We Play

We love to play outside now that the weather is great.  We eat snack outside, bring out our favorite toys and just get silly.

Come over and play at the Childhood 101 We Play link up

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More Bird Ideas

Here are some more ideas I had for bird related projects to do with Bear. 

I think we're going to be moving on though.  

The great part of homeschooling (be it a full time homeschooling or even just an afterschooling, as is the case with Mouse Grows, Mouse Learns) is that you can let a unit go as long or as short as works for your child.  We'll likely revisit birds as a unit of study next year so that Bear can attach new levels of meaning and knowledge to what she experienced this year.

Here's what we didn't get to:

• Making bird's nest with twigs and mud
• painting with feathers
• making a collage of feathers
• making a bird out of feathers and styrofoam balls
• making a collage using liquid glue and bird seed

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Yarn Nest

The Magic Onions had this timely post on how to make a nest with a balloon, white glue, and yarn.  We went out right away to buy yarn and made our nest right before nap.

It's been cold and cloudy here, so it took a good three days for the nest to dry.

We found this project to go well with the book Just How Long can a Long String Be? by Keith Baker, a book we just happened to have out from the library.

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Old Creams

Do you ever clean out your bathroom cupboard to realize there are tons of half full jars or tubes of creams that are either expired or you just don't use?  (I got a lot of creams and lotions as a teacher.)

Before you throw them out, let your little one go to town with them on an old baking sheet.

It's similar to using shaving cream, but since it's going to the garbage anyway, a little less wasteful.  

You can add food coloring to the lotions, but ours were still in a box at the time.

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Edible Bird's Nest

I found this idea here when I was looking for bird activities to do with Bear.  We just finished making them.

Yum!

As we made them, we talked about the cereal being the twigs and branches, the coconut being like the grass clippings, and the melted butter being like the mud birds use to hold the nest together.

Ingredients: (these amounts will make 6 birds nests)

• 2 large shredded wheat biscuits per student (we used three total for the two of us and it made 9 nests)
• 1/4 cup coconut
• 1 tablespoon brown sugar
• 1/4 cup melted margarine or butter
• grapes

Procedure:

1. Crumble the shredded wheat biscuits into a mixing bowl. Use a spoon to stir in the coconut.
2. Pour the melted butter over the shredded wheat and coconut mixture, and mix together.
3. Line muffin tin with foil or liners. (We used liners.)  Press the shredded wheat mixture into the foil-lined cups.
4. Bake in a 350 degree oven for about 10 minutes or until crisp.
5. Cool in tin. Remove from muffin tin by lifting up on the foil.
6. Fill the nests with grapes as eggs.

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Authentic Cutting Practice

Sometimes, when I happen to be going through coupons when Bear is with me, I give her the task of cutting them out.  She loves this job.

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Bird Beaks

We've been reading about birds and watching birds in our yard a lot lately. 

Today we pretended to be birds and ate our snack using "beaks"

Here's a little sparrow beak.

Here's a duck bill.

Here's a big beak. 

We then tried this again with beans.  I couldn't get my sparrow's beak to pick up anything.

But bear did!

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Using Nature in Our School Room

We like to hunt for treasures any time we're outside.  We found lots of these under our crepe myrtle tree - so many that they turned into a manipulative.

I wrote numbers 0 to 10 on popsicle sticks and we took turns drawing a stick and counting out the number of  seed pods.  I got this idea from Montessori Beginnings, but I turned it into a game.

Later, when Bear is more inclined, we will use this game to teach addition - choose two popsicle sticks, count out each and then figure out the total.  I guess we were kind of indirectly already doing this, but Bear wasn't very interested in "adding" her total number of seed pods.

How do you incorporate nature in teaching your child?

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Wing Streaks in the Sky

I love Kevin Henkes.  He writes such poignant books about issues that truly occur in childhood (Wemberley Worried, Chrysanthemum, Owen, Sheila Rae the Brave).  I was surprised to see he'd written a book about birds.

Birds is beautifully illustrated.  The text is simple, but creative.

 Our favorite page read,

"If birds made marks with their tail feathers when they flew, think what the sky would look like."

