October Day 6 - Tractors

Before I get started today I must first explain my children's hair-do.  It is not a pony tail, it is a dinosaur spike.  They asked for them, so there you have it.  I am not going through girl withdrawals since we just found out we are having our 3rd boy.

The first activity on Tractor day was to make a tractor.  They were all busy playing and having fun, which is of course great.  So I set out an "invitation".  I quote that word because I have seen it used in different blogs.  Where they set up something for the kids to approach on their own time.  I think the idea is for it to be something they explore on their own.  For this I have to help, but the idea is the same.  I figured when they were interested they would approach the table and ask me to do it.  They did!

 We got to work coloring the body of the tractor. 

 Glued on the little window where the farmer sits and glued some green tissue paper to add texture.

 I asked them each to smile and hold up there tractors.  They were quite proud. 

 Peter's faces are just too funny, I had to share a couple.

 They took the tractors to the Learning Tower for a tractor puppet show.

I didn't get pictures of the other two things we did on this day.  The second was a puzzle of a tractor.  It is a print out of a photo pre-cut into puzzle pieces.  I set it out on our little table and each kid came by it through out the day and put it together.  There was a discussion question that went along with the puzzle that asked, what kind of farm work would you like to do?  We were supposed to get out a flashlight and take out the batteries and have the kids try to get it to work.  Then talk about how when things are apart they don't work, we have to put them back together.  I tried to have this conversation with Lachlan with out actually getting out a flashlight.  We have a major problem with all of our flashlights disappearing and being found again, left on in some strange place and the battery drained.  So I didn't want to start that fight.  But we still talked about the concept. 

Lastly we did the What's the Word? lesson which teaches vocabulary both in English and Spanish.  They give us two photo cards of the same thing, like a barn and two vocab cards one in English and one in Spanish.  The photos and the vocab cards have little numbers in the corner so you know which ones go together just in case you aren't familiar with the Spanish word. 
I laid them all out and pointed to a picture.  For example, the barn again.  I said can you find a word that starts with /b/b/B.  They searched over the words and did pretty good at finding it.  Then I told them in Spanish a barn is called granero can you find a word that starts with a /g/g/G.  Once we found it I had them say the word.  It was pretty fun to work through it like this with them.