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

Bug Homes

This week with  Mother Goose Time we learned all about Bug Homes. We talked about bugs that use plants as their homes, live in dirt, make hills, webs, and hives. This was such an interesting week especially for my older daughter. She had so many questions and these topics sparked so many conversations. I think our favorite day was about hives. We learned so much about bees and we even did a fun experiment. One activity we did was the Honeycomb activity. This was an invitation to create project so I set up everything that they would need and then let them create. This helped my son with his fine motor skills because we used little hexagon stencils to draw the picture, It also gave me a chance to have him verbally tell me what he included in is picture. He did a great job and retained quite a bit of information. I loved that after the project was over he was able to tell me what was going on in his picture. He included the hexagon cells of the honeycomb, them he ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Filling in the Gaps

This is our second month using the  Mother Goose Time More Math and More Literacy workbooks. I have really noticed a change in my 4 year old son since using these workbooks. He will be 5 in just a few more months and I thought that it might benefit him to have a little more in the way of practice pages and reinforcement so when I was given the opportunity to try these out I jumped on it. He was really excited to have his own workbook and I noticed that he started to try a little harder to do his work. I focused on the More Math workbook this month because I already know he needs work on his letters and letter sounds. I was curious about his math skills. He is stronger in his math skills right now and I wanted to find out what areas needed more reinforcement and what areas are pretty much mastered. The pages in the workbook go along with the months theme and have great pictures. They are fun and inviting and he feels like he is doing big boy work, which he is so its win...
Post a Comment
Read more

Mother Goose Time Our Way

When I first started homeschooling I wrote out schedules and times for when we would do certain subjects and activities. I pretty much drove myself crazy trying to keep up with our strict schedule. I felt stressed and most of all I felt like I was failing. I've come a long way since then. Our homeschool is so much more relaxed and homey feeling. I think the biggest change I made is going by a routine instead of a schedule. A schedule is so rigid and gives you this feeling that you can't stray from the schedule. A routine, for me anyway, is so much more flexible, and  Mother Goose Time has fit in so seamlessly with our routine. In fact I will be a little sad when my kids are to old for this program because I love the way Mother Goose Time enhances what we do each day. Our morning routine pretty much starts off the same each day. We start with what I like to call Breakfast and books. This is the time that I introduce the Daily Topic for the day. Mother Goose Time provides a Da...
Post a Comment
Read more