Week 1: Ice Cream
Week 2: Monsters
Week 3: Camping
Week 4: Fish
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This week's theme was the jungle! We had never done this before specifically, but do take a look back at our zoo themes and activities from 2014 and 2015.
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Monday - Math and Craft
Today we did a simple math activity, which turned into an exciting craft for Honey Pot! First I printed out images of common jungle animals, their sizes dropped down from feet to inches, in scale. To save money on colored ink, I printed the large ones as coloring pages. We began by coloring them in!
Then I asked Little M&M and Honey Pot to place them in order from smallest to largest, and glue them to the paper.
Using the handy tape measurer from Little M&M's tool set, we measured each animal and wrote that number above them.
This was meant to be the extent of today's math project, but Honey Pot took it upon herself to extend the activity! She drew the jungle around these animals! First she put the parrot and monkey into a tree, and drew a berry and banana for them to eat. She also put a rabbit in the grass for the tiger. She drew a pond and a peanut for our dear elephant. And she also drew a great big tree for the giraffe to munch on. She did all of this by herself while I was in the next room. I was so impressed, because it shows she really has a good grasp of what a jungle is, and the animals in it!
Tuesday - Literacy and Sensory
We borrowed a few great books from the library this week in our theme. By far the favorites were Zoe's Jungle, in which two sisters at the playground pretend they are an explorer and a beast in the jungle, and Jumanji, which I didn't realize was a Chris Van Allsburg book! We read these books in particular over and over this week. Though Elmer was the runner up because it's just so cute!
I combined our sensory and literacy days together this week for this fun activity. We hadn't pulled our 3-bean bucket out in a long while. I decided to use it in conjunction with our new easel and magnetic letters. Though not in theme, I began our activity for Little M&M to review all of his letters. He was to find the letters in the beans and place them up on the easel where they belonged.
He loved using the scoopers!
If ever he had any trouble determining what a letter was, he'd sing his alphabet song to figure it out. He went through this whole activity two times in a row before we moved on!
And it included quite a lot of scooping and pouring. So much fun!
Later to pull it into theme, I placed some animal magnets up there, with a line beside each of them. Little M&M had to find a letter in the beans (this time I only included the few letters we needed) and figure out where to place it. We talked about what sound the letter makes, then worked together to find which animal's name began with that letter. He did such a good job with this! The only one that was tricky for him was the L because, understandably, at first he thought it was the first letter in the word elephant.
Here is what it looked like when he finished.
Later, it was Honey Pot's turn. I set it up a little bit differently, to include handwriting practice.
And when she was finished, this is what her's looked like.
And the play continued beyond this. The two kids played with the beans and the letters on their own for a long time. Thankfully, the beans didn't get too out of hand!
Wednesday - Craft
Today we did a craft mainly for process, not product. We used our terrific plastic stencils to trace an image onto construction paper. Then we used liquid glue to trace over that image, and sprinkled salt over it. And finally, we painted the images with watercolors. The kids really love working with interesting materials like salt, so this was a fun one!
Here are the final products, but the picture was taken before they were dry.
Thursday - Gross Motor Skills and Imaginative Play
This week instead of doing science on Thursday, we created a jungle for some gross motor development and imaginative play. I found the idea for this from Cutting Tiny Bites. I had a ton of leftover green streamers from a birthday party, so I used that to create jungle vines for the kids to climb through. We grabbed their safari hats and they became great explorers!
And remembering one of their favorite books from this week, they decided to act out Zoe's Jungle. One of them was the explorer, and the other was a rare beast to be captured. Looks like Little M&M captured the HoneyBeast!
The play went on for over an hour like this, until all the crepe paper had fallen to the floor in pieces. And well, even then the play continued. I'm not sure why pieces of crumpled crepe paper is fun, but it occupied them for even longer! A successful activity to end our week, for sure!
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