Memorial Day Week

Sunday, we went to church.  Genevieve made it through most of the service without problem, although she still doesn't like the nursery so she stayed in the small play room to the side of the sanctuary that the church set up for parents like me.  We rolled brother over and blew bubbles.  Genevieve sat still long enough to hear me read excerpts from Frost and Emerson read during the service.  Unlike other Sundays, we also made it through the whole service without going back and forth to the bathroom.  Last week, we made five trips.  Ah, the joys of potty training.

Monday, we did our chores like watering the garden in the morning.  Then we went for a short walk around the neighborhood.  We did this so that we could hunt for flowers and take pictures along the way.  We used these photos to create our own flowers for Memorial Day.  We painted coffee filters with liquid water colors.  Depending how you paint, this can also be a fun experiment in chromatography but we will talk about that more later.  After they dry, you fold the filters in half and roll them up.  Wrap a green pipe cleaner to hold them in place.  We used our art time to talk about Memorial Day.  We looked at our pictures of flowers and talked about how many people use red poppies to gift to veterans and use in remembrance of those lost.  We talked about how many countries celebrate a Memorial Day, but some celebrate on a different day of the year or use a different name.  We also talked about the first Memorial Day, which occurred in May right after the Civil War.  Recently freed African Americans used this day to remember the soldiers who had died for their freedom.

Later, we started our big project for the summer.  Genevieve is making her own book, an alphabet book.  We are starting by exploring animals of the alphabet.  We went to the zoo on Saturday, which was a great start.  Today we talked about the zoo and then started gluing letters and animals in the book for the letters A, B and C.  We will talk about more letters in coming weeks.  For A, we talked about armadillos, ants, anteaters, and alligators.  We had seen some anteaters at the zoo.  For B, we talked about bats, bears, badgers, bees, butterflies, birds, and bison.  We noticed that some of the animals also were colors that start with b - black bears, brown bats, and a blue footed booby.  For C, we talked about cats, cheetahs, camels, caterpillars, coral, chickens, cows and chipmunks.  We finished by doing some animal movements.  We wiggled our hips like an alligator, lumbered across the floor like a black bear and stretched our backs like a cat.

On Tuesday, we went to the local library for story time.  We heard stories about trees.  After story time is always puzzles and coloring.  We chose a really appropriate puzzle today, as the clock puzzle by Melissa and Doug has different shapes for each number.  This was appropriate as after lunch we talked about shapes.  We read Mouse Shapes and A Triangle for Adaora.  Then we pulled down the train cars I used using Thomas Pictures and tissue boxes.  We sorted some pre-cut shapes into the train cars.

Wednesday we read Go Shapes Go and 10 Times 10.  We looked at pictures by Wassily Kandinsky. With these sources of inspiration, we used the precut shapes we had sorted yesterday and shape foam stickers to create our own shape art.

Wednesday evening we had an exciting experiment.  When we were out doing our evening chores, we found an owl pellet.  Owl pellets are amazing.  The first amazing thing about an owl pellet is thinking about the owl's digestive system.  Owls swallow their food whole, then the things they cannot digest, is formed into the owl pellet, which they throw up.  So, yes, some people may find it gross but it's exciting to see what you can find inside.  Using tools like tweezers and sticks, you can slowly open up the hair and feathers that hold the pellet together.  The bones inside are interesting because you can use them to learn about the animals in your area and compare them to your own skeleton.  We found tiny hip bones and jaws in our owl pellet.  If you aren't lucky enough to have an owl near you and want to dissect an owl pellet, you can find kits that will also help you identify the bones.
 Thursday we took a break from shapes.  We went to soccer in the morning and made it though the whole session which is impressive considering the heat.  We took plenty of water breaks though.  We are getting better at only using our feet for soccer.  After soccer, we needed to plant some more seeds for our garden.  We read The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle and The Little Flower Seed, which is a Little Clifford Book.  We acted out being seeds - we curled up on the floor as seeds; the sun and rain feel on us so then our roots emerged as we stood; we spread our arms out to be the leaves and then blew in the wind so our seeds could blow away and we could start over.  After that we planted the seeds and will now watch them grow.

Friday we went to gymnastics.  Genevieve is getting really good at pulling her feet up to the bar and walk the balance beam.  She's also been practicing her forward rolls and loves playing tag with friends on the trampoline track.  After gymnastics, we played a little in the park although it was rather warm for that.  We went to baby bounce story time for her brother.  We also signed up for the summer reading program for pre-readers.  When brother went down for his afternoon nap, Genevieve and I read Pete the Cat and His Four Groovy Buttons.  This book is nice because it introduces subtraction.  However, we used the buttons theme from this book to practice buttoning our clothing.  We also pulled out our button collection.  We sorted by size, shape, color, and the number of holes in the button.

We ended our week with a special baby signs class.  This was designed for older siblings and their new babies.  We reviewed signs for mom, dad, sister, brother, love, play, baby and gentle.  We talked about ways for older siblings to play with the baby and ways for parents to help with the transition.  Then we walked down to the train station to hang out for a bit and watch the trains go by.