My Amazing Body - Scrapbook

Mother Goose Time has added a new feature this year called a My Mother Goose Time Scrapbook.  I was super excited about this new addition and started to wonder, well where are the things we are supposed to put in the scrapbook?  I thought maybe we would work on it periodically through out the month. 

I was searching through MGT's Facebook page and found someone else who asked the same question I was wondering.  Another MGT subscriber gave us the answer.  It was all part of day 20, the last day of the month. 

We have done really well at keeping on track for school.  But somewhere along the lines we got one day behind.  So I skipped a day in the last week in order to get us to day 20, today, the last day of the month. 

Today we learned about how to eat healthy and did some awesome games about healthy food versus unhealthy food.

I played some MGT music and when I said the name of an unhealthy food they had to dance slow, because they didn't have the energy to dance fast. 

 When I named a healthy food, they had to dance fast, because healthy food gives you energy. 

You can tell the difference between fast dancing and slow because my shutter speed remained the same.  Their hands and arms aren't too blurry in the slow dancing picture but they sure are a blur in the fast dancing picture.  I wasn't sure when I was taking the pictures if we would really be able to tell the difference.  So I think it's kind of fun that we can. 

But mostly, today, I am just going to show you our time with our My Mother Goose Time Scrapbook.

In today's day bag we got a card stock paper with the 6 photos from our letter cards this month, 2 photos for each letter we learned.  There was also the words boy or girl to choose from.  I was actually debating about whether or not to cut out these pieces myself or let them do it.  I kind of thought I wanted the scrapbook to be neat and tidy.  Then it dawned on me, the scrapbook is intended to be a reflection of their knowledge and skills, so they needed to be the ones to do the work.  I bet their cutting skills will even get better through the year. 

 Peter gluing his I am a boy paper down. 

Next across the top there are the 3 letters we learned this month, A, B, and H.  They had to choose an A picture to put in the square above the A.  I sounded out the pictures with Peter and Lachlan in our search for an A photo. 

 Peter chose the Apple and Lachlan chose the Ant. 

 We kept working through all the letters in this same way. 

For a review of the number 1 they gave us this card with a blank area in the middle and instructed us to have them place their fingerprint on it.  I talked to the boys about how there is only 1 person in the world like them, that no one else has the same fingerprint. 

Next there was a frame, blank in the middle for them to draw a self portrait.  Lachlan drew a picture of himself on the beach and Peter drew a picture of himself at school. 

Circle is the shape we learned about this month.  MGT put a white circle on the scrapbook page for September and asked them to color it their favorite color. 

In the center of the page it asks them what their favorite healthy snack is.  Lachlan said apples, news to me!  But hey it was a healthy food. 

Peter, hard at work coloring in his circle.  His favorite color is green, so that's what he colored his circle.  When he was working on coloring his circle, I was instructing Lachlan to color the bird brown.  Peter chose to color his bird green instead, so I outlined it in brown. 

Here are their finished pages.  I kind of figure we can look back at our scrapbook, for not only a walk down memory lane, but as a great way to review our letters, numbers and shapes. 

My Amazing Body - Shirt

Day 11 is all about shirts.  Seems like a fairly simple subject, but we had fun with it.  The first question was simple, what kind of shirt are you wearing? Lachlan was wearing a monster truck shirt and Peter was wearing a football shirt.

This day went pretty much according to plan, we worked through the story cards at breakfast, decorated our paper shirts for art, threw buttons at Daddy's shirt and sorted through a pile of shirts organizing by shirts with buttons and shirts with out.

I also had him sort by long sleeve and short sleeve.  We had talked about the difference between the two at breakfast.  Since it's turning to fall and the weather will be changing, we will start dressing different and I thought it might be nice for them to understand why.

But one of the biggest lessons of the day was actually an adaptation of a lesson from a previous day.  Lachlan is officially in Kindergarten this year and we are still using Mother Goose Time.  Mother Goose Time is a preschool curriculum but their stuff can easily carry you through.  Even their Developmental Continuum of Skills helps you asses all the way out to primary school. So we use MGT and add on here and there to challenge him.  So far I have added a bit more reading using the Bob books.

I was laying in bed the night we used the new Math Story Cards and I was trying to think of how I could expand that.  I kept on thinking, Lachlan can do math, but he doesn't know what a math problem even looks like.  So I decided I would read through these story cards with him and as we worked them out I would write out how the correlating math problem would look. 

So the first math problem in the upper left corner is the first story card written out.  Bobby had 1 button on his pants.  Then it fell off, how many buttons does Bobby have left?  1 - 1 = 0. 

Next I told Lachlan he had 2 buttons on his shirt and 1 fell off, how many does he have now?  2 - 1 = 1.  As we were working I interchangeably used the vocabulary take away and minus and add and plus. 

