Consequences Play

Katie is continuously working on how to deal with the reality that there are consequences to decision... and not particularly nice consequences to bad decisions. Most recently her thoughts and play with regard to this has focused in on food. It started when we read The Hungry Caterpillar. On Saturday, the caterpillar eats a bunch of junk food and then he feels sick. The next day he eats one nice, green leaf, and he feels much better. This really tickled Katie. She wanted to read that part over and over. Then we got her some new play dough, and the first thing she made was a caterpillar with food for it. I said, "Let's make a green leaf!" And she said, "No, let's make a piece of cherry pie!" (That's one of the junk food pieces the caterpillar eats in the book). She made a bunch of junk food for the caterpillar and then he ate it all up, and then he felt so sick!!! THEN he ate a nice, green leaf and felt much better. She is playing this over and over again. I think she is actually a little confused, because she doesn't believe the caterpillar can make a cocoon until it eats all the junk and gets sick, like in the book... I attempted to tell her otherwise, but she is really stuck on this. Maybe I can find another book on caterpillars to show her it doesn't really work that way??? In any case, what she is really working on is the fact that the caterpillar WANTS to eat all this junk food, but the end result is getting sick. She talks about it at meal times. This morning the caterpillar made the decision NOT to eat the cookies before lunch time, just like his mommy told him. :-)

Hungry Caterpillar

This evening we did a play dough acting-out of Eric Carle's The Hungry Caterpillar. Katie made a play dough caterpillar, and then she made a bunch of food for it - I helped with ideas for food while washing the dishes. And then we told the story, with the caterpillar "eating" the food. By the time he had eaten all the food Katie had made for him, he was, indeed, a "big, fat caterpillar" ready to make a cocoon. Then it nibbled a hole in the cocoon, and... out popped a beautiful butterfly!

Katie's Favorites

I thought I'd make a list of Katie's favorite activities that she can do by herself when I need her to play alone. Its funny that we have all these nice toys, but the favorites are all inexpensive classics:

1. Bubbles
2. Play dough
3. Paint a picture
4. Roller Skate
5. Blocks
6. Tumble on/off furniture

Wash a chair

This was also inspired by Montessori. I asked her, "Would you like to learn how to wash a chair?" To my surprise, she responded enthusiastically. So I got a cup of water and two wash towels. We went over to one of the kitchen chairs, and I explained how to do it. I went back and forth, back and forth, really carefully, just like in the Montessori method. She watched, very focused, and then got her little towel and imitated me. The more careful I was, the more careful she was likely to be. We ended up doing all the chairs, and she did the last one herself. She was SO PROUD. "Look, Daddy! Look what I did! I washed this chair!!! It won't be dirty when you sit on it, because I washed it!"

Long Division

This activity was inspired by Montessori Math. The link is to the left of the blog. I took a bunch of her Easter Egg Hunt candy, along with 4 stuffed animal friends and 4 sheets of paper labeled 1, 10, 100, and 1000. We set up the friends in a circle and told them we were going to give them equal amounts of candy. Then I had her count out 4 candy pieces and put them on the units paper (the one labeled 1), 8 pieces on the tens paper, 4 pieces on the hundreds paper, and 8 pieces on the thousands paper. We said, "We have eight thousand four hundred and eighty-four pieces of candy to give away!" Then we "divided" the candy between the 4 friends (so, in big person terms, 8,484 divided by 4). From the thousands paper, we gave 1 candy piece to the first friend, 1 to the second, etc., until each of them had 2 pieces of candy for their "thousands place." Then we did the same with the pieces in the hundreds place, tens place, and units place. When all the candy was divided, we said, "Each friend gets two thousand one hundred and twenty-one pieces of candy." Then they gobbled it all up. She was like, "Again! Again!" It is now one of her favorite games.

Books

I was inspired by another homeschool blog to go to the library and get books. Katie LOVES it when I read to her, and we usually read once every day, but there are classics we hadn't done, yet. So this is the book list we are doing this week:
Green Eggs and Ham
The Hungry Caterpillar
Where the Wild Things Are
Some Dogs Do
Peter Rabbit
Yurtle the Turtle and other stories
Friendly Fish
Baby Einstein's My First Book of Shapes - this one is really beneath her, but what is good about it is that it engages her really well.

Easter Play

My daughter saw her Halloween angel costume yesterday, and asked if we could play angel. She wanted to act out the story of Mary being told that Jesus was going to be born. Since it is almost Easter, I asked if she wanted to learn a new angel story, and she did. And so we acted out the story of laying Jesus in the tomb, rolling the big stone in front of it, and the women going away sad to prepare spices to anoint the dead body... Then early in the morning on the first day of the week, they go to the tomb, and the body isn't there. Instead - an angel! They are terrified. And the angel says, "Don't be afraid! Jesus is alive! Go and tell the disciples and Peter to go to Galilee, and he will meet them there." But they go away and tell no one, because they are afraid. (We do it up - "Did we just see an angel? That is so strange! I've never seen an angel! What is going on? Jesus is alive? Dead people don't rise from the dead...") Then we go to the part where they tell Peter and John, and Peter and John run to the tomb, and there is no body. We take turns being either the angel in the angel costume or all the other characters.