Every month I get more and more excited about our Little Passports kit that we have subscribed for! For a little extra fun I have incorporated our Little Passports kit into our Mother Goose Time curriculum :) I feel like it enhances our geography lessons! L-Bug loves seeing Max and Mia from Little Passports so when they introduced our new friend from Egypt she was so excited to find this new friends home! The hint was to find the zebra on our map to find out which continent Egypt was in. Once L-Bug found the zebra on our map L-Bug and I talked about Egypt and the landmarks that we could find there. We also talked about safari being in parts of Egypt. Next L-Bug opened her Passport work book and got out her Little Passports landmark figurines and found them on her page. While writing this post I just realized L-Bug now has three work books that she regularly works out of throughout the month! She's growing up so fast :) Here is our Mother Goose Time Global Friends collection! It's fun to add new friends each month and to explore the places they live. It's been a great way to incorporate more geography into our lessons! It's fun incorporating our Little Passports materials in with our Mother Goose Time curriculum! L-Bug loves her Mother Goose Time map and her geography station continues to grow.
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Like I wrote a few posts back L-Bug has learned so much during the first half of our 2015/2016 school year. She continues to grow and learn and surprise me! As fun as it is watching her learn it keeps me on my toes. Always looking and learning new ways to challenge her so that she will continue learning! The past few months she has really blossomed when it comes to learning her letters! She can sing nearly 3/4 of the alphabet on her own and she has been recognizing more and more written letters. Over our winter break I took some time to read and learn about children's learning habits and how to expand on them! I'm very excited to begin a few new things this last half of the school year. I'm hoping that they will continue to challenge her learning and help her to grow! One of the things I'm chasing in our School Routine is our Concept Introductions! Each month we introduce a new color, shape, numbers and letters. To make letters and numbers more fun we are going to do different games on Intro and Review Days! I found that because we have used the Mother Goose Time Curriculum for over a year we have built up quite an amazing stock of resources and tools to help reinforce the learning and there are different games for her to play. Our concept Intro today was the letter Ss, so I started out by having L-Bug put together her alphabet puzzle. I told her that one piece was missing. I helped her name all of the pieces as she put them onto the board. At the end she found that the letter S was missing! Next she pulls out her work box drawer and found her alphabet mat, the missing puzzle piece and her Ss stick! I told her we were going to sing the alphabet song. Once we got to the letter S she was going to yell the letter and jump up and down. We did the song three times with a different action each time, i.e. whisper and spin, monster-voice and roll... she loved it and was happy to sing the song again and again. While we sang I had her help me point to the letters on the paper. Then I gave her the stick and said we were going to find the letter S around our school room! Both the alphabet house poster and the letter flip strip are from past months that came with our Mother Goose Time curriculum. It was nice to be able to incorporate them in today's lesson! Her next work box drawer had the letter flag and cards for the month in it! Along with our Phonics sound key. L-Bug loves the letter sound song. I used the letter cards to have her identify the capital letter S and the lower case letter s. Since we had done the SEE part of our learning for the letter S I had her use the alphabet key to HEAR the letter S sound song. Then I had her turn over the letter cards in her box and we talked about words that begin with the letter S: suitcase, star were on the cards. We came up with sun, sky, soup, etc. We sounded out the S at the beginning of each word as we said them. Finally I worked on WRITING the letter S with L-Bug. I used a white board to demonstrate how to write the letter. I had her sit in my lap while I guided her hand through dots that I made and had her trace them. Then I gave her a page to do out of a new fun work book I got for her. A Sesame Street Color, Letter and Number Preschool workbook :) She loved it and was very excited to do it! Our concept intro took up the whole morning half of our school day, but I was pleased with the way it turned out! Seeing, Hearing, Saying and Writing a letter are all important part of learning it.
Yikes it has been WAY too long! We took a holiday vacation that got a little extended.... we did a little school here and there where we could fit it in, but traveling to see family and mama starting her new job at the church nursery got us a little off schedule. BUT we are ready to get back to school :) L-Bug was beyond excited when I told her that I had new school all set up and ready to go.
We started off talking about what a New Year means! We looked at L-Bug's 2015 Calendar she made in January last year. It had her foot print, height and weight. So we talked about how she grows a little bit every single day but we don't really realize it because the changes are so small. We weighed her and measured how tall she was and compared it to last year! Then we made a foot print to see how much bigger her feet have gotten :) She was so excited to see!!
Once we were done with the 2015 calendar I showed her the new 2016 calendar and told her this time we were going to do our handprint! She also got to write her name this time (which she definitely couldn't do last year). We sang the months of the year song and L-Bug danced around the room, I think she was really excited to hear our Mother Goose Time CD for Circle Time!