Then he had 2 sitting on his desk and I said, oh there are two more on the floor.  Add those 2 to your 2.  2 +2=4.  I let Lachlan make up his own math problems from there and I wrote them out as he went. 

It was the first time he really saw what math looked like. 

After Lachlan was done, Peter wanted a turn. 

Peter really wants to write his name.  His brother just got his library card because he went in and wrote his name.  So Peter wants to get his now.  He was actually writing it really well and almost perfectly.  But as he keeps practicing he seems to be getting it more mixed up.  He writes it backwards and mirrored.  I am not sure what is going on there.  I remember Lachlan doing it too as he learned.  So I know it's somewhat normal, I just feel so bad he is regressing.  It makes him SO upset. 

 I just had him trace his name here.  Try to get him back on track.

 As he practices his name he ofter writes the first 4 letters and leaves off the R.  So I told him one day, that doesn't say Peter that says Pete.  He thought that was funny. So as he was writing he would stop and ask me what it says.  Here he marked one little part of his R and said what does it say with all these letters and one little mark on the R.  Funny boy.  It still says Pete. 

Finally finishing his R. 

My Amazing Body - week 2, the 5 senses

On Day 6 we learned about sight.  The craft for the day was to decorate ping pong balls like eyeballs.  We tried it with washable markers but that didn't stay, it just smudged off.  So I knew we needed to use permanent marker, but it was picture day for Peter at flag football practice.  I didn't really want his hands and arms covered in black lines for photos.  So I put this craft off a day and we did it before we started Day 7s events.

We talked about making them look like our eyeballs and looked into each others eyes.  But I think they were just too excited about being able to color on ping pong balls.  They just covered them in scribbles.  It's got to be a pretty cool curriculum though, if you get ping pong balls as part of your supplies.

Here's my spread as they color.  I am preparing for Day 7 about hearing.  I also was trying to work in an Experience God lesson about faith, which is what the 3 bowls are for.  We were to hide a ball under one of the bowls, mix them up and then ask which one they thought the ball was in.  Talk about how we have to have faith that it is under that bowl because we can't see it.  Fun stuff.

Next we took those cardboard bowls, wooden spoons and rubberbands and put them together in different ways to figure out how to make music or sound. 

 First he tried just hitting the bowl with the spoon.

 I thought this one was clever.  He spun the bowl on top of the spoon. 

 Adam joined us as well.  He chewed on his spoon.

 I showed Lachlan how to put the rubberbands around the bowl and strum it like a guitar.  Then he came up with the idea of putting the two bowls together and putting beads inside.  We used rice.  I taped them together and they left the rubberbands in place.  It was actually super cool because you could pull back the rubberband on the bottom, let it snap and you could hear the rice jumping inside. 

 Then they stuck the wooden spoons in the rubberbands and used them as handles to shake their instrument with.

The next day, Day 8, we learned all about smell.  We talked about good smells vs. bad smells.  We worked on a pattern provided by Mother Goose Time which was a simple AB pattern of a skunk and flower.  We reiterated our knowledge of the letter B by playing around with sneezes.  And we worked in our I Can Read books.  This months book was called It Smells.  It shows a flower and says, it is a flower, it smells good.  Then a skunk and lastly a sock.  The final page just says, it smells ________.  The kids are supposed to write in how it smells and draw a face on the boy smelling the sock.  The boy was left faceless. 

Lachlan chose that he sock should smell stinky.  So I wrote it out for him on the white board that I have sitting on his desk there.  He wrote in the word and is working on drawing the boys face.  He drew two eyes and a tongue sticking out, like ewe gross.

Day 9 was all about touch.  We started our day with a number review.  I had the flash cards 1 through 11 and laid them out in front of the boys.  Some for Peter and some for Lachlan.  As I counted from 1 to 11 they were supposed to hold up the numbers I was counting. 

Next I filled a bag with odds and ends for them to reach in and feel and try to tell me what was inside.

He peaked.

 The craft for the day was the Tree Texture Book.  MGT provided us with these super cool tree trunk books.  One page 1 said rough, then soft, smooth, hard and create your own page.  First they cut out the green paper for the tree top.  Peter cut his in half and was excited that he made a "puzzle" and he slid the two pieces back together. 

Peter spent a lot of time cutting the red cellophane into little squares for apples on his tree.  MGT provided feathers for the soft page, cellophane for the smooth page, a small Popsicle stick for the hard page and sand for the rough page.  We did that page last as it required glue that had to dry.

We took a little break and this is what happened.  

Lachlan turned into a pumpkin and every toy got pulled out of the red bin.  Oh well. 

You can see here in the corner of this photo the green paper cut up.  MGT had us cut semicircles and long rectangles ask the kids if they could use these shapes to make a big B and a little b.  That was fun. 

