What we Did this Morning

We've been quite busy this morning. I asked the boys as I was pouring their milk where we get milk. Emmett said, "cows!" Ethan said, "We can make butter from milk!" He knows this from a recent Thomas episode where Thomas drove the milk too fast and the shaking turned it to butter. So, I called my mom and asked if all we had to do was shake up some cream; she checked online and confirmed. So, we tried it in a baby food jar. We took turns shaking while we were eating and we sang a song while each child shook ... ABC's, Days of the Weeks, The Continents and The Oceans. Here is Ethan shaking and Cruz showing off our final product.




We then went into Emmett's room for our Circle Time. I found a great book at the library last night, Peak with Books: An Early Child Resource for Balanced Literacy. This contains units for many, many children's books. So, I checked out Rosie's Walk and we did some of the activities from this book this morning. After reading and discussing the book, we acted it out. First, we had to find objects to represent things in the story. The dresser was the hen house, the papasan mattress was the pond, the beanbag was the haystack, a pillow was the mill, the chairs were the fence and the table was the beehives. This activity allowed them to act out the story as well as work on their directional words: around, over, past, through, under etc. They had a blast doing this. Here's the boys waiting to hear the story and acting out the story.





Next, we did did our Tape Activity from the blog contest we won on Merranda's blog. Contrary to her experience, this was not a wonderful time for us. It started out that way, but it quickly deteriorated. Ethan and Brayden had a great time stringing the tape ... Brayden really did a great job. Emmett, Cruz and Zach, though got quite discouraged when they would get stuck in the tape. Emmett also got angry when the tape he put up would fall down. I had to step in to make it "really cool". As Merranda said, though, they LOVED to make it into a ball and then we played catch with that for a while.



The last thing we did, also inspired from a book I found last night, was some craft stick activities. We had sticks that we had to match the colors, we had sticks that had patterns to match and sticks that made little puzzles. The kids loved the new materials to manipulate. Brayden and Ethan of course wanted to use them as swords! But, they all did want to complete the task set before them. Here is Ethan with his pairs, all of them working so well together, and Cruz and Emmett with their finished puzzles (that, honestly, I pretty much did).






After all that stimulation I thought they could afford to play alone a while while I posted this so their parents could see what we did today. Now, I will bid you farewell and go clean up a crazy mess which I would show a picture of, but that would just take longer!