Baby Animals - Which babies are carried on a back?

Day 7 we completed in 3 days, maybe 4 and we did it completely out of order.  We started with the Participation Story The Monkey and the Tortoise at breakfast one morning.  The story is about a monkey riding on the back of a turtle down the river when they see a banana tree.  They take the tree and cut it in two so they can each have half.  The monkey takes the top half with the bananas and the turtle gets the bottom half with just the ugly roots.  A little while later they meet again and the monkey's tree has withered away while the turtles tree has grown big and strong with lots of bananas.

The story comes with an additional sheet of paper to cut out the characters and other parts of the story like the tree and bananas.  I had them all cut out and asked the boys to tell me the story.  I am pretty sure we had done this before but it had been a while.  So I started by taking the monkey and putting it on the turtles back.  I kept going until I could tell they had the idea.  They told the story a couple times through and then adapted it a bit at the end. 

We did the last 3 lessons today.  First Back to Back which had us take the set of matching cards Mother Goose Time provided for us and put one of each of the baby animals in one location and the other in a stack.  I had the boys each pick one out of the stack I had in my hand and had them carry that baby on their back all the way to the matching one, which I had placed on the couch. 

Carrying his baby deer over the the couch.

Getting the baby off your back, safely, is a bit tricky.

Peter taking the baby lion cub.

Lachlan was really happy to get the baby sea horse.

Carrying the baby turtle on his back and crawling along the floor like a true turtle.

Brothers helping each other out.  He is checking to see what animal is on his back so he can direct him to the right location.

Later in the day we got to the experiment Bend & Hang.  I grabbed a metal hanger and a selection of odds and ends.  The odds and ends we were suppose to try to hang on the hanger and sort into two piles - things that hang and things that don't.  I thought that the odds and ends I had collected were mostly things that don't hang, but my boys are very clever it seems.

Lots of glare again, sorry about that.  But you can see our two piles.  The pile on the left is the pile of things that do not hang the pile on the right is the things that do hang.  Buried in there you can see a pen that I thought would not hang and a bottle pump as well.  They were able to get the pump to balance and they used the clip on the cap of the pen to hang the pen. 

On the card it said we could take it to the next step by having them tally their findings.  So I got out a piece of paper and showed Lachlan how to make an X for each item.  Then we counted the Xs and wrote the numbers.  I asked him which pile has more and it was clear the one with 8 items had more than 2. 

Daddy came home right when we were finishing up, so the boys showed him their experiment.  I held the hanger and they hung all the different items on there.  It was fun to get Dad involved.

The last lesson we did was the Monkey Backpack Art.  I gave Lachlan a pencil and paper to trace his hands and scissors to cut them out.  He got started but then it was time to eat.  So I did the rest of the cutting.  Next we needed to trace his feet and since Dad was home, I gave him the task of bending over.  Being 34 weeks and 4 days along with baby #3 makes bending a challenge.  I again did the cutting while Lachlan drew his monkey face and put on the monkey eyes.

Next I sent Peter over to his Dad to get his hands and feet traced.  Peter brought the paper back over to me to cut out and this is what one of the hands had written in the middle.

Apparently Peter was moving around a lot while Dad was trying to trace that hand.  Pretty funny.