Baby Animals and Inspired Conversations

January brings a new year as well as a new and exciting month of Mother Goose Time! This month is all about Baby Animals and my kids get pretty excited about anything involving animals. A favorite make believe game around here lately is playing dog. Another recent favorite thing to do is to ask sweetly if we can get a dog, wish wistfully but loud enough for me to hear for a dog, and beg sadly for a dog and inform me about how much fun they would have. You can imagine how much fun Day 5 was this week which was all about adopting animals and taking care of them.... Maybe they need a fish or hamster. Guess the Caffeinated Homeschooler Vice Principal (Husband) and I will have to have a meeting about this in the near future.

We focused on shapes and colors this week mostly. The last few months the shape of the month has been familiar to my son, he already new what they were and could recognize them instantly. This month however came with a hexagon which wasn't one he was real familiar with. So it was fun to show him something new. His first guess was that it was a square. So we pulled out the square and compared them. We counted how many sides each had and we agreed that they were different. I then told him that it was a hexagon and had him repeat the name. After introducing him to the hexagon we played the Hexagon Egg Hunt game on day 2 which was all about eggs. This week focused on how baby animals are born so we learned about pregnant moms, eggs, helper dads, birthdays and adoptions. For the hexagon egg hunt game I took a basket and some shredded paper that I had saved from one of the previous months boxes and hid this months included pattern blocks in it. I encouraged him to dig around in the basket and find an "egg". When he pulled out a shape I had him tell me the color and the shape of the "egg" he pulled out. If he pulled out the hexagon he got to keep it. If he pulled out any other shape he put it back in the nest. This was great practice with his shapes and colors. It also was really helpful for remembering the name of the hexagon shape. He was so excited when he pulled the hexagon out of the nest. He has been able to recall the hexagon shape every morning this week after doing this activity. 

The next day during the Helper Dads day we were able to re visit the pattern blocks and go over the shapes and colors again before playing the included math game. The game was a lot of fun and it also gave him more practice recognizing numbers and counting. We each chose a pattern block to be our game piece and then rolled the color cube to move our shape pieces around the board. We then collected however many baby seahorses corresponded with the colored space on the board. After all of our seahorse shapes made it home we counted how many babies our daddies hatched and celebrated what good daddies they were.

After the game we made a seahorse picture using the supplies for the invitation to create prompt. We used yellow and red paints to decorate our pictures. My son noticed that the two colors mixed together made orange which also happens to be the color of the month. This project was a little tough, he wanted to make the seahorse out of the paper plate and couldn't figure out how to do it. I helped him cut it up and arrange the pieces and then he painted it and added little babies all around. My daughter decided to not use the plate and just painted directly on the paper.

One great thing I noticed this month is that Preston's writing is getting better and he can recognize the first letter in his name and write the first letter of his name with no help. All the practice he is getting is really helping him and I have noticed a big difference in his skills as well as his enthusiasm for learning. One thing we always do on the first day of the new month is make the name tags included in day 1's bag. We don't really need them the same way a larger school would but we do them anyway and hang them up on our wall to show the people in our class. It makes it more fun and personalized for them. I also keep his in his portfolio at the end of each month so that we can look back later and see the difference. I can already see a huge difference in the way he writes on it this month then in September. I also see him writing p's on his own and he usually adds one to everything he does. I can tell that he is so proud of himself and excited to be writing. He is still tracing over the yellow marker but I can see that it is getting neater and more smooth and he is putting a lot of concentration and effort into it. I am going to start having him practice on boogie boards, white boards and a salt tray. He really wants to be able to write but I have noticed that he doesn't like making mistakes and if I can erase it so that he doesn't have to see the mistake he is more willing to try again.

Here is our name tags displayed above our white board and in the other picture you can see the improvement in his writing in just a few months. There are less breaks in the lines and the tracing is neater.

This has also been a great week for my daughter as well. We have been using Mother Goose Time as inspiration for her science this month. We have had more in depth conversations about how baby animals are born. This week really got her thinking and asking a lot of questions. She asked about how the babies come out of their pregnant moms on day 1. I  had to think hard about age appropriate responses to some of the questions she has asked. I don't want to lie to her but I don't want to scare her or tell her things she isn't ready for either. We also read a great book about different animals hatching from eggs. It went into more details about how many eggs each one has and how long each incubation period is. We also went deeper into the helper dads day and learned about several other dad fish that carry and help take care of their eggs. And we discussed penguin dads and why they stay to hatch the eggs. I'm thinking of having her watch the March of the Penguins movie this weekend to learn a little more about this. We also used the pregnant moms and egg day to discuss the traits of mammals and how you can tell if an animal is a mammal or not. I will be utilizing the library to find some more books on this subject for her. We are also taking a trip to the zoo this weekend and are going to look for baby animals there, and if there aren't any then we will go look at the egg laying animals and the mammals. Next week we will be learning about how baby animals are carried by their parents. So hopefully we can take a look at that when we go to the zoo as well. This will be our first time going to our local zoo here so I don't know what to expect at this one. Can't wait to see what fun Mother Goose Time has for us next week.

*Mother Goose Time has generously provided our curriculum to us in exchange for our stories and honest opinions*