Skip to main content

Snow Day

Our first week home after being on vacation has been a success. We took it easy and focused on reading a lot of great Christmas and winter books, and just having a fun and relaxing week. We started our first week of Mother Goose Time Winter Wonderland theme for December. We are a little behind now for the month, but there was so much fun stuff to do that we are just going to end up finishing this theme around the second week of January. Luckily this curriculum is flexible and does well with schedule changes. We can go at our pace and change things easily whenever we need to.

This first week was all about Ice and Snow, and while it is pretty cold here we aren't cold enough to be icy, not to mention we strangely have been lacking in the rain department here in Seattle! We still enjoyed talking about and learning about snow though. We had indoor snow days all week long.

On snowflake day we hung up the name tags we had made the previous week before our trip, and we played with the snowflake builder manipulatives that came in this months supplies. We also made these really cool snowflakes out of craft sticks that we hung in our window. They were so cute!


On Snowman day we made snowball cookies and we used play dough and counted how many play dough snow balls we could roll in one minute. This was so fun, and great for practicing measurement, spatial awareness and fine motor skills. There were a lot of laughs while we rolled as fast as we could. Then we worked more on fine motor skills and emergent writing by doing the cutest snowman craft. My little guy was so proud of this snowman and I think this is the hardest I have seen him work on something. It was fun to watch him carefully make the face on his snowman, and writing his name out on the body pieces was challenging especially when it came time for him to put them all in the right order, but he did it all with little help. I have a feeling this one will be staying up on display for awhile. 



On Icicle day we played with ice cubes and watched them drip, then we searched for fun items on our monthly topic poster. We also played a fun math game called sizing icicles. I pre cut clear straws to small, medium, and large sizes and had him sort the pile of straws. Then he used these sparkly silver pipe cleaners to imagine how ice might melt and drip to the ground by sliding the pipe cleaners through the straws. After we were finished with this activity we actually kept the straw icicles and hung them on our Christmas tree. They are really pretty and a lot cleaner then tinsel!



On igloo day we used the included counting cubes as blocks to build our own igloos, and we used our Legos to try another way to build an igloo, then we did a fun make and play activity that let the kids make their own igloos out of paper plates complete with fun animals to play with. Creating this was a lot of fun and was a great source of imaginative play.





Our last day this week was Freezing and Melting Day. I didn't get pictures of this day, but we drew the covers for our monthly journal, experimented with ice in bins of warm water and cold water, and went back to one of favorite activities from a month or two ago. We froze an animal toy and then used salt, warm water, pipette, and little hammers to get them out. I forget which month we did this in, but we have gone back and done this activity several times. My kids really like rescuing their toys from blocks of ice. I was thinking I might have to try this activity on a larger scale and freeze something in a big tub or bucket. 

We had a fun week yet still we were able to do math, science, language arts, and social skills all while learning about ice and snow. We can't wait for next week when we get to learn about the Alpine Tundra. There is a painting with pinecones activity that I can not wait to try, not to mention we were just gifted some beautiful natural paint brushes made from different evergreen trees and I think they would go perfectly with this week as well.


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










Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lets Talk About Manipulatives...And a Give-Away!

I am so excited about this post!  Mother Goose Time has allowed us to do a giveaway with our readers! One lucky winner will win 2 bags of Mother Goose Time manipulatives. It will be a surprise what they give you but let me ease your mind, we have loved all the manipulatives they have sent so far. Each month of Mother Goose Time has a theme and everything you get works with that theme. This means you get a meaningful month of learning that is all planned out for you. Every month you get a new calendar set up as well as numbers, shape, and color to add to your circle time. You also get a storybook and a music CD that is matched to the months theme as well. But, I think the most fun items you get is the hands on stuff. They include a stamp to go along with the shape of the month, cookie cutters of the letters you will be focusing on, and 2 bags of really good quality manipulatives. This Months theme is Nursery Rhymes and we received a bag of sheep counters and a bag of lacing s...
6 comments
Read more

Mother Goose Time Goes to the Allergist!

This was a hard week for my daughter. Since we moved we have had to find all new doctors and specialists. It's time for her yearly allergy appointment and she was not looking forward to it. Last year it looked as if she was out growing her egg allergy so we did a food challenge in the doctors office. She passed but complained about her stomach hurting the whole time and even got a hive on her face. I wasn't so sure how much of a pass it really was. We continued giving her egg baked into muffins and she still complained of stomach aches and eventually said her mouth itched. We stopped giving her egg after that. So this year we were going to have her skin tested for egg again to see what the result showed. We saw a new doctor though and this one wanted to recheck a few different foods and he wanted to do a blood test as well so we could compare and get a more accurate result as to what she might be able to tolerate. I was happy, she was not. It was very dramatic. She cried, whine...
1 comment
Read more

Fun with Sleds

With Christmas coming in just a few short days we decided to take it easy this week. We did lots of cookie baking, present wrapping, and movie watching. For my daughters school work this week we mostly focused on learning about different Christmas traditions from different countries. We then made an ornament to help us remember what we learned for each country. It made for a very fun and meaningful Christmas tree this year. The only part of our normal routine that we continued was our Mother Goose Time . The great thing about this program is how flexible it is. I love that I can really get into a week or even just a day and do everything that is listed in the teacher guide, or I can pick and choose what we do to make it an easy fun day. I liked that even though we weren't really doing a lot of school this week Mother Goose Time helped to make it feel like there was still some structure to the day. We continued our morning routine of calendar, weather, ...
2 comments
Read more