Bugs & Crawly Things - Bee & Plants

These lessons were from both Day 5 & 6.

One of our favorite games that comes in the Mother Goose Time box is BINGO.  This is the second one that we have ran across in our time with Mother Goose Time, but we did take a couple months off for baby.  This months was Bug BINGO of course.  Instead of numbers each card has pictures of different bugs and then corresponding cards to draw form a pile.  I've used dried beans and this time pennies as markers.  The boys and I have played this everyday for like 3 days in a row.  I now have the game packed in my diaper bag, for those moments where we are waiting and need something to do.

Lachlan and Adam were both sleeping so Peter and I were playing a game together.  At first, they played with just one card each but have now worked their way up to playing with 2 each.  I have to watch their cards and help them call out BINGO when they win.  But I am sure with practice they will be able to see and call on their own.

Next I got out the I Can Read book for the month.  The site words we were looking for were I, am, the.   So first they had us say "I am the _______."  Which ever bug they wanted to be.  I chose the word I for Peter to search for first.  I had him choose a color he wanted to use to circle all the I's in the book with.  He chose yellow and first circled the letter I on the little word card first.  Actually, he came up with that idea, and then moved on to finding it in the book.

 

He found it on the back page too!

I love how hard he was working on this.  He had to get super close to circle it at first.  I used to do this, my parents thought my vision was bad.  But I just thought it was comfortable.

Listed as skills for this activity is: Letter/Word Recognition 12.1, Vocabulary 9.1, Social Relationships 3.2 and Communication 8.2.

For Letter/Word Recognition 12.1 the topic is Identifies Letters and Words.  I would probably put Peter at the beginning of Benchmark D, which is Preschool level.  Benchmark C says that they can recognize the difference between pictures, letters and numbers in print.  Peter can do that no problem.  Benchmark D states that they can recognize some common words in print, such as his/her name, mom, dad or stop.  Peter can find his name easily, but otherwise does not recognize other words from memory.  To get to the next benchmark he would need to know all upper and lowercase letters when presented in random order.  He knows quite a few, but not all of them yet.  The other part of the next benchmark, Benchmark E states that when shown a 2 or 3 letter word he could find it in print.  This he can do, and is doing here, but can't do the first part.  I would comfortably put him at Benchmark D. 

At the end of the book they had a tracing activity where they drew a line between the letter that the bug starts with and the bug.

On day 6, we were learning about plants, which are homes for some bugs.  The first lesson of the day was Catching Bugs which had us learning how to say different bug names in Spanish.  Peter was matching the illustrated cards with the picture cards of each bug and we practiced saying each bug in Spanish as he did so.

You are supposed to cut the words out as well but I have been leaving them attached to the picture.  I have lost the words on previous sets and gotten them all mixed up.  They are numbered so you can figure out which word goes with each picture even if you don't know what the Spanish word is.  But I have found this to be easier unless the activity in which we are supposed to do with them requires that they be cut apart.

The last activity Peter chose to do was this.

That took a lot of work to undo.