Learning About Lions with Mother Goose Time

Today was one of the best Mother Goose Time pre-school days we have had so far!  We were able to do all the activities, in a timely manner, and Little Guy was cooperative the whole time.

First we did Circle Time.  This month's pattern is ABCDABCD and it is to hard for him, but he keeps trying.  He really likes the Days of the Week song from the Circle Time CD, and the last few days has asked if he can do it himself (usually I hold his finger over the correct day during the song).  I tell him yes, but then step in and help him since he still just points at them randomly.  I always give him two days of the week clouds and have him identify the day that it is by the first sound (and never give the poor kid a Tuesday and Thursday cloud at the same time!).  I think next month I will start giving him three options, because he gets it right EVERY time.

Today's Circle Time activity was supposed to focus on the shape of the month (oval) but since I didn't want to cut out a bunch of shapes, I just reused the owl shape cards from last month and used the blank side.  These didn't have an oval, but since Little Guy knows his shapes I wasn't to worried about it.  He got to pretend to be a lion (which he hated doing last week but totally loved today) and pounce on the shapes as I called them out.

Lion Roar Experiment was a failure as far as science goes, but a lot of fun.  We used some random cups and containers and a couple of spoons and made lots of noise by banging on them.  Then we roared into them and were supposed to see which ones made the loudest noise, but it didn't work that great.  It didn't help that Bitty Baby was crying over the top of us (we apparently held her to much the first month because now that we are "back to our regularly scheduled program" she is pretty irritated).  Little Guy used the two spoons to pretend to play the violin.

Next we played Be Patient, which was a game that involved the Friendly Bees, which we didn't use last month.  These games seem to be very classroom oriented, and a little harder to make into one child activities.  The Friendly Bees are supposed to teach you character traits and citizenship so it makes sense they would be group activities.  Anyways, I explained to him the being patient was waiting nicely, and then we played a number game.  There were zebra number cards and lion number cards.  He drew one lion card and then I called out numbers and when we got to his number he got to run across the room to eat a zebra.  I am a little morbid I guess LOL.  At the end of a few rounds he got his Friendly Bee Badge.  The game would have done a lot better at teaching patience if I had thought to wait until the girls got home to play.

Lion Mask was a very long craft project.  In the end it looked like crap because two year olds are not good artists.  First he made faces in the mirror while I cleaned the bathroom.  I asked him if he would rather meet a happy lion or an angry lion.  He made the right choice because an angry lion would eat him.  Then we set out making the mask.  Which took forever.  Partly because there were so many pieces and partly because Little Guy loves to paint.  I have been putting on the theme CD during art projects and today he asked if these were "my safari songs".  When I said yes he started dancing.  It was freaking adorable!  He also made an "x" with the strips of paper for the lion mane, completely unprompted and was pretty excited to show me!

The last thing we did was an interactive story called "Why Am I Small?".  We looked around the room and decided which things were big and which were small.  He did okay, but does better with identifying big and small in a group of items rather than finding them himself.  After the story were some comprehension questions.

I did the first part on the left page.

He also did a page in his Safari Journal, and since we did the Stamp a Map activity last week he did much better at tracing the lines and has been doing better in his workbook too.  Apparently "follow the path" makes way more sense to him than "trace".  I am pretty excited to see him learn this important pre-writing skill!

Today was awesome.  We had a lot of fun playing games, reading stories, and creating a mask.  Having the opportunity to use this stuff is amazing, and I express how thankful I am to have all these opportunities for quality time with my little boy!

*I get Mother Goose Time curriculum for free in exchange for sharing all the awesomeness on my blog!  This is a great blessing, but all opinions are my own!*