October Day 13 - Horse

Technically it is already November.  But I have to go back to one of our favorite days in October.  I mentioned this day in an earlier post about the More Math & More Reading work books.  We accomplished this day on one of our sick days.  Typically, on a sick day, we could get away with not doing our school work.  So I didn't feel the normal pressure I put on myself to try to get some school work in.  Instead, after laying around and watching movies for many hours, I just thought this is crazy we need to do something with our day.  Not only did I want to do something, I wanted to do something to connect and spend good one on one time with Lachlan, who was not sick, but willing to lay low for Mommy and Peter's sake.  Where do I turn for inspiration, Mother Goose Time.

This thought process kind of gave me a fresh look at MGT and what it means to me and my family.  We are learning, sure, but we are also given amazing ideas and opportunities to interact with each other, be eye to eye and talk.  It's a moment that takes us away from the daily chores and routines.  I am so thankful.

On this day we jumped right into the first lesson called Show Me Shoes.  The discussion question asked, why do you wear shoes?  And, why do you think horses wear shoes?  We just had a recent event in our lives that was a good example for why we wear shoes.  Lachlan ran out to say goodbye to Grandma, he did not have shoes on and stepped on a piece of glass, or forever named by Lachlan "sharp thing".  He got a pretty good cut.  So when the first question was asked he knew the answer, "to protect our feet."  He quickly tied this answer to the reason why horses need to wear shoes.  I asked him if he knew what a horse shoe looked like and he drew one in the air.  He was spot on.

Next I grabbed a shoe of Peter's and one of Lachlan's and showed them how to create a rubbing of the pattern on their shoe.  With the scrap paper placed on the bottom of the shoe I rubbed the crayon over it and we watched the pattern appear.  Then I gave them each a turn.  Lachlan wanted to see what his boot looked like, so he grabbed it and we did that one too.

We moved on to making the art for the day which was a horse blanket.  MGT provided us with red strips and a brown paper with slits cut in it evenly spaced for us to weave the red strips through.  This brought back a lot of good memories for me, I loved weaving as a child.  I thought this might be tough for the boys, but they quickly picked it up. 

 Lachlan really wanted his to have yellow dots on it just like the picture on the example sheet. 

After our blankets were all finished up we learned about the letter U.  Again I asked Lachlan what a horse shoe looks like.  After he drew it in the air I told him that a horse shoe is the same shape as a letter U.  I gave Peter the U pointer and had him go over to the alphabet chart to find the letter U.

Here is the Hands-On Letter U and the pointer that came with today's lesson.


Next MGT has us take the Hands-On Letter U and place it across the room.  Then have the kids gallop to the letter U.  I had to show the boys how to gallop like a horse.  This was an interesting task at 23 weeks pregnant.  But they got it down and were loving the action.

We did this over and over again.  Such a simple activity.  The U kept on getting farther and farther away.  Soon they were galloping from one end of the house to the other and taking turns at which horse got to go first.

Lastly, we got out our My Little Journals and found the letter U page.  We traced the letter U on the page and then were instructed to use crayons and collage items to decorate it.  I thought of Cheerios.  I got out a little pile for each child and showed them how to bite off just a little bit at the top and it turned the Cheerio into a U.  Lachlan thought this was mind blowingly awesome.

 First he bit off the tops of all his Cheerios and then placed them on the paper where he wanted them to go.

 He decided to make a smiley face out of his Cheerios and big U.

Pretty darn cute.  I have to say, this really made the letter stick in his mind.  The combination of the horseshoe being a U, galloping to the U and biting off the Cheerio tops.  What fun ways to interact with the letter U.