This inspired us to make our own illustrations for this using oil pastels on blue cardstock.

Bear has two birds.  I love the bird with the zigzag wing streaks.

This fit in well with our bird studies.

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A Nest Full of Eggs

Bear made some robins after I read her My Spring Robin and A Nest Full of Eggs.

I saw a variation of this on a blog  and we adapted it since it called for red tissue paper and our red tissue paper is somewhere in this mess.  I love that Bear was able to do this project with minimal help and still have it look close to the prototype.  The nest is a nest we found in a banana plant while living in Costa Rica  We rolled ovoids of turquoise play dough to make eggs.   

Materials:

empty cereal box

a plate to trace for the bodies

red construction paper

colored construction paper (for the tail and beak and legs)

Trace the plate onto the cereal box and cut it out.  Fold the circle in half. 

Have child cut bits of red construction paper and glue to breast. 

Draw an eye.

Cut strips of colors for the tail feathers.  Glue to bird.

Make legs if desired.

Linking to Friday's Nature Table at The Magic Onions.

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Nice Weather

With the weather so nice lately, we've been enjoying having post-nap snacks outside on a blanket.  J-jo's snacks often include leaves and dirt.  Yuck!

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Baby Activity

Faced with a fussy baby who wouldn't nap, I raided my recycling box (and wracked my brain) to come up with something that would entertain when none of the toys would.

A few lids from the recycling box and an empty wipes container (I find the Huggies brand works the best because of the soft rubber around the opening) lends itself to numerous lessons while playing.

"Hello Red!"  I say (well, in French, because we play this in French).  Then as I slide it in, I say with a lot of enthusiasm "Bye, bye Red!  Oh no! Where did Red go?"  Then we open the container and get the lid. We repeat this with the other colors.  Blue, green, yellow, and red are enough for now.

Eventually, J-jo will be able to put the lid in by himself.  (He'd rather chew on it right now.) That will be a great fine motor activity for him.

We have two of each of the color lids, plus a third lid of some of the colors that is smaller.  So we can also play "Hello Little Red.  Hello Big Red." 

I lay one red lid on the floor and say, "Here's another Red."  Then with shapes from the shape sorter, I will put a yellow shape on the red lid and say "Is this red?  No, it's yellow.  This is red." When I say, "This is red," I place a red shape from the sorter onto the lid.  I will do this again for the second lid.

J-jo loves the colors.  He loves the extra attention he's getting while we play this.  Five minutes later, he's no longer a fussy baby and will happily play ball with me. 

Note:

As J-jo gets bigger, you'll be starting to see more baby activities on Bear's blog.  I should have considered a second child when I named this blog and now that it's kind of well known, I don't really want to start a new blog or even change the name of this blog (though I may add J-jo to the title).

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Why I haven't been blogging much

All the rooms in the house (except the school room and the children's bedroom) pretty much look like this right now.  Our container arrived almost two weeks ago and I have not been able to unpack much with the two kids around.  Not to mention J-jo (8.5 months) suddenly wants me ALL the time.

I have tons of posts to write but they'll have to stay in my head for a while longer.

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Flower and Planting Books

Sunflower House by Eve Bunting

 

In this book, a child plants twelve sunflower seeds in a circle to form a sunflower house for the summer.  Bear and I planted our own sunflower house this Spring and are hoping the seeds sprout soon.

Jody's Beans by Malachy Doyle is a sweet book about a little girl who plants bean seeds with her grandfather.  We liked this book because instead of "Jody" and "Grandpa" I substituted Bear's name and "Tito" (grandpa in Spanish) each time we read the story. 

In Max's Magic Seeds by Jean Pierre Corderoch, a boy is given a bag full of seeds for his birthday and asked to scatter them around the town on his way to school to beautify his community.  I love how the teacher in the book took the flowers and incorporated them into the school day.  It reminded me of how I once taught my students - incorporating pieces of them into my lessons. (I digress, but we once did a whole writing assignment on My Littlest Pet Shop animals because all the girls in the class were fanatical about them. LOL)

Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney is a book I loved as a child.  The previous book reminded me of Miss Rumphius, so I found it at the library for Bear.  A child decides she wants to make a difference in the world and as she grows up in the story, she realizes all these goals she made as a child, except for the one about making a difference, until she starts scattering flower seeds wherever she goes.