This tool is new this year to MGT.  They are Math Story Cards.  We used the buttons that came with the kit this month, also new, to act out the story and in doing so, we did math.  You can see the boys holding the buttons up to their shirts in the photo above. 

 Since we were on the topic of math, I had thought up an activity I wanted to do for Lachlan a while ago, so I decided to do it now.  My Mom and Dad found these rolls of receipt paper at a garage sale.  I got out our yard stick and showed them what 10 inches looked like and then measured one out to be 100 inches.  In this photo I showed them what 1, 10, 20 and 100 looked like all lined up next to each other.  20 is as high as Lachlan can count and Lachlan has been asking about and been fascinated with the number 100.  So I thought a visual would help. 

He thought it was cool but was also fascinated by the roll of paper.  So I am not sure which part he will remember most about this. 

My Amazing Body - Day 2 through 4

I have pictures from a little bit of each day from Day 2 through 4 of the Mother Goose Time, My Amazing Body curriculum.  So I thought I would share with you the pictures and tell a little about what we were learning in each of them.

 This isn't the greatest photo but I took it to show you how we made the hair for the Happy Head Shaker on Day 2 where we learned all about our heads.  Lachlan is holding up Peter's head shaker on a stick.  Peter had very carefully and tediously cut his blue square of tissue paper into strips and then crumpled them all up.  I took a piece of tape and put it sticky side up on the table.  I turned the two ends under, so that it would stick to the table but the whole middle is the sticky part.  Then we worked together to place all the tissue pieces on the tape.  When he was done I peeled it up from the table and stuck it to the top of his head shaker, wrapping it all the way around.  It looked pretty cool and was probably the easiest way to do it.  We learned this trick when making our special ribbon pencils at co-op.

I am doing my best to work some of the Experience God curriculum into our day.  This month is all about Jesus and his miracles.  We read the story about the women who believed she could be healed, if only, she could touch Jesus' robe.  The first part of the lesson had us just talk about touch and we touched on the knee, elbow, shoulder and so on.  Next Lachlan tried on the robe and I touched it in the back to see if he could feel it.  The Explain part of the lesson says: Good feels our pain even before we tell him.

This B lesson was on Day 3 where we were learning about our Bodies.  I set out the B photo cards, one with a picture of a ball and the other a button.  I also set out the Hands-on Letter Bs.  We were supposed to get out a ball, bean bags and blocks to carry to the B photos.  We just dug out our bean bags which were there in the living room.  I didn't want to get out a ball inside, so I avoided that part.  I held the Hands-on letters behind my back and had the boys pick a hand.  If they got the big B they had to bounce to the ball picture, if they got the little b I had them bounce to the button card.  After all of that, I had them try to toss the beanbags to the Hands-on Bs. 

Lachlan added a bit more fun to the mix by trying to balance the bean bags on his head.  The whole time we were doing this we were practicing B sounds.  After all, there were a lot of B words included; ball, button, beanbag, bounce, balance.

Here we are at Circle Time, better known as breakfast, on Day 4 which is all about our arms.  You can see the new book was introduced on this day Beatriz Bananas and the Very Big Hat.  During Circle Time we were to recite the rhyme,
There were 11 in the bed, 
And the little one said,
"Roll over, roll over"
So they rolled around, 
And one fell to the ground
We were supposed to put buttons on the book, but we didn't have our new shape manipulatives yet and I didn't have a collection of buttons laying around.  So I grabbed what was handy, cheerios.  I put 11 on the book and each time "one fell to the ground" in the rhyme was read I would flick one off.  I tried to aim them towards the boys and they would eat them after they came shooting towards them. 

While still at the table on this day I started the first lesson because we were to read the new book and the boys were begging me to read it. 

 Adam joined us too.  He really loved the pictures in the book, so I made sure he could see them well. 

This was the discussion question, before we read the book.  What is taller than you? Lachlan exclaimed "Elephant!" Peter, "Dinosaur!" 

I showed them the front and back cover first and asked them what they saw.  Monkeys and a girl and a jungle.  On the back Lachlan pointed out the straight line.  I thought that was fun. 

I read through the story and they were quite captivated.  There were 3 questions to ask at the end.  What did Beatriz make? and why? They both answered correctly saying "hats" and Lachlan explained that she made them to sell. 
What happened to her hats? "Monkeys grabbed them."
What do you eat for breakfast? Lachlan said "cereal", we were sitting at the table eating cereal after all.  Peter said "milk, bread & butter & honey."

I will have to take some more pictures of the book to share with you.  They boys have continued to ask me to read it, so you know it's a good one.  Mother Goose Time created and published this book and all month long Beatriz and her very tall hat will be making appearances.  We played Beatriz BINGO on Day 5.  This makes the story and this book even more appealing to the kids.  Anything that makes them more excited about reading makes me very happy.