Museum of the Month

Last night, we stopped on a whim at a small circus. They had pitched their tent just a few blocks from church, so when we drove by, Raccoon was VERY excited. He sat through church like an angel in order to go afterwards. Besides some questionable clown skits, it was a lot of fun. Raccoon watched enthralled as jugglers, acrobats, and tightrope walkers did their thing. Our favorite part was a little dog who did tricks, even climbing up a rope ladder to jump off a platform into a waiting net. Then the little dog came out dressed as a white tiger (Raccoon thought he really was a tiger) and did more tricks (pretending to be dead, following the clown around when he wasn't looking, reviving, etc). Seeing the wonder on Raccoon's face made it all worth it. I love that the world is still a magical place to him.

Weekly Review - My Body & Monsters



Raccoon is 34 months

Tot school this week - Raccoon was not excited about so much seatwork (aka fine motor), so I changed some of the activities I had planned to make them more active. I didn't re-link to my sources, so please see my activity chart post if you're curious where I got the ideas and materials.

He loves to play "museum," so this often how I sneak some learning into our play. First I laid out the body part pictures, then I told him that a naughty monster had stolen all the signs and it was his job to put them back in the right places. I said the words as I passed him the slips of paper, and he matched the labels to the right body part.

Then he, the museum guard, "fell asleep" and the naughty monster came back and stole all of the exhibits (body part pictures). He did a really good job with both ways of matching.

He did such a good job protecting the museum afterwards that the naughty monster (a cow puppet we call MooMoo) decided to mess up a new exhibit, a picture of a boy.

But the "guard" helped me re-label the boy, and this time we glued them on. Ha! Foiled again evil MooMoo.

Tracing was not a hit, I'm not sure if he didn't understand the concept or just didn't see the point (not pictured but I had a page with lines after the monster one). Oh well. On the monster one, my printer didn't do a good job with the colors so the differences were hard to spot. Since I have my nifty tracing book and dry erase markers, I'm going to try again, perhaps with some homemade sheets. Sometimes I give up on something I think he's not interested in, only to have him ask me for it a few weeks later, so I'd like him to at least see the idea a couple of times before I totally put it away.

I forgot to print out the continent maps, so we did an impromptu art project instead. I did the wavy lines with a paintbrush, then he poured water on the page. Afterwards, I picked it up and let the water run off. I put rolled up towels on either side of his little work table to absorb the extra water.

The end result was a lot more colorful than I expected.

Play doh is one of our most frequent activities. I bought him a nice set of things last month, and we have used it a lot already. He likes to have me roll out a thin piece, then he makes tracks with his plastic animals. He also likes to stack different shape cutouts (we have a circle, clover, diamond, star, and tree). When we first bought the set, the scissors were his favorite.

He liked the number order puzzle. We pretended that he was a doctor putting the person back together. But about halfway through the second one, he decided that it was time for him to be the patient, so we were off to play doctor, then knight.

I mixed up the cornstarch paint, but we don't really have any sidewalks where I live, so we chose a cement wall at our neighborhood park instead. I wish I had a large paintbrush because the sock didn't work very well, it was too hard for Raccoon to manipulate. We ended up just splashing the paint on the wall instead. I also only made up three colors with 1/4 cup each, but if I did it again, I'd probably do maybe 1 cup each.

The Color Changing Milk experiment was very cool. We did it twice, then he used the milk to paint a picture with q-tips. It was so much fun that I forgot to take any pictures until he was all done. (I painted the sun, he hasn't really started to paint anything on purpose yet, he mostly just likes to scribble with the paint).

My Body and Monsters Week

Raccoon is 34 months

I was very excited to find the site, 2teachingmommies, along with exploring Tot School more. Premade materials save me so much time! I plan to work a little more on some fine motor skills, mostly because I'm curious if Raccoon will be interested in things like tracing and matching. We'll see how it goes.