She knew right away what was coming next and grabbed her calendar to sit down for the days of the week! Over the past few weeks we haven't done circle time with school because most of our school was on the go in the car. Last month L-Bug really started singing along with songs, but she hadn't really ever done it before so I was so shocked when she started singing almost the entire Days of the Week song! We put our calendar day up and did our weather :)
January's theme is all about the Safari, but I was VERY excited that Mother Goose Time started Day 1 off with Travel and Passports :) Not only was I able to bust out the Passport we did last year with them but it gave the perfect way to add in our Little Passports Curriculum for this month!
​Here is L-Bug using her magnifying glass as she went through the Mother Goose Time passport we made last year. She was pretty little then so most of our MGT lessons were modified with the Little Goose Supplement or I did some simplifying on my own! I really liked doing this one because I got pictures from our travels and from our families travels and I was able to do the Mother Goose Time lesson of the places with pictures of people L-Bug knew! It was fun for her to look through it this year.
Next we took our new passports for this year and our Continent Cube. We rolled the cube and found that continent in our passport. L-Bug found the matching color crayon and colored her continent the same color as the one on the cube! She did have a little big of a hard time with the continents that had lots of smaller island around them because they looked similar to other ones in her book, but it was a good way to get her to really focus on the cube and the pictures in her book!
We also stamped the continents she has been to! She liked that :)
We used the continent cube again to find all of the continents on our map! She liked talking about the animals she saw on each of the continents and then informed me that she wants them all as her pets.... I asked her where we would put a lion and she said he could sleep in the garage!
I like asking L-Bug questions that make her think and challenge her a little bit, it tests her knowledge now and makes her focus on a specific thing when thinking about new possibilities! SO while we were still standing at the map I reminded her that each of those colored shapes we were pointing to were CONTINENTS and then I asked her what all of the blue stuff in the middle was. I shouldn't be, but I was pretty surprised when she told me it was the ocean! So then I asked her if she knew how we could get from one continent, like South America, to another, like Africa (as I pointed to them).
She didn't know. So I had her pull out our world globe ball and I had three of our Mother Goose Time manipulative ready to go! I had a bus, train and plane out (I sure wish we had a boat, but we didn't). I asked L-Bug if we could take a bus from South America to Africa... "sure" she said with a grin! Then I started driving the bus across South America and stopped at the ocean. I said "Uhoh... can a bus drive on the water in the ocean?" "Oh! No, no, no..." she said as she laughed. So then I grabbed another pieces and said "Ok how about the train? Can we take that to Africa?" She looked at the globe and then the train and said "No trains can't go in the ocean too." I smiled and said "You are right! What about the plane? What does a plane do?" She jumped up and said "Yeah planes fly, it can fly over the ocean!" I was so excited to see her so excited when that light bulb came on!
I asked her to fly us there and she picked up the plane and flew it over the ocean to Africa!
pretended it was St. Peter's Basilica in Rome since she has seen that one) and an Egyptian Pyramid! We set them up and used our Mother Goose Time manipulatives (buses, planes and trains) to go from one monument to the next.
It was a busy and full day but I was happy to see that our much needed vacation didn't mess L-Bug up at all. She was happy to jump back into school and I don't think she forgot anything! :)
Happy New Year Y'all! At the beginning of this school year (late August early September) I started working with L-Bug on her hand writing and letter recognition. We had never really practiced any hand writing so I started by drawing doted lines and having her trace along them. WOW I am blown away by how quickly she mastered it! Now we are in the beginning of November and I can tell she is getting bored with his activity (which for the past two months has been a favorite)... she's getting bored because it's too easy for her now! So, that means it's time to find new ways to challenge her! I started off by adding a few extra steps to her Little Journal from Mother Goose Time this month. A simple way to challenge her yet mix up what she was doing. On the day we did our triangle page I had her pick an orange crayon to color inside of the triangle with. Next I told her to pick any colored pencil and while she did I drew dashed lines for her to trace. Then I asked her to pick a new color and draw me her own triangle! I gave her verbal directions on how to draw it and she was very pleased with how it came out :) When she was all done I made my own notes on the page so I could put it in the portfolio to look back on and see how much progress she has made in a few months! Unfortunately my camera got left behind at the house this week as we headed off on our family Thanksgiving vacation so I'm not able to share the rest of the images, BUT we practiced our letters lots of different ways the past three weeks :)
We used paint brushes, crayons, markers & pencils! I filled a ziplock bag with colored glue and had L-Bug practice writing her letters with her finger over the top of the bag. She LOVED that activity. We used dry erase boars a few times. One time I had L-Bug follow along as I did each step on my white board and then I had her attempt to do it without me showing her! We did writing in a few different sensory activities.... we used sand and our fingers, dirt and sticks, chalk on the sidewalk! I can't believe how different her attitude towards writing our letters has become just from me adding in a little more fun and mixing up her materials! WOW what an eye-opener! I just can not believe how much L-Bug has grown and learned in the past 7 months with our Mother Goose Time curriculum! L-Bug knows a lot of her colors, a handful of shapes, she can sing along to just about all of the ABC song, count to four all by herself, and she knows all of her body parts and so much more! She is growing into this little girl with a love for learning! I've decided that with the beginning of a new school year we are going to start focusing and learning more about number and letter recognition, phonics and letter sounds, writing, etc! This is the first month we will have actually used the My Little Journal that comes in our Mother Goose Time curriculum kit. I’ve always thought that it was a little too advanced for L-Bug since she’s only two. But I’m ready to give it a shot! I'm excited to look at these at the end of the year and see how much things have changed and grown!
