B is for MORE Bugs!

 Today was another bugtastic day!  We got together again with Stay at Home Adventures, but this time at their house, and it was a hot one!  Today we got up to a super humid 97 degrees...Gooba was a little sweat ball by the time we got home.


Our first activity was digging in the dirt, always a winner with Gooba, and deciding if the creature we found was a bug or not a bug.  Mostly the girls enjoyed digging in the dirt, so we let Bro Bro sort the creatures and count how many we had of each.

 The next activity was super fun and a water activity, which definitely helped with the heat.  As bug exterminators we filled up little water guns and tried squirting each other.  If you got hit with the water you had to wiggle wiggle wiggle and fall to the ground like a bug.  We did not so much understand the wiggle, but we sure did enjoy squirting the car!  The car did not understand wiggling either.

When we had exterminated all of the bugs with our water guns, we filled the water with bottle top bugs.  The kids had to fish them out with their little strainers and place them in the hoop that matched the color.  The girls were fantastic at this activity!  They matched all of their colors perfectly and loved playing with the strainers.  In fact Gooba kept taking the "bugs" out of the hoops and putting them back in the water to fish more out.

Next, and very appropriate for our super hot day, was the frozen bugs.  Pretty Girl's Mommy had frozen three bugs into three blocks of ice.  The kids had to spray the blocks of ice with warm water and try to pick out the bugs.  I'm not sure what worked better, the 97 degree heat or the warm water.   Either way, the kids still had fun.

After freeing the frozen bugs we moved on to attacking bubble bugs with fly swatters.  Since I was the one blowing the bubbles, I didn't get a picture of this one... sorry!  Essentially we blew a bunch of bubbles and the kids ran around the yard whacking them with fly swatters.  A good time for all!

Craft Time!  All I have is a finished product picture of this one since it was pretty hands on, but they turned out great!  First we used Dot Painters to paint a paper plate.  This was a great time for the girls to practice their colors and their manners.  When they were done painting we cut their plates and attached the body that Pretty Girl's Mommy cut out the night before.  We taped the body to the wings and taped on pipe cleaners for antennae.  Then they chose and glued on their own googly eyes.



The next craft was another super cute one.  We turned red socks inside out and filled them with beans, tied the top and rolled the extra over the knot.  We added some black dots, and voila instant beanbag ladybugs!

We then took our ladybugs and placed them in a sheet to make a make shift parachute and just went crazy!!!!  Gooba was very good at this since we have now played parachute at both Story Time and Gymnastics.  And frankly, she's just great at going crazy in general, it's kind of her thing!

 

Finally we were on to our last craft of the day... notice how all the outside activities were at the beginning before the heat got too bad!  Gooba really liked this one, so again I only have a finished product picture.  We cut out a butterfly shape and placed it on contact paper.  Then we added a few pieces of ribbon, cut the extra contact paper and stuck them on the window!  Gooba is super proud of this one and showed it several times to Daddy.







When we got home we decided to work on a few of our butterfly activities.  The first one was one of her favorites, size sorting.  This time we had many Daddy, Mommy, and Baby cards.  We sorted them by size and then counted how many of each we had.

 The next one made me smile.  Earlier in the week really struggled with sorting the bee B's so I thought we would try to sort some butterfly B's.  She had absolutely no problem with this today.  In fact, even our bear we made yesterday helped a little bit.  She insisted I take bear's picture since he helped so much.  Then I realized that she was just mega confused by the whole B bee thing.  Probably shouldn't have started the week with those!

Next we tried something new, some pattern cards.  Gooba was freakishly awesome at finishing these patterns.  She continues to surprise me with what she knows.  She was also pretty excited about this activity if you couldn't already tell from the picture.

 After the 30 seconds that it took us to make patterns we moved onto "heads and tooshies" even though they were technically right and left wings.  Even Chance got in on the fun with this one.  Gooba continued to rock at this game.





Finally, as if we hadn't accomplished enough today, we ended the day with some magnets.  All in all we had another fabulous friend day and learned a lot in the process.  Tomorrow we hope to squeeze in some ballerinas and some pool time with Gogo and Pop as well!