Zinnia's Flower Garden by Monica Wellington has really bright illustrations.  I liked how it taught different flower names.  I was inspired by this to make all the flower three part cards.

Jasper's Beanstalk by Nick Butterworth and Mick Inkpen has the cutest cat and we just adore the page in which said cat is mowing his bean plant!  Love how the book also teaches the days of the week.  "On Monday, Jasper planted a bean." (Or something like that....)  "On Tuesday he watered it..." 

I'm linking this to What My Child Is Reading, Read Aloud Thursday, and Feed Me Books Friday

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Our Book Pick this Week

 My First Little House Books - We first discovered these at Christmas.  This week, Bear repeatedly asked for A Little Prairie House, Going to Town, and A Little House Birthday.






She really enjoyed Can't You Sleep Little Bear by Martin Waddell.  We found the French version at the library.  I have a difficult time finding French books that hold her interest so I was thankful to finally find something!

  
I finally remembered to put Not A Box and Not A Stick on hold.  We loved Antoinette Portis' A Penguin Story and we loved both of these too.  Very imaginative stories.




Bunny Mail by Rosemary Wells was a cute story of Max wanting a super sand spitter dirt bike and trying to write Santa a letter for one (in August, in spite his older sister Ruby's advice that Santa just doesn't read letters in the summer).  The letters end up at his grandma's and she finally figures it out, phones Santa and orders a bike for Max.

We signed out at least 50 books - probably more - I went over my limit and had to use Bear's card.  It was a bit embarrassing actually. 

This is linked to
 

and Read Aloud Thursday.

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Montessori Monday

This will be a post of few words.

Practical Life

flower arranging

Bear cut the flowers herself from our garden (with permission and supervision of course!).

Sensorial

She loves these blue solids, so I don't regret having bought them.  She enjoys tracing the bases.

Language

I hid the words in the eggs and she read them after finding them in the eggs.  I got these off a link at Walk Beside Me.  The cards are actually from here.

Math

A variation of numbers and counters. We LOVE food math around here!

Linked up at Mommy Moment Montessori Mondays and One Hook Wonder's Montessori Monday

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Ordinal Numbers

We read Henry the Fourth, from the Mathstart series.  It's a book about ordinal numbers, taught through some dogs at a dog show.  Not my favorite book, but a great way to start a lesson on ordinal numbers.

Then, I was inspired by Montessori in Mars' activity.  So I printed out this barn, cut it out, sliced the windows open with my exacto knife and quickly typed out some ordinal numbers and printed them out.  We used Bear's farm animals and did a listening exercise. 

"Put the gray horse in the first window."

"Put the piglet in the second window."

"Put the rooster in the third window."

And so on.

I just remembered how much I love reading a book and then doing a lesson to go with it. :)

It's a great listening activity and if you have more than one of an animal but different in color or size then you can sneak in some adjective work and discrimination work too:)

(For example, I had a big mama pig, a tiny piglet, a gray horse, a brown horse, a black goat, a white goat, a black and white cow, and a brown cow)

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Strewing

I just love strewing things for my children to find and explore.  (You can read more about strewing on this wonderful website.)  For the baby, I leave his blocks stacked up for him to knock down, baskets of toys based on a theme (ovoids, ring type toys, spherical toys, kitchen utensils....).

For Bear, I used to strew all the time on our kitchen counter.  There was always an interesting thing for her to discover on our kitchen counter, which she would reach with the two-step stepstool.  Straws and an empty parmesan container, a stamp pad and different lids to stamp on paper.  Now I strew by leaving her material or books on her work mat.

One thing I have found very interesting is that using pretty baskets to store things entices Bear to use them more.  For example the dominoes just sat in their tin box a lot, but now that they are in a shallow open basket on her shelf, she frequently takes them out.  The same applies to her pattern blocks. 

We spent all morning at garage sales and I found a ton of baskets for 20 cents a piece.  Soon I'll be able to share photos of how I've set up the school room and play room.  Stay tuned.

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