon worked.  Next time, I hope I choose not to touch his work.  Lesson learned.

Again, I think this would work better with plane paper and heavier writing with the white crayon.  I have seen this work before and it's tons a fun.  So give it a try.  A perfect Halloween activity.