Activities
Language	A Gift for Bear (sequencing)	Tracing lines*	Label the Body*, Monster Parts**	Label the Body, My Body Spelling*
Science	Which one is different?**(Monster)	Which continent? with plastic animals	Create a Monster (sorry I only have link to pdf, not sure what the site was)	Color Changing Milk
Math	Clip and Count Clothespins*	Dice + Graph*	Number Order Puzzle*	How Many Monsters are at the Door?**
# Books Read
Extras	sidewalk paint, play-doh, listen to music

*2teachingmommies' My Body (under "All About Me")
**2teachingmommies' Monsters (under "More Themes")
***under the "Free Resources" section on the left-hand side.


So far we've done two of the activities -

Create a Monster

Raccoon needed a bit of help getting the pins in the right places, then he enjoyed sticking the extras in all over the monsters. When he put two in the skeleton's skull (not pictured), I said, "Ah, right in his brain!" Raccoon replied, "No, I'm making eyebrows."



How Many Monsters are at the Door?

I made a larger copy of the door, then set it up on the couch. We hid the little monsters behind the door a few times, then Raccoon decided that they needed a whole house, and lunch. So he raided my cupboards and vegetable basket.

The monsters' door

Adding rooms to the house

Monsters taking a bath in my mixing bowl

Time for lunch!

Pizza Fractions

We played Pizza Restaurant and talked about 1/2 and 1/4*. His stuffed friends ordered different size slices, then Raccoon got creative and made some new varieties for us.



*I used the pizzas on p. 89 of "20 Instant Math Learning Centers Kids Will Love" from Scholastic Teacher Express.

Tree and Flower Crafts

I decided to try my first post with pictures, the tree and flower crafts listed on my Community and Nature idea chart. I'd like to get linked up to Tot School, but I'm a little intimidated and not sure I'll have the time to create detailled posts.

First, we collected the materials at our local park: bark, twigs, leaves, acorns, rocks, and petals.

Then we made the flower. Raccoon wanted to paint it first, then I put the glue on for him to add the petals. He wasn't crazy about adding texture to his paper, so there aren't as many petals as I'd imagined. He kept trying to brush them off. We talked about the basic parts of a flower - petals and leaves.

He enjoyed the tree much more. We had so many things left over that I quickly drew another tree with markers. He got tired halfway through so I helped more with the second one. We talked about the basic parts of a tree - roots, trunk, bark, branches, leaves, seeds/acorns, and how it gets it food (through the roots and leaves).

Community and Nature Week

Activities
Language	Phonics Cards	Riddle Matching	Worker Memory Game	Music Activity
Science	World Map	Ocean Booklet	Ocean Diorama	Map Activity
Math	Frog Numbers	Make a Tree***	Make a Flower***	Pizza Fractions ½  ¼
Pretend	Dress-up	Guess Who?	Plastic Animal Tracks in Playdoh	Toothpick Art in bananas
# Books Read
Extras	stranger danger role play (w/Bernstein Bears book), threading “fish” blocks, cornstarch sidewalk paint

Just a few notes on how I use this chart:
*I try to print/prepare all of my material over the weekend so that I'm ready to go on Monday. I keep all of the things I need in one folder.
*When Raccoon is in a good mood or I'm looking for something new to play, I pull out whichever activity I think will work at the moment. So some days we do one thing, other days five, it just depends.
*Our big "learning" times are Tuesdays and Thursdays for now, as they are our completely stay-at-home days.
*We do a lot of things in the afternoons because by then we've played all his favorite things and he's often ready for something new.
*This list is probably too brief to be helpful. Right now it's more for my record-keeping, but in the future I will try to put up more links or pictures.

***I downloaded these two printables from the Teacher Express part of Scholastic's website under their "Free Resources" section on the left-hand side.

Almost there...

I have been teaching an early learning class for moms with kids 0-4, so Raccoon and I have not done much lately. My new printer ink is fabulous though. I have our lesson plan for next week only half-done, but it's summer, we have live-in guests, and we've been travelling, so I'm not worried about what we didn't do. Now it's time to jump back into learning. My theme for next week is the ocean and people in our community. We'll be starting Year C in September, roughly corresponding to Pre-K. I'm still using most of my favorite resources from Year B, but I'll be adding some Abeka things in the fall. More on that to come.