Printables borrowed graciously from Confessions of a Homeschooler and Making Learning Fun

B is for Bugs

After and very successful Letter A Week, we finally made it to Letter B Week!  I think Gooba and I were both very excited to focus on a new letter today.

We began this week with B is for Bugs.  We started our day with a familiar activity - magnets.  Since we used these several times last week, Gooba was a pro.  She took all the magnets and placed them right on all the circles.  After she completed this once she experimented with different sizes of magnets.

 Once we were done with filling in the circles, but not quite done with the magnets, we moved on to another activity and adapted it for use with the magnets.  We used a printable with a capitol B column and a lowercase b column and some bee cards marked with both kinds of letters.  Gooba had to decide where each card went and then stick it there with a magnet.  There seemed to be some confusion at first since all of the bees are the same, just the letters are different.  I'm not sure she was looking at the letter at first.  Eventually we got a little better at noticing and sorting the letters.

 Next we moved on to some "handwriting" practice.  I helped Gooba write a capitol B and a lowercase b and then let her have at the rest.  Pretty much she just scribbled on the paper, but did notice that a lowercase b has a circle on the bottom.  Gooba is a big fan of circles.






The next printable was just a printable with both letters in an outline form with some pictures of bugs on it.  She scribbled on here to, but the scribbling was on top of both letters.  Seemed like there may have actually been a little bit of control somewhere in there!








We traced the letters on the next printable together and then I let her color some herself.  By this point she was quite tired of printable so we just left it and moved on to a favorite activity from last week... the clapper catcher!

This time in our muffin tin we had little erasers in the shapes of bees, ladybugs, butterflies, and dragonflies.  We practiced moving them between different sized containers, counting them, and sorting them.  Later they became "lunch for a dinosaur" and I was no longer allowed to play with or even touch them anymore.

 So after clapper catcher we moved on to another game we played last week - "head and tooshies"  Gooba wanted to play with the magnets again so we adapted this the same way we played the letter sorting game earlier.  She made four quick matches and then was tired of this game.  I'm hoping we can play it again a little bit later.

Then came our favorite activity so far.  I had purchased a bug catcher set at the Dollar Tree which included a little contained, tweezers, and a tiny little net.  I also had purchased a bag of plastic bugs.  I hid the bugs around the house and then had Gooba search for them throughout the house.  Our original plan was to do this outside, but we were having a severe thunderstorm, so staying inside seemed like probably a better idea.

We hid and then found the bugs probably four or five times.  She loved picking them up with the tweezers, putting them in the net, and finally putting them into her little bug container.  After we found the bugs for the billionth time we sorting them by color and we named all the different kinds of bugs.  We also used hiding them as a good way to practice directions.  For example, "this time they are all down low, look down low" or "this time they are all up high."  Needless to say we had a lot of fun with this particular activity.





From bug hunting, we moved onto our bumblebee lacing card.  This seemed much more calm and a great thing for Gooba to do while I was preparing her lunch.  She started here in the kitchen and later moved to the couch, which is where we worked on lacing cards last week.  She is such a creature of habit, I love it!






After lacing cards and after lunch it was time for some quick crafts before nap time.  I cut these pieces out earlier and Gooba helped me glue them onto the half sheets of paper.  She also helped glue the stripes and her personal favorite, the googly eyes.  If it was up to her every craft would have googly eyes on it.  I'm hoping these will help her to tell the difference between Big B and little b throughout the week.

 After a great nap, a trip to the grocery store, and a delicious dinner, we attempted to squeeze in a few more school activities.  We sorted some bugs and flowers pictures cards.  We also played hide and seek with the bugs and bug catching kit with her Daddy.

 Finally the last activity we managed to attempt was the line tracing wipe off page where she could help the bug find the leaf.  She managed despite the look of scribbles on the page to draw a semi-straight line across the page and drew and up and down pattern though it went from the  top to the bottom of the page instead of follow the lines.  Some sort of progress from last week.  I look forward to looking back at these pictures as she grows and getting to see how far she progresses.






Thank you to 1+1+1=1 and Confessions of a Homeschooler for your wonderful printables!