Baby Animals - Which babies grow inside their moms?

It's January 2nd, and I am working on my first blog post of the month!  This is super exciting to me and I do hope I can keep this going.  I think we are all done with health issues, we have met our quota for the winter, I am sure of it. 

This month is all about babies.  Seriously, I think Mother Goose Time specifically catered this month to me.  I am pregnant and due with our 3rd son in February.  So needless to say, babies are a regular topic around here.  Not only that, but my boys love to role play, each taking a turn to be the baby of what ever animal they are pretending to be. 

Today, was mostly about cats and kittens, which of course grow in their moms tummy.  I was able to get Lucy and Peter interested in making the Kitten Masks.  They hopped up at the counter and got to work.  It didn't take long for Lachlan to want to join. 

They first colored their masks.

Next they glued on the whiskers.  Then at the very end, I realized their were pink stickers for their noses.  So we added those last.

While working on making our masks I asked them the discussion question, what color fur have you seen on a kitten/cat?  Lachlan said he had seen an orange cat in his yard, Peter said yellow and Lucy said pink.

After making the masks, of course we had to wear them.  This lead to so awesome kitty play time.

As we were finishing up the masks I was putting together the Shape Cube for For the Baby.  I told Lachlan we were going to learn a new shape this month and that it was a tough one.  He looked at the cube as I was putting it together and said "octagon".  I said "hey dude, where did you learn that?"  "I see stop signs everywhere, stop signs are octagon."  Oh well excuse me, mister smarty pants.  He was pretty proud of himself of course. 

First I asked the kids if they every got presents when they were babies.  Lucy said yes, when I asked her what she got, she said "Barbies".  I handed Peter the shape cube as his present and asked him what was on it.  I told Lachlan "shhh, don't tell, since you already know it."  But he couldn't keep it to himself and blurted it out.  Peter picked up on it and we turned the cube around to see all the different octagons.  I then asked Peter what he thought might be inside the cube, he knew the answer of course and was excited to open it and take a peak.

"Octagon"

For Naming the Baby we worked on our name tags for the month as we talked about what we would name a kitten if we got a kitten.  We actually just got 2 guinea pigs for Lachlan's 5th birthday.  The tricky task was naming them.  Lachlan wanted to keep renaming them, but finally we settled on Jessie and Toothless.  I wasn't sure if he would have more names to pull from for a kitten.  But he did, he said he would name a kitten, Mittens.  Lucy wants to name her kitten, Meow.

I wrote Peter and Lucy's name with a highlighter and they wrote over it with a pen.  For Lachlan I set his name above where he was writing to copy freehand.  The first time he did it he spread his letters out so far that he ran out of space for the last three and just put them in between some of the other letters all mixed up to fit them in.  I asked if he wanted to try again to see if he could get them to all fit and he was willing.  So I cut out the other baby rabbit one and set him up again.  He let me talk him through the whole thing.  I showed him how to put the L to the far left and then put the next letter as close to that one as possible and so on.  He did awesome and they all fit perfectly. 

Peter, again concentrating beautifully.  He asked me to do the rest after he finished the P, but I told him he was doing awesome, that he should finish. 

The last activity, Cat's Tail is where we covered the color brown.  We had our color wand and I pretended it was my tail.  We talked about what it meant when a cat's tail is down.  They weren't sure so I told them it means they are relaxed and quiet.  Then I held my tail up and asked what it meant when a cat's tail was up?  I said it means they are happy and playful.  We took turns from their, acting out the two moods as I held it up and then down.

I was able to keep the momentum going all the way through and got all the lessons done.  We did not do the singing of the song at the end in the Closing Time section.  But maybe we can fit that in a bit later. 

Tomorrow we get to learn about babies that grow in eggs.  Should be fun!