Wednesday, January 4, 2017

Baby Animals with Mother Goose Time

It's a new month, which brings us to a new theme with Mother Goose Time.  This month we are learning about Baby Animals and started Day 1 by learning about Pregnant Moms.  Of course we had to make cat masks so we could pretend to be a Mama cat with her kittens.

We talked about all the different colors of cats we have seen as they prepared to make their mask.  Peter chose to make an orange cat.

 Adam went with orange as well, probably because it is the color of the month and I had just introduced the new color ribbon to him.

 Lachlan, who is almost 8, was very excited about this project and spent a lot of time getting every detail right.

 He started with some yellow stripes, then added in gray.

 Adam added a few more colors and colored both sides of the mask.
 His mask is getting closer to being fully colored.
Lachlan then added another creative element, a lightening bolt mark between the eyes of his cat mask.
On the first day of each month we introduce all the new shapes and colors, one new number and a new letter.  This month we are learning about hexagons and we got a new hexagon stamp.  Since Adam was done working on cat mask before his brothers, I got out all of the stamps for him to work with.  His cat got one hexagon on his face and then he stamped on scrap paper.  I am very pleased to say he has now, for the most part, figured out which side of the stamp to put in the ink.
Of course I took the opportunity to point out the baby human that we had from our first set up stamps we got this year during the Me and My Family theme.
 After stamping he came back to finish his mask and glued the whiskers on.  He really glued them well!
 Meet Thunder.  This is Lachlan's finished cat mask.  As I expected, the minute they got their masks on they transformed.  They were no longer boys but cats instead.
 They now crawled on all fours.
 Here they are as a cat family.
 They even got in some cat fights.
But overall, they were pretty friendly cats.  They even rubbed themselves on my leg like our cat does when searching for some affection.
The other thing I always like to introduce right away is the storybook that comes in each months kit.  I like to introduce it now and read it over and over through out the month.  This months book is called Baby Animals Learn and Play and you can see more about the book and how we learned about baby animals 3 years ago from this post.  Each page asks a question and one of the questions asked if they could hide.  Adam showed me how he would hide and with his backpack on, he is pretty hard to see and of course no one can see him when his eyes are closed.  
This is where our day with Mother Goose Time ended because I knew our neighbor Autumn would love to be a part of the cat family and it happened to be a holiday, so she was home.  Peter went down to get her and they were a cat family for MANY more hours that day.

But I really wanted Adam to spend some time with the number five counting sheet and the hexagon and pig manipulatives.  So the next day I got them out and asked him if he could stand five pigs on the five hexagons.  He got right to work.
 After he got them all stacked he counted them again.
 So there you have it 5 pigs standing on five hexagons.  That's not something you see everyday.
Thank you for joining us for a day of fun with Mother Goose Time.

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