After a couple of days using our journals and helping L-Bug practice her tracing I let her trace the circles all on her own and she did really, really good! The only circle she didn't do on her own was the one I x-d out. You'll notice notes I put on some of the pages. These are so I can look back over the workbooks at the end of the year and see what kind of progress L-Bug has made! With me guiding L-Bug's hand in this journal I wanted to have notes to remind me what she was able to do on her own.
**Please excuse the PJ pictures! Since we have been so into stories these past few days L-Bug has wanted to wear her "princess shirts", who am I to argue when she uses such good manners and tells me how pretty they are!!! We finished up our first week of Folk Tales and Fables! This week we have saved a lion, broken sticks, fed a grasshopper, raced a hare and lost our bones :) L-Bug has loved acting out all of these stories we've read. I really love all of the wonderful morals that comes with each story even though some of them may be a little above L-Bug's grasp. On Day 4: The Tortoise and The Hare we talked about speed! L-Bug ran fast and walked REALLY slow... I taught her about talking fast and slow. We talked about how even when you are the fastest it doesn't mean that you will win a race. At the beginning of the story L-Bug told me that the Hare was not being nice to the Tortoise. I said she was very right. The hare wasn't being nice because he was making fun of the Tortoise for being slow. We talked about how it's not kind to make fun of other people because they are different than we are. She told me "Not good manners, mommy." Here is our board game this month! This is the first time L-Bug and I have talked about the (+) sign and the (-) sign! Every time we rolled I'd ask her is it a plus or a minus? She had fun with this one! For our investigation station, I set up a race car track with blocks and cars. We pretended to race our cars through the track. L-Bug enjoyed it so much she wanted to continue playing so we left it set up and she continued to return to it for free play in between our lessons! I like the investigation stations like this because they give children different ideas on how to use toys that they play with all the time. On day four we also watched an episode of one of L-Bug's favorite shows: Mickey Mouse Club House- Road Rally. This episode is about Pete who is "the fastest" racer, but he keeps loosing just like the hare. On Day 5: The Dog and His Reflection we talked about greed and sharing. L-Bug agreed that sometimes it's hard to share because you want to play by yourself, but sharing is kind. We also talked about the different manners you use when you want something or when someone shares with you: "Please", "Thank You" & "Your Welcome"! L-Bug had a blast with this art project! She created a puppy mask and got to play with some bones. The craft for making the dog mask and the bone were simple! Essentially all you would need is construction paper, string and something to color with and you could have puppies of your own hiding bones :) She really enjoyed the activity of "burying" the bones all around the room and having me find them and then I'd hide the bones and she would go find them. This turned into a game of hide-n-seek ourselves! Reflection was a hard concept for L-Bug to understand, so we went to the mirror for some investigating! We talked about how we see our reflection in a mirror just like the dog in the story saw his reflection in the river. As I mentioned in an earlier post this week we are working on adding a few more activities to our school time. L-Bug is excited to be doing calendar again. She loves the days of the week song and she knows that "Mrs. Morgan's class (gymnastics) is on TUESDAY". Every day we do the calendar I have L-Bug tell me the full date: "Friday, August 7th". Sometimes she remembers what the day is and tells her daddy when he gets home from work "It's Wednesday, Daddy!".
We've also started using the Little Journals that come in our Curriculum box! Though L-Bug isn't too excited about the work that comes with writing on the lines, tracing slowly and having mommy help... I am excited to see the different levels of progress that each month will show me. Do you use work books with your preschoolers? How hands on are you? This is L-Bug's first time and I don't want to crowd her and essentially do it for her by holding her hand and helping her trace, but at the same time how else is she supposed to learn if I don't show her? Ideas, thoughts? Here is L-Bug hard at work decorating the cover of her Little Journal! |
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Proud supporter of Mother Goose Time curriculum!All the posts in this blog are from real life experiences. We've taken the activities and materials provided in the Mother Goose Time curriculum and modified it in different ways to fit our lifestyle. Enjoy the read!
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