Away in Cobram

So my husband has a big job to do here in Cobram, country Victoria and rather than be separated for two months the winkles and I have come along too.

It was very difficult to pack! Especially for activities for the children so we have made do with the bag of things I brought from home and a few things we have picked up along the way.

We have been for walks along the Murray River and around lake Mulwala as well as visiting the Barooga gardens.

My winkles love to walk and everywhere we go we collect things...seed pods, rocks and sticks so why not an art project....

I popped Lamb in the sun and we came up with this....

Kids love water!!!

Five senses at an end

Firstly apologies for everything being crooked....we are away on a job with my husband so I'm using his laptop late at night when he's home and everything is different!

Over the course of looking at the five senses we have done a few art or craft activities.

We did paper plate faces ( Mummy helped with the glasses)

We 'broomed' crayon cars on sandpaper (both the winkles loved this!)

And we painted pictures of ears with ear buds (I just did this with Lamb as I thought for sure Cherry would have it in her ear!)

So that's a wrap for our five senses....

The sense of sight

For the sense of sight we printed out a set of pictures and a mini set to go with them. I bought Lamb a magnifying glass and he matched the mini pictures with the ones that he could see clearly.

He loved this activity, applied himself with gusto and proceeded to inspect all kinds of things with his magnifying glass in the following days.

 

We also needed to have a discussion about the parts of the eye in an interesting way.

I chose colouring. Lamb is usually pretty against colouring. He loves to draw but just doesn't get into the whole 'within the lines' thing. He was quite interested in this though as we discussed the names of the parts of the eye, what kinds of eyes colours you could get and the corresponding eyebrow colour!

 

This lent itself to a discussion of counting in twos. He pointed out that eyes come in pairs and I went through the hard and soft counting to ten. He seemed to get it but we only did it the once. I'm not sure he's quite there yet....

Dinner for Daddy

Lamb and I had a great play dough session the other day. My husband was home and Lamb insisted that we make dinner for Daddy.

Here is what we have:

A steak with olives (because Daddy likes olives), peas, carrots, yellow capsicum and florets of broccoli.

For dessert he made a banana and some blueberries but was a bit perplexed about how to make ice cream so squished it all together and said it was chocolate mousse instead!

The sense of hearing

First of all I introduced 'silence'. Maria Montessori writes a lot about the benefits of silence and how her small groups of children really enjoyed tip toeing around avoiding making noise and to a degree my tots are the same. She would write the word 'silence' on the board while I hold my finger to my lips until they have both caught on then I hold up one finger or two depending on whether we are doing one minute or two. It did depend a little bit on the mood to whether Lamb played along or deliberately made as much noise as possible but when he was interested he would ask to do it again and again so that we would tip toe around or eat soup with silly smiles on our faces without making any noise!

Then we practised isolating sounds. One of these activities we added to our 5 senses chart and Lamb isolated the sounds of his breathing and the trickle of the fish tank in another room, the birds outside and things like that. Outside is of course much better.

Then we talked about different kinds of ears and I set up this activity.

I found some pictures of animals and printed out two sets cutting the ears from the second then I arranged them on the paper and Lamb had to match the ears to the correct animal and glue them down. He quite liked talking about the different appearance of the ears especially the lizard ears which are little more than holes in their heads!

Smelling spices

How I wish I had taken photos but alas I enjoyed the moment too much (and also didn't want to interrupt it) but yesterday Lamb created a Montessori activity on his own.

I was at the computer. He opened the pantry on the pretense of having a discussion about what he would like for a snack then proceeded to scan the shelves naming things and asking about things he didn't know the names of.

Next thing I knew he had all of my little spice jars down all lined up in a row and was counting them. Then there he was carefully removing the lids, smelling them and holding them up to ask me the name of the herb or spice that was contained within the jar.

He repeated it several times then put them all back into the basket they were in and toddled off to do something else!

I had never even thought of that for an activity but what a great idea!

Sequencing

Look like a math lesson?

We used fruit skewers to talk about patterns and sequencing. Until now we have done it with a tub of play buttons that we have of different colours and shapes and with a strip of pictures that I printed out and you place the missing squares but here we decided upon a pattern and applied it to the skewer! Apple, banana, marshmallow....

Lamb thought